Slobodan Milosevic Found Dead In Cell

[David]

(AP) Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav leader branded by the West as "the butcher of the Balkans" but hailed as a hero by many of his fellow Serbs, has died. He was 64.

Milosevic was found dead Saturday in his bed at a U.N. prison near The Hague, where he was standing trial for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, the U.N. war crimes tribunal said in a statement. He appeared to have died of natural causes, the tribunal said.

A leader of beguiling charm and cunning ruthlessness, Milosevic was a master tactician who turned his country's defeats into personal victories and held onto power for 13 years despite losing four wars that shattered the former Yugoslavia and impoverished his people.

He had been on trial since February 2002, proceedings interrupted repeatedly by Milosevic's poor health and chronic heart condition. The 66 counts against him stemmed from atrocities in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo during and after Yugoslavia's violent breakup in the 1990s.

Milosevic's trial and Saddam Hussein's war crimes tribunal in Iraq have widely been seen as together constituting the most important legal test the world has faced since the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals brought Axis leaders to justice after World War II.

Both trials have come under criticism because of frequent interruptions and the ability of the defendants to use the courtroom as a stage to launch vitriolic anti-Western diatribes.

Defiant to the end, a brooding Milosevic frequently, and feistily, denounced the trial as a "farce" and the tribunal's judges as puppets of the despised West. Reveling in the spotlight, he insisted on serving as his own defense lawyer, and seemed to enjoy rising to cross-examine a witness or ridicule the prosecution.

Milosevic described himself as a misunderstood figure, the last defender of a proud people who suffered "NATO aggression" and "Western-backed terrorism."

Milosevic led Serbia, the dominant Yugoslav republic, into four Balkan wars, but always managed to emerge politically stronger. The secret of his survival was his uncanny ability to exploit what less adroit figures would consider a fatal blow.

Each time he would bounce back, skillfully reinventing himself in a series of political transformations, as a devout communist, a reform-minded nationalist, and again as a communist at a time when most of the world had abandoned Marxist ideology.

He once described himself as the "Ayatollah Khomeini of Serbia," assuring his prime minister, Milan Panic, that "the Serbs will follow me no matter what." For years, they did, through wars which dismembered Yugoslavia and plunged what was left of the country into social, political, moral and economic ruin.

But in the end, his people abandoned him: first in October 2000, when he was unable to convince the majority of Yugoslavs that he had staved off electoral defeat by his successor, Vojislav Kostunica, and again on April 1, 2001, when he surrendered after a 26-hour standoff to face criminal charges stemming from his ruinous rule.

Milosevic was born Aug. 20, 1941, in Pozarevac, a drab factory town in central Serbia best known as the home of one of the country's most notorious prisons.

His father was a defrocked Orthodox priest and sometime teacher of Russian. His mother was also a teacher. Both parents eventually committed suicide.

In high school, he met his future wife, Mirjana Markovic, the daughter of a wartime communist partisan hero. She was also the niece of Davorjanka Paunovic, private secretary and mistress of Josip Broz Tito, the communist guerrilla leader who seized power in Yugoslavia at the end of World War II.

Milosevic graduated from Belgrade Law School in 1964, joined the Communist Party and rose steadily through the ranks.

The party put him in various business positions, and in 1983 he was appointed as director of a major state-run bank. He became friends with several Western figures, including former U.S. Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger and banker David Rockefeller.

He also befriended Ivan Stambolic, who became the leader of the Communist Party in Serbia in 1984. Stambolic picked Milosevic for the powerful post of party leader in the capital, Belgrade.

And when Stambolic was elevated to president of Serbia in 1986, Milosevic succeeded him as Serbian communist boss.

A year later, Stambolic sent Milosevic to Kosovo, where Serbs were demanding protection from the ethnic Albanian majority. During a meeting of local Serb leaders, hundreds of angry people gathered outside and demanded the leadership hear their grievances.

Milosevic faced the crowd and delivered a fiery speech, one of the few of his career, telling them: "Nobody has the right to beat you."

Those words shattered the myth of ethnic "brotherhood and unity" that had been the slogan of Tito's communist regime. They also elevated Milosevic into a Serbian popular hero.

Months later, in September 1987, Milosevic publicly accused his old friend Stambolic and others of anti-communist and anti-Serbian policies during a party meeting that was televised live nationwide.

All were forced to resign in a de facto coup. And Stambolic, who had set the stage for Milosevic's rise to power, disappeared in the final weeks of the Milosevic regime.

In 1989, Milosevic became president of Serbia in elections widely considered rigged. His rise alarmed the other peoples of former Yugoslavia--Slovenes, Croats, Macedonians, Albanians and others who feared that the hard-line nationalist would allow Serbs to dominate the country.

In 1991, Croatia and Slovenia declared their independence from Yugoslavia. Milosevic sent tanks to Slovenian borders, triggering a brief war that ended in Slovenia's secession.

