The leader of Serbia's ultranationalist Radical Party stirred a bellicose nationalism in the Balkans which left hundreds of thousands of non-Serbs displaced or dead, prosecutors said at the start of his trial.
Vojislav Seselj, who gave himself up to the United Nations war crimes tribunal in 2003, went on trial today accused of propagating hatred of Croats, Muslims and other non-Serbs, and of inciting murder and torture. He denies the charges.
While in detention he has remained leader of the Radicals, Serbia's strongest single party for almost a decade. Mr Seselj, dressed in a dark suit with a large briefcase at his side, sat in the courtroom used to try the late Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic, who died in detention in The Hague in March 2006 just months before his trial was due to end.
Like Milosevic, Mr Seselj has accused the Hague tribunal of bias against Serbs and repeatedly disrupted proceedings.
Mr Seselj's trial provides prosecutors with a new chance to expose Serbia's role in the wars that tore apart the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, after Milosevic's death meant his trial was concluded without a verdict.
"The evidence will show that Mr Seselj ... with the leading power structures in Serbia, actively pursued the production of an entity he called 'Greater Serbia'," said prosecutor Christine Dahl.
"Seselj repeatedly called for the liberation of what he said were Serb lands. Unfortunately other people already lived there - people Seselj had no use for," she added.
Mr Seselj is accused of a joint criminal enterprise with Milosevic to create a "Greater Serbia" by inciting the forcible removal of Croat, Muslim and other non-Serb peoples.
"In the end Mr Seselj did not achieve a greater Serbia. He only managed to achieve a lesser Serbia, and gave the world the phrase 'ethnic cleansing'," Ms Dahl said.
She opened the case with an account of the atrocities suffered by a Bosnian Muslim woman whose two children and husband were eventually murdered by Serbs after detention.
"Your sin is that you were Muslim," the woman was told by the Serb soldiers detaining her. Deprived of food and water, the woman had to give her baby urine to prevent dehydration.
Mr Seselj (53) has routinely disrupted pre-trial proceedings by insulting judges and refusing to co-operate with defence lawyers imposed on him by the court, whom he called "spies".