Slobodan Milošević; (20 August 1941 – 11 March 2006) was President of Serbia and of Yugoslavia. He served as President of Serbia from 1989 to 1997 and then President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1997 to 2000. He also led Serbia's Socialist Party from its foundation in 1992 to 2001.

He was one of the key figures in the Yugoslav wars during the 1990s and Kosovo War in 1999. He was indicted in May 1999, during the Kosovo War, by the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia for crimes against humanity in Kosovo, charges of genocide in Bosnia, crimes against humanity, and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions. Violations of the laws or customs of war in Bosnia and Croatia were added a year and a half after that.

He was forced to resign following a popular uprising against his rule. A year later Milošević was extradited to stand trial in the The Hague but died after five years in prison with just fifty hours of testimony left before the conclusion of the trial. Milošević, who suffered from chronic heart ailments, high blood pressure and diabetes, died of a heart attack.

Early life

Milošević was a Montenegrin Serb by origin, born in Požarevac, Serbia, during the Axis occupation. His parents separated soon after he was born; his father, Svetozar Milošević, a deacon in the Serbian Orthodox Church committed suicide in 1962, and his mother, Stanislava Milošević, a school teacher, hanged herself in 1974.

He went on to study law at Belgrade University, where he became the head of the ideology committee of the Communist Party's student branch. While at the university, he befriended Ivan Stambolić, whose uncle had been a prime minister of Serbia. This was to prove a crucial connection for Milošević's career prospects, as Stambolić sponsored his rise through the Communist hierarchy.

On leaving university, Milošević became an economic advisor to the Mayor of Belgrade in 1960. Five years later he married Mirjana Marković, whom he had known since childhood. Markovic would have some influence on her husband's political career both before and after his rise to power; she was also leader of Milošević's junior coalition partner, Yugoslav United Left in the 1990s. In 1968 he got a job at the Tehnogas company, where Stambolić was working, and became its chairman in 1973. By 1978 Stambolić's sponsorship had enabled Milošević to become the head of Beobanka, one of Yugoslavia's largest banks; his frequent trips to Paris and New York gave him the opportunity to learn English and French, both of which were to be considerable assets in his political career.

Rise to power

Milošević was elected president of the Belgrade City Committee of the League of Communists in April 1984, again replacing Stambolić, who had moved on to the post of head of the Serbian Communist Party. At this time Milošević publicly opposed nationalism; he prevented the publication of a book containing the works of Slobodan Jovanović, a distinguished Serbian historian, law professor and nationalist politician of the early twentieth century. Milošević also advocated retaining Marxism as a school subject and publicly lambasted Belgrade's youth for their low turnout at the Communist Day of the Youth, claiming that their absence "desecrated" Tito's character and work.

Milošević emerged in April 1987 as the leading force in Serbian politics. His political positions have sometimes been termed as nationalist (though there is no indication of that in quotes or acts from Milošević in those years), although socialism and internationalism also marked his ideology. Later that year, while addressing a Serbian crowd in Kosovo gathered to protest about alleged brutality by local police, he told them that "No one has the right to beat you! No one will ever beat you again!".

This broke two important taboos in Yugoslav politics; that Communist officials should not publicly criticise their peers (the police were controlled by the local Communist administration) and that Party officials should not publicly side with one of Yugoslavia's ethnic groups (the local administration was dominated by ethnic Albanians, which the Kosovo Serbs resented). Stambolić later said that "he had seen that day as the end of Yugoslavia".

At the same time, Milošević's message was in accordance with internationalism cornerstone principle of the Communist's party, which tells that no ethnic group has any precedence over another. With the statement, Milošević tried to insure this policy with the message that Albanians of Kosovo can not use police to oppress and abuse local Serbs.

Meanwhile, Stambolić had become the President of Serbia. To the dismay of senior figures in the party, he supported Milošević for election as the new party leader. Stambolić spent three days advocating Milošević as leader, managing to secure him by the narrowest margin in the history of Serbian Communist Party internal elections.

Dragiša Pavlović, a Stambolić ally and Milošević's fairly liberal successor at the head of the Belgrade Committee of the party, opposed Milošević's policies towards Kosovan Serbs. Contrary to advice from Stambolić, Milošević denounced Pavlović as being soft on Albanian radicals. Milošević had prepared the ground by quietly replacing Stambolić's supporters with his own people; on 23 September and 24 September, during a thirty-hour session of the Communist Central Committee broadcast live on state television, Milošević had Pavlović deposed. Embarrassed and under pressure from Milošević's supporters, Stambolić resigned a few days later.