Serbs in Croatia, encouraged by Milosevic, took up arms. Milosevic responded by sending the Serb-led Yugoslav army to intervene, triggering a conflict that left at least 10,000 people dead and hundreds of Croatian villages and towns devastated before a U.N.-patrolled cease-fire was arranged in January 1992.

Three months later, Bosnia-Herzegovina declared its independence, too. Milosevic bankrolled the Bosnian Serb rebellion, triggering an even bigger war that killed an estimated 200,000 people before a U.S.-brokered peace agreement was reached at Dayton, Ohio, in 1995.

During those conflicts, Yugoslavia was ostracized worldwide. "The Butcher of the Balkans," the United States called him. Strict international sanctions and government mismanagement devastated the economy and left its people impoverished.

Realizing that the conflicts could not continue, Milosevic agreed to the Dayton talks, accepting a deal that abandoned Croatia's rebel Serbs, who were driven from their homes when the Croatian army recaptured almost all the land the Serbs had seized there in 1991.

The Dayton agreement also meant giving up the nationalist goal of a Serb state in Bosnia. Nevertheless, it bought Milosevic time and transformed his image from Balkan villain to benign peacemaker.

Milosevic's term as Serbian president ended in 1997 and the constitution prevented him from running again. However, he exploited legal loopholes in the constitution to have parliament name him president of Yugoslavia, which by then included only the republics of Serbia and Montenegro.

It was the thorny problem of Kosovo, the majority Albanian province that had served as his springboard to power, which finally set the stage for his downfall. In February 1998, Milosevic sent troops to crush an ethnic Albanian uprising there.

The United States and its allies responded by imposing some of the sanctions that were lifted after the Bosnian war. In 1999, after Milosevic refused to sign a Western-dictated peace agreement at Rambouillet, France, NATO launched 78 days of punishing air strikes against Yugoslavia.

Milosevic refused to back down and instead ordered his troops to crack down on Kosovo Albanians even harder. More than 800,000 Albanians fled into neighboring Albania, Montenegro and Macedonia before Milosevic finally accepted a peace plan and handed over the province to the United Nations and NATO in June 1999.

Before the conflict ended, the U.N. tribunal indicted Milosevic and four of his top aides for war crimes and crimes against humanity allegedly committed in Kosovo. Milosevic became the first sitting head of state ever to be indicted for such crimes. Later, they broadened the charges against him to include genocide.

Although facing criminal prosecution, his term as Yugoslav president nearing its end and his country devastated, Milosevic sought to hold on to power by pushing through a constitutional change in July 2000 to permit the election of president by popular vote rather than parliament.

Arguing that this exempted him from the traditional two-term limit, Milosevic stood for re-election, gambling that the factious Serbian opposition would fail again to challenge him successfully.

But Milosevic had misjudged his popularity. Exhausted by years of war and political upheaval, Yugoslavs rallied around Kostunica, a colorless man but one with a reputation for integrity who held out the promise of a return to normalcy.

Kostunica's followers claimed their man won an absolute majority among the four candidates in the Sept. 24 balloting. The Milosevic-controlled election commission admitted Kostunica finished first but without the necessary majority and scheduled a runoff.

On Oct. 5, 2000, before the second ballot could be held, hundreds of thousands of people converged on Belgrade, setting off a daylong riot. The police and army refused to intervene, and Milosevic conceded defeat the following day.

He remained sequestered in an opulent government villa in Belgrade's upscale Dedinje district until his arrest early on April 1, 2001. Milosevic was extradited to The Hague in June of that year.

[1CAVCCO15MED]

I guess the Devil just couldn't wait on a trial.

[82Rigger]

Whenever I think of him I think of the term "ethnic cleansing".

[melody1181]

Glad he is gone from the face of the earth. I just think he got off to easy. I also hope that his time in jail was miserable. He will never know the same kind of terror and scared feelings "his" victims felt.

[MarineAO]

No Loss to the world I'm sure.

Agree Marine AO, no great loss here

[Seascamp]

Great article, David, thank you. It?s interesting how Milosevic went from Communist, to Nationalist and back to Communist. That foul control freak took up the full width of the political highway, from end stop to end stop, and nothing but the same-o, same-o, blood bath at either end. Last I heard, his son was the mega dope kingpin in Belgrade, and once again, evidence that rotten fruit doesn?t fall far from the tree.

Excellent book and reference for those interested;

?Balkan Ghosts, a journey through history?. By Robert D. Kaplan
St. Martins Press, 1996.

Caution, do not attempt this book if faint of heart, this one is a heart searing and accurate narrative that travels from Suleiman to Milosevic and geographically travels from Romania and Hungary, to Turkey and Albania. Bottom line; no one is clean, and Milosevic just happens to be the vile scum bag history caught up with, too bad the rest didn?t get nailed equally, including Osama bin Laden and a few Vatican entities of the WWII era. Bad place, the Balkans.

Scamp