Slobodan Milošević

• 1. Introduction

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  Slobodan Milošević was born in Požarevac on the 20th of August 1941, four months after Axis forces had overrun the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. He died on the 11th of March 2006 in a prison cell in The Hague, still on trial for war crimes he had never been convicted of. Between those two dates, he rose from a law student at the University of Belgrade to the president of Serbia, then to president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and became the first sitting head of state ever charged with war crimes by an international tribunal. How did a man who spent the first twenty-five years of his career as, by most accounts, a thoroughly ordinary Communist civil servant end up standing accused of genocide? Why did hundreds of thousands of people desert the army he commanded while tens of thousands gathered in Belgrade to mourn him? And what exactly happened to his trial, which began in February 2002 and never reached a verdict?

• 2. A Family of Suicides

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  Požarevac, the Serbian town where Milošević grew up, sat in a country that had just been occupied by Axis forces when he was an infant. His childhood was shadowed not only by wartime occupation but by a family history of devastating personal loss. His father Svetozar, a Serbian Orthodox theologian, died by suicide in 1962. His mother Stanislava, a school teacher and active Communist Party member, died by suicide in 1972. Her brother, Milisav Koljenšić, who had reached the rank of major-general in the Yugoslav People's Army, died by suicide in 1963. Three suicides across two generations of one family: the pattern is striking, and it left Milošević and his older brother Borislav, who went on to become a diplomat, to navigate adult life largely on their own. Milošević went to the University of Belgrade's Law School, where he joined the League of Socialist Youth of Yugoslavia and headed its ideology committee. It was there that he met Ivan Stambolić, a fellow student whose uncle Petar Stambolić had served as president of the Serbian Executive Council. That friendship would shape the next two decades of Milošević's career in ways that neither man could then have foreseen. In 1964, Milošević graduated and became economic advisor to the mayor of Belgrade, Branko Pešić. In 1965, he married his childhood friend Mirjana Marković. In 1968, he followed Stambolić into the Tehnogas company and became its chairman in 1973. By 1978, Stambolić's sponsorship had carried Milošević to the head of Beobanka, one of Yugoslavia's largest banks, a post that brought him frequent trips to Paris and New York.

• 3. Kosovo Polje, April 1987

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  On the 24th of April 1987, Milošević was sent to address a crowd of Serbs at the historic Kosovo field, a site weighted with centuries of Serbian national memory. While he was inside the local cultural hall talking with the leadership, a crowd of 15,000 Serbs and Montenegrins outside clashed with the Kosovo-Albanian police, hurling stones after police used truncheons to push people back from the entrance. Milošević was sent outside to calm the situation. A videotape of that moment captured him responding to complaints that the police were beating people by saying: "No one is allowed to beat you." Serbian television broadcast the video that same evening. The remark was addressed to a small group immediately around him, not to the mass of demonstrators, but its significance took on a life of its own. Ivan Stambolić, who had by then served as Serbian president, later said that he had seen that day as "the end of Yugoslavia." The Federal Secretariat of the Interior Ministry formally condemned the police's use of rubber truncheons, finding that the crowd's conduct "cannot be assessed as negative or extremist" and that there had been "no significant violation of law and order." None of that mattered as much as the video, which made Milošević the man who had stood with the Serbs of Kosovo. Within months, his rival Dragiša Pavlović was expelled from the party leadership. The central committee voted 106 to 8 for Pavlović's expulsion, with 18 abstentions. Stambolić was pushed out next. His resignation was formalized in February 1988, clearing the path for Milošević to assume the Serbian presidency.

• 4. The Anti-Bureaucratic Revolution

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  Beginning in July 1988 and running through March 1989, a wave of rallies swept through Vojvodina and Montenegro that Milošević's supporters called an authentic grass-roots movement and his critics called a coordinated political operation. In Vojvodina, where 54 percent of the population was Serb, an estimated 100,000 demonstrators gathered outside the Communist Party headquarters in Novi Sad on the 6th of October 1988. The majority were workers from the town of Bačka Palanka, 40 kilometres west of Novi Sad. The provincial leadership resigned. On the 10th of January 1989-50,000 demonstrators gathered in the Montenegrin capital of Titograd, now Podgorica, to protest an unemployment rate of nearly 25 percent and a situation in which one-fifth of the population lived below the poverty line. Montenegro's state presidency tendered its collective resignation the next day. Protesters carried portraits of Milošević and shouted his name. Organizer Kosta Bulatović said the movement was "spontaneous" and driven "from the grassroots." Stjepan Mesić, who served as the last president of a united Yugoslavia, said that Milošević "broke down the autonomous government in Vojvodina, which was legally elected." Slovene president Milan Kučan said flatly: "none of us believed in Slovenia that these were spontaneous meetings and rallies." At rallies in Serbia and Montenegro in August 1988, chants included "Give us arms!", "We want weapons!", "Long live Serbia, death to Albanians!", and "Montenegro is Serbia!" By the end of these events, Milošević's supporters held power in four of the eight republics and autonomous provinces that made up the Yugoslav federation. He now controlled half the votes in the federal presidency.