In February 1988, Stambolić's resignation was formalized, allowing Milošević to take his place as President. Twelve years later, in the summer of 2000, Stambolić was kidnapped; his body was found in 2003 and Milošević was charged with ordering his murder. In 2005, several members of the Serbian secret police and criminal gangs were convicted in Belgrade for a number of murders, including Stambolić's.

Milošević spent most of 1988/1989 focusing his politics on the "Kosovo problem". His subordinates organized public demonstrations – the so-called "anti-bureaucratic revolution" – which led to the elected leaderships of Vojvodina (6 October 1988), Montenegro (10 January 1989), and finally Kosovo itself (in February-March 1989) being removed. Azem Vllasi, leader of the Kosovo Albanian majority, was arrested and a strike by Kosovar miners was violently crushed by the Serbian police, killing 32 people.

On 28 March 1989, the National Assembly of Serbia, under Milošević's leadership, amended the Serbian constitution to greatly reduce the autonomy of its two provinces. The decision was hugely controversial, especially in Kosovo, where many Albanians had never accepted the legitimacy of Serbia's annexation of the province in 1912. A harsh regime was imposed which attracted widespread criticism from international human rights organisations, transnational bodies such as the European Community and other foreign governments. This caused great alarm in the other republics of Yugoslavia, where concerns were expressed that their own autonomous status could come under threat.

As nationalism grew within Yugoslavia, Milošević sought major constitutional changes. The 1974 Yugoslav Constitution had organised the country so that Serbia's status as the largest and most populous republic was counterbalanced by the way that the other republics were represented. The socialist Yugoslavia was at the time governed by an eight-member Presidency, representing the six republics plus Kosovo and Vojvodina. By ousting the government of Montenegro and replacing it with a more compliant one, Milošević effectively secured that republic's vote for himself; likewise the abolition of the autonomous governments of Vojvodina and Kosovo ensured that he controlled those votes as well. The Presidency was thus divided down the middle between Milošević's supporters and his opponents in the other republics, with four votes for each side. The result was stalemate and an increasing paralysis of Yugoslavia's federal government.

At the 14th Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia in January 1990, Milošević's Serbian delegation campaigned for major constitutional changes which would give greater political power too. Slovenian and Croatian delegations (led by Milan Kučan and Ivica Račan respectively) strongly opposed this, seeing it as an attack on their own republics' status, and left the Congress in protest. This caused a deep rift in the League of Communists and effectively put an end to the Party as a unified organisation.

With the collapse of the Yugoslav League of Communists, Milošević presided over the Serbian party's transformation into the Socialist Party of Serbia (July 1990) and the adoption of a new Serbian constitution (September 1990) providing for the direct election of a president with increased powers. Milošević was subsequently re-elected president of the Serbian Republic in the direct elections of December 1990 and December 1992.

In the first free parliamentary elections of December 1990, Milošević's Socialist Party won 80.5% of the vote. The ethnic Albanians in Kosovo largely boycotted the election, effectively eliminating even what little opposition Milošević had. Milošević himself won the presidential election with an even higher percentage of the vote. Although the elections could not have been described as wholly free and fair – Milošević controlled much of the media as well as the election system itself – there is little doubt that at this time he genuinely enjoyed mass popular support in Serbia.

Milošević's rise to power happened amidst a growth of nationalism in all the former Yugoslavian republics following the collapse of communist governments throughout eastern Europe. In 1990, Slovenians elected a nationalist government under Milan Kučan, and the Croatians did the same with Franjo Tuđman. Communist single-party rule in Bosnia and Herzegovina was replaced by an unstable coalition of three ethnically-based parties.

The Yugoslav Wars

Yugoslavia's collapse became inevitable by the start of 1991, with the federal institutions completely deadlocked between pro- and anti-Milošević forces. In a televised address on 16 March 1991 Milošević declared that Yugoslavia was finished and that Serbia would no longer be bound by decisions of the Federal Presidency.

In June 1991, Slovenia and Croatia seceded from the federation, followed by the republics of Macedonia (September 1991) and Bosnia and Herzegovina (March 1992). The Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) sought unsuccessfully to prevent Slovenia's secession by the use of force; however, Slovenia's Ten-Day War ended in a disastrous defeat for the federal forces. At this point, Milošević adopted a policy of establishing "all Serbs in one state," based on the ostensible premise that the large Serbian populations in Croatia (580,000) and Bosnia (1.36 million) should have the right to stay in Yugoslavia as they desired, arguing that the Yugoslav Constitution gave the right of self-determination to nations (Serbs, Croats, etc as a whole), not republics (Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, etc).

