Slobodan Milosevic yesterday attacked a prosecution theory that he sought to carve out an ethnically pure "greater Serbia" in the broken Yugoslav federation, and branded the war crimes indictments against him "a sheer mutilation of justice".

More than two-and-a-half-years after the trial of the former Yugoslav president began at the UN tribunal, Milosevic wound up his opening statement that began Tuesday as he laid out a series of complex conspiracies against his Serb people involving the Kosovo Liberation Army, Osama bin Laden, the Vatican, Croatian neo-Nazis and the CIA, among others.

Milosevic called his trial "a farce, pure and simple". Charging that prosecutors had failed to prove any of the charges, he called the indictments a "sheer mutilation of justice. Nothing else. What it says there are empty words".

"This indictment represents a sum of unscrupulous manipulation, lies, crippling of the law, and an unjust presentation of the history," he said.

After he concluded, the three-judge panel asked the parties to make submissions on a prosecution motion to name a defence lawyer for Milosevic, who has said he would not cooperate with court-appointed counsel.

The judges have said they need to balance Milosevic's right to defend himself against the requirements of a speedy trial, which so far has been repeatedly interrupted by his illnesses.

Milosevic contested pro-secution allegations that he fanned Serbian nationalism and instigated a decade of Balkan wars.

He said prosecutors, lacking evidence of specific crimes, manufactured "the unique concept of a joint criminal enterprise", the term in the indictments referring to an alleged conspiracy to drive out Muslims, Croats and other non-Serbs from areas designed for an expanded Serb state.

"In two years, you have not presented a shred of evidence" to support the charges, Milosevic told the court. He described his own role as striving for peace while protecting the Serbs. "Our greatest wish was to establish peace," he said.

Inside Serbia "during all of those 10 years, there was no discrimination against anyone", Milosevic said.

Milosevic accused the Western powers in the Nato military alliance of intervening in Kosovo in 1999, during a Serbian crackdown on the Kosovo Albanian population, to profit from the region's natural resources of cobalt, lead, nickel and its power plants.

"What they (UN prosecutors) fail to say is that the activities of the Serbian people were activities aimed at defence," Milosevic said.