Milosevic Seeks End to Suicide Monitoring

Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic appealed Tuesday for an end to the suicide watch on his detention cell and vowed to fight to “topple” the U.N. war crimes court and his “farce of a trial.”

“Apparently they are monitoring me so that I should not commit suicide. I would never commit suicide. I do not wish to do that to my family and my children,” he said during his fourth pretrial appearance.

Milosevic, detained in The Hague since June, has refused to plead to charges of spearheading ethnic cleansing in Croatia and Kosovo, a province of Serbia, Yugoslavia’s dominant republic. Prosecutors also plan to indict Milosevic next week on genocide charges related to deaths in Bosnia-Herzegovina during that nation’s 1992-95 war.

Milosevic, both of whose parents killed themselves, threatened to shoot himself in April rather than be imprisoned on domestic corruption charges.

But on Tuesday, he said he would “never” commit suicide because he “must struggle here to topple this tribunal and this farce of a trial and the masterminds using it against the people who are fighting for freedom in the world.”

His trial for alleged crimes in Kosovo is set to start Feb. 12, judges said. Milosevic, however, maintains that the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia is biased, and he accused it Tuesday of inciting anti-Serb “terrorism.”

“Please go and read out the judgments you are instructed to read and don’t bother me and make me listen for hours on end to texts that are at the intellectual level of a 7-year-old child,” he told the court, a day after listening to his indictments. “Or rather, let me correct myself--a retarded 7-year-old child.”