This policy – characterised by critics as a "Greater Serbia" in all but name – was, however, certain to produce a violent conflict. The Serb minorities lived, for the most part, in ethnically mixed areas with large non-Serb populations in their midst. Their areas were also not contiguous with Serbia itself.

Croatia's Serbs began campaigning for autonomy or independence from Croatia as early as mid-1990 after the election of the Croatian nationalist Franjo Tudjman, with Milošević's full support. Through 1991 and early 1992, together with the Yugoslav People's Army, they engaged in a war against the Croatian government. The first leader of Serbs in Croatia, Milan Babić, has stated that Milošević was responsible for this and his successor Goran Hadžić publicly bragged about how he was "the extended hand of Slobodan Milošević".

War crimes prosecutors subsequently characterised the creation of the separatist Republic of Serbian Krajina as a "joint criminal enterprise" whose goal was "the forcible removal of the majority of the Croat and other non-Serb population from the approximately one-third of the territory of the Republic of Croatia that he planned to become part of a new Serb-dominated state." At the trial of Milan Babić, the ICTY found that the Serbian government was directly involved in the Croatian Serb rebellion, providing supplies, weapons, money and leadership.

In 1992, Bosnia and Herzegovina was plunged into war even before its formal declaration of independence. Bosnian Serb forces soon captured as much as 70% of the country, expelling hundreds of thousands of non-Serbs and killing many thousands more, often in atrocities such as the Srebrenica massacre. Again, war crimes prosecutors have characterised this as a "joint criminal enterprise" in which Milošević played a leading part. The ICTY likewise found that the Serbian government was directly involved in the conflict.

By 1995, however, the ongoing wars in Croatia and Bosnia had become an unsupportable burden for Serbia. The country had experienced hyperinflation and a drastic worsening of living standards, due to an economic collapse and the effect of international sanctions. Milošević sought to force the Croatian and Bosnian Serbs to the negotiating table but was rebuffed by their nationalist leaderships. In response, despite his earlier support for their rebellions, he let it be known that they were on their own.

The Croatian War was brought to an end in August 1995 when Croatia's Operation Storm rapidly overran the Republic of Serbian Krajina. Almost the entire Croatian Serb population was expelled from Croatia in the process, fleeing into Bosnia and Serbia. Only a month later, the Bosnian Serbs were brought to the brink of military collapse by a combination of NATO air strikes (Operation Deliberate Force) and a joint Croatian/Bosniak ground offensive (Operation Mistral). Again, many hundreds of thousands of Serbs were forced into exile.

Milošević subsequently negotiated the Dayton Agreement in the name of the Bosnian Serbs, ending the conflict. As the agreement finally brought an end to the war in Bosnia, Milošević was credited in the West with being one of the pillars of Balkan peace. But crucially, the Dayton Agreement did not grant amnesty for the war crimes committed during the conflict – an omission on Milošević's part that was to pave the way for his eventual prosecution.

Milošević was limited to two terms as President of Serbia, but at the end of his term of office he instead stood for the hitherto relatively unimportant post of President of Yugoslavia (which by this time consisted of only Serbia and Montenegro). He won easily and assumed office on 23 July 1997. His old post passed into the hands of Milan Milutinović, a political ally. In Montenegro, however, the pro-Milošević old guard was pushed aside by the ambitious Milo Đukanović, who became President of Montenegro and emerged as an increasingly bitter opponent of Milošević.

That same year, an armed rebellion broke out in Kosovo against Serbian rule. The separatist Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) began to launch attacks against Serbian and Yugoslav security forces as well as Serbian officials and those Albanians, Serbs and others whom the KLA regarded as "collaborators". Although the Serbian response was initially fairly restrained, by 1998 hundreds had died in escalating retaliations and 100,000 Kosovo Albanians were reported to have been made homeless.

The conflict culminated in the Kosovo War of 1999, during which over half of the province's Albanian population fled and several thousand people died. A NATO campaign of air strikes (Operation Allied Force) eventually forced Milošević to back down. The subsequent Kumanovo Agreement saw Kosovo being handed over to a United Nations protectorate along with the total withdrawal of Yugoslav forces. In the aftermath of the war, the majority of Kosovo's Serb and Roma population fled into Serbia proper, fearing or experiencing persecution by vengeful Albanians and adding to the country's already large refugee population.

