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BELGRADE, Serbia-Montenegro - A landmark war crimes trial opened Tuesday for six Serbs accused of slaughtering 192 Croatian prisoners during the Balkan conflicts, a key test of Serbia's ability to find justice for its wartime atrocities.
The trial over the killings in Vukovar, Croatia - a notorious massacre in the fighting that broke apart Yugoslavia - comes amid a resurgence of nationalist sentiment in the Serbian republic, now run by a prime minister who opposes the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, as biased against Serbs.
Serbia's judiciary hopes that if the trial meets international standards, it will be able to try more cases at home rather than at the U.N. tribunal, where former Serb strongman Slobodan Milosevic is now being tried on war crimes charges including genocide.
"This is a historic moment for our judiciary," said Bruno Vekaric, a spokesman for the prosecution at Belgrade's Special Court, recently established in conjunction with the U.N. tribunal.
The proceedings "will show the ability of our courts to handle war crimes cases, which is important for further transfers of cases from The Hague," Vekaric said.
At the time of the massacre, the six suspects were members of a Milosevic-backed paramilitary group of ethnic Serb Croats fighting Croatia's 1991 secession from Yugoslavia. In mid November 1991, the Serb side gained control of Vukovar.
After that victory, according to the indictment, Serbs took the Croat prisoners of war from a Vukovar hospital on the evening of Nov. 20, 1991, and bused them to a nearby pig farm.
There, the six defendants allegedly lined up the victims, strafed them with machine-gun fire and dumped their bodies into a freshly dug pit. Exhumations revealed the scope of the massacre, which came to symbolize the brutality of the war in Croatia.
At the trial's opening Tuesday, the names of the 192 victims were read aloud along with charges against the suspects. Chief defendant Miroljub Vujovic, a Vukovar native who allegedly commanded the Serb paramilitaries, professed his innocence.
"The indictment is a complete fabrication," he said, adding that he only had "a secondhand knowledge" of the killings.
Three ranking officers of the former Yugoslav Peoples' Army accused of ordering or allowing the Vukovar massacre are being tried in The Hague. The six accused of being the killers are being tried in Serbia-Montenegro, the two-republic state that remains after the breakup of Yugoslavia, with the permission and monitoring of the U.N. tribunal.
The defendants face up to 20 years in jail if convicted.