PARIS — Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb wartime leader, on Tuesday denied charges that his troops had committed large-scale atrocities during the Bosnian war, brushing aside the accusations as “myths” fabricated by his enemies.

He said the judges at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague should withdraw his indictment and should throw out the prison sentences given to some of his generals.

The siege of Sarajevo, where more than 10,000 people died in 44 months, was not a siege by Bosnian Serb forces, he said. Instead, Sarajevo was a city divided by fighting, he contended, where Muslims killed other Muslims and “planted bodies of dead soldiers” around the city to put the blame on the Serbs.

He also dismissed the widely documented massacre of more than 7,000 boys and men at Srebrenica in 1995 as a fiction. He said that the accusation of genocide there was based on graves that held a few thousand bodies of people who were not victims of a massacre but had simply died during four years of fighting.

Mr. Karadzic, who was once a psychiatrist and poet, spoke on the second day of his opening statement at the trial, where he faces charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. He presented his version of the war, and as his onetime mentor, the former Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, did during his own trial, he used television clips, documentary reports and quotations from friends and foes to buttress his case.

But his portrayal of the Serbs as victims of hostile propaganda and cunning wartime trickery seemed directed at an audience far beyond the courtroom, who could follow proceedings live on television.

Mr. Karadzic’s presentation, which often included rambling descriptions, was unlikely to have made a great impression on a court in which much of what he described has already been the subject of lengthy trials, convictions and appeals.

Mr. Karadzic, who is acting as his own lawyer, apparently intends to concentrate on a narrative of the Serbs as victims. In his view, the Serbs were not the aggressor during the war from 1992 to 1995 but the “weaker party, on the defensive all the time.”

Bosnian Serbs in particular, he said, were victims of “ruses of war” and trickery employed by Bosnian Muslims, who he said were bent on establishing an Iran-type Islamic state and driving out all Christians. He cited attacks on a Serbian church, on a wedding ceremony and on Serbs celebrating Christian holidays as examples of Muslim aggression.

United Nations peacekeepers were not neutral, he argued, but a warring party; he said he would provide proof that they helped smuggle weapons and ammunition to Muslim forces.

Mr. Karadzic said that he had been a peacemaker and that he had had nothing to do with the deaths at Srebrenica, a United Nations enclave that was overrun by Serbian troops.

“Some officers said they wanted to kill prisoners of war, and I said they are crazy,” he said. Mr. Karadzic made light of notorious concentration camps where, former inmates have testified, non-Serbs were raped, tortured and killed.

They were normal “investigation centers,” he said, used by organs of the state to separate civilians from fighters. At the end of Tuesday’s hearing, the presiding judge said the trial was adjourned, pending a decision on an appeal Mr. Karadzic has filed, requesting more time to prepare his defense.