This time, though, Milošević was not lionised as a peacemaker. On 27 May 1999, he was indicted by the ICTY for war crimes and crimes against humanity allegedly committed in Kosovo. The possibility of his standing trial seemed remote at this point; despite the loss of Kosovo, he still appeared to retain popular support.

Downfall of presidency

On 4 February 1997, Milošević recognized the opposition victories in some local elections, having contested the results for 11 weeks.

Constitutionally limited to two terms as Serbian president, on 23 July 1997, Milošević assumed the presidency of the Yugoslav Federation (currently Serbia and Montenegro).

Armed actions by Albanian separatist groups and Serbian police and military counter-action in Serbia's previously autonomous (and 90% Albanian) province of Kosovo culminated in escalating warfare in 1998, NATO air strikes against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia between March and June 1999, and finally a full withdrawal of all Yugoslav security forces from the province.

During the Kosovo War he was indicted on 27 May 1999, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity allegedly committed in Kosovo, and he was standing trial, up until his death, at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, which he asserted was illegal, having been established in contravention of the UN-charter.

The Yugoslav constitution called for a second election round with all but the two leading candidates eliminated, in the event that no candidate won more than 50% of the vote. Official results put Koštunica ahead of Milošević but at under 50%. Opinion polls suggested that supporters of most of the minor candidates would go to Milošević as would numbers of people who abstained in the first round but would oppose an opposition supported by the NATO powers.

Milošević's rejection of claims of a first-round opposition victory in new elections for the Federal presidency in September 2000 led to mass demonstrations in Belgrade on 5 October and the collapse of the regime's authority. Opposition-list leader Vojislav Koštunica finally took office as Yugoslav president on 6 October when Milošević publicly accepted defeat.

Some say he was forced to accept this reality when commanders of the army whom he had expected to support him had indicated that in this instance they would not. Ironically, Milošević lost his grip on power by losing in elections which he scheduled prematurely (before the end of his mandate) and which he did not even need to win in order to retain power which was centred in the parliaments which his party and its associates controlled. This downfall is known as the Bulldozer Revolution.

Following a warrant for his arrest by the Yugoslav authorities on charges of corruption and abuse of power, Milošević was forced to surrender to security forces on Saturday, 31 March 2001 following an armed stand off at his fortified villa in Belgrade. On 28 June of the same year, Milošević was transferred by Yugoslav government officials from the gaol in Belgrade where he was being held to United Nations custody just inside Bosnian territory. He was then transported to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav Constitution explicitly prohibited extradition of Yugoslav citizens and President Koštunica formally opposed the transfer which has been ordered by Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić.

Following Milošević's transfer, the original charges of war crimes in Kosovo were upgraded by adding charges of genocide in Bosnia and war crimes in Croatia. On 30 January 2002, Milošević accused the war crimes tribunal of an "evil and hostile attack" against him. The trial began at The Hague on 12 February 2002, with Milošević defending himself while refusing to recognize the legality of the court's jurisdiction.

His popularity among the Serbs and Yugoslavs again rose sharply once the trial had begun, as his supporters see it as a travesty of justice and violation of national sovereignty. In addition, the rules of procedure and the Statute of the ICTY are widely considered among legal experts as less-than-democratic by standards of modern (U.S.) jurisprudence (i.e. admission of hearsay as evidence, ex-post facto changes to rules of procedure, etc.)

Milošević had a team in Belgrade that helped him, often sending him information available from the secret police files. Serbian insiders often supported Milošević's point of view, while Bosnian and Croatian witnesses have offered much testimony supporting the indictments.

The tribunal had to prove that Milosevic had command responsibility in Croatia and Bosnia, at least de facto, since formally as a President of Serbia at the time he was not in charge. His influence may have gone beyond his formal duties, but there is little to no evidence to support the prosecutor's case.

Milošević was not considered by some contemporaries to be a radical nationalist himself (although some of his followers were). Milošević's rhetoric did not make use of hate speech, though it may have been implied at times.

At one point during the Yugoslav wars, Serbia had rejected further cooperation with the Croatian Serbs (the Republic of Serbian Krajina), and also with the Bosnian Serbs (the Republika Srpska, in 1993, when Serbia closed the border over the Drina river). This action by Milosevic was regarded as treason by many Serbs.

After the Dayton Agreement in 1995, the Serbian nationalists (Vojislav Šešelj's radical party) became his sturdy opponents, up until 1998 when they joined his party in a coalition government.