The Hague, Netherlands ? Shifting from accused to accuser, Slobodan Milosevic took the offensive at his war crimes trial Thursday and charged that Western countries tried to bomb Yugoslavia “back to the Stone Age” and were staging a political trial against him.

In his first chance to speak in his defense, the ousted Yugoslav president claimed he had tried to prevent civilian casualties during the Balkan wars, that he fought a legitimate campaign against terrorists destabilizing his country, and that he knew nothing of Bosnian Serb concentration camps.

A Bosnian Muslim, Fatima Begovic, 53, cries as she watches former Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic on television during his war crimes trial at The Hague. Begovic lives in a refugee center for widows in Tuzla. All the male members of her family have been missing since the Srebrenica massacre. Milosevic is accused of war crimes committed against non-Serbs in Kosovo, Croatia and Bosnia, including the Srebrenica massacre.

After sitting restlessly through two days of wrenching prosecution allegations that he orchestrated murder, rape and expulsions, Milosevic dismissed the prosecution case as “concoctions.”

Thumping his desk and waiving his arms energetically, he told the prosecutors, “You basically have nothing. You just want to invent things. This is a political trial, and this has nothing to do with the law itself.”

In what is seen as the most important war crimes trial since World War II, the 60-year-old Milosevic could face life in prison if convicted of any of 66 charges against him.

Prosecutors say Milosevic is responsible for a decade of violence in the Balkans that accompanied the disintegration of Yugoslavia. They have indicted him for crimes against humanity in Croatia and Kosovo, and for genocide in the 1992-95 Bosnian war.

Milosevic tried to turn the tables, accusing the Western powers of criminally bombing his country in a 78-day campaign in 1999 that dislodged his forces from the Serbian province of Kosovo.

At Milosevic’s request, a court clerk displayed dozens of photographs on courtroom monitors showing charred bodies, decapitated corpses, and destroyed villages and bridges.

“Only Nazis could have thought of such bombing of villages. The aim of the aggression was obviously to break the whole nation, to throw Serbia back to the Stone Age,” he said, narrating as the gruesome images flashed one after another.

“This is yet further proof of the collaboration of NATO forces and this terrorist force that was used to destabilize Yugoslavia,” he said, referring to the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army.

Among the most gruesome pictures were of the casualties of a refugee convoy killed by NATO bombs on April 14, 1999. “They were all peasants, farmers, mothers and daughters,” Milosevic said. “They were intentionally targeted, because they were returning to their village,” he claimed, dismissing what he called NATO “lies” that they were fleeing Serb forces.

At the time of the strike, NATO said it was a mistake caused by the misidentification of the convoy.

NATO’s secretary-general, Lord Robertson, rejected Milosevic’s claims. “Milosevic is entitled to make any case he wants,” he said, but added NATO took the action it did “in order to save lives, not to lose lives.”

The accusation that the NATO bombing constituted a war crime was investigated and dismissed in June 2000 by a committee appointed by the chief prosecutor. In the convoy incident, the committee was critical of the pilots’ failure to identify civilian targets. But it concluded that killing of civilians was not deliberate and that criminal charges were unwarranted.

Milosevic renewed his request to the judges to release him so he could better research his defense, pledging he would not try to escape. He said the odds were stacked against him.

“I only have one phone, while you have a huge apparatus behind you,” he said, nodding toward the prosecution table. “You want me to swim a 100-meter race with my hands and legs tied.”

Tribunal spokesman Jim Landale said Milosevic had been offered legal counsel and investigators to help him fight his case, but that he had declined. He has maintained from the start that the tribunal is illegal and has refused to cooperate with it.

A spokesman for Milosevic’s party, Branko Ruzic, said his colleagues feel confident their leader will come out of this trial as a “moral winner. He will defend the integrity and dignity of Serbia and reveal the utter nonsense of The Hague court.”