• 5. Media, Money, and Kleptocracy

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  Milošević publicly advocated a synthesis of socialist and liberal economic policies designed to gradually move Serbia from a planned economy toward a mixed economy. In practice, critics charged that he transferred ownership of much of the industrial and financial sector to his political allies and financiers, creating a kleptocracy. Under United Nations sanctions tied to his role in the Yugoslav wars, Serbia's economy deteriorated severely. The National Bank of Yugoslavia's war-related monetary policies drove hyperinflation to 313 million percent in January 1994. According to the World Bank, Serbia's economy contracted by 27.2 percent in 1992 and 30.5 percent in 1993. World Bank economist Dragoslav Avramović was appointed governor of the National Bank in March 1994 and instituted reforms that pegged the Yugoslav dinar to the Deutsche Mark at a 1:1 rate, ending the hyperinflation. The Serbian economy grew from 1994 to 1998, reaching a rate of 10.1 percent in 1997, though that growth was never enough to recover the pre-war ground. To pay pensions and wages, the government sold off Serbia's telecommunications assets, bringing in about $1.05 billion in revenue. On the political rights front, Milošević's government ordered a 36-hour blackout of B92 Radio and Studio B television in March 1991 to suppress coverage of anti-government protests in Belgrade. Article 98 of the Serbian penal code in the 1990s provided for up to three years' imprisonment for publicly ridiculing Serbian state institutions or their officeholders. The director of Radio Television of Serbia during Milošević's era, Dušan Mitević, later admitted on a PBS documentary: "the things that happened at state TV, warmongering, things we can admit to now: false information, biased reporting. That went directly from Milošević to the head of TV."

• 6. The Wars and The Hague

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  The ICTY indictment alleged that Milošević had built a plan to create a Greater Serbia by forcibly removing non-Serbs from large parts of Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo. The prosecution argued that the Kosovo events, though separated from Croatia and Bosnia by more than three years, were a continuation of the same plan. A telephone conversation between Milošević and Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić, tapped by Yugoslav intelligence in September 1991, was released publicly by Yugoslav prime minister Ante Marković. In it, Milošević told Karadžić: "Go to Uzelac, he'll tell you everything. If you have any problems, telephone me", and added: "As long as there is the army no one can touch us." Vojislav Šešelj, leader of the Serbian Radical Party, claimed Milošević had directly organized the supply of paramilitaries: "Milošević organized everything. We gathered the volunteers and he gave us a special barracks, Bubanj Potok, all our uniforms, arms, military technology and buses." The prosecution never produced a written order by Milošević to Serbian fighters in Croatia or Bosnia; a prosecution analyst acknowledged this under cross-examination, though the analyst added that the absence of orders did not mean they did not exist. Milošević replied: "There are none, that's why you haven't got one." He was indicted on the 24th of May 1999, during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. Charged with genocide, complicity in genocide, deportation, murder, torture, and destruction of cultural monuments, among other counts, he conducted his own defense after refusing to appoint counsel and denouncing the tribunal as illegal. The trial began on the 12th of February 2002. The prosecution took two years to present its case. Between 50,000 and 200,000 people had deserted from the Yugoslav People's Army during the wars, and between 100,000 and 150,000 people had emigrated from Serbia rather than participate.

• 7. Downfall and Death

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  After 96 days of mass protests, Milošević recognized opposition victories in some local elections on the 4th of February 1997. Constitutionally barred from a third term as Serbian president, he moved to the federal Yugoslav presidency on the 23rd of July 1997. He then called a snap presidential election, a move that proved his undoing. In the five-man race held on the 24th of September 2000, opposition leader Vojislav Koštunica won slightly more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round. Milošević refused to concede, claiming no one had achieved a majority. The dispute led to the mass demonstrations of the 5th of October 2000, known as the Bulldozer Revolution. The Yugoslav Army commanders he had expected to support him indicated they would not act against the demonstrators. On the 6th of October, Milošević met with Koštunica and publicly accepted defeat. He was arrested on the 1st of April 2001, following a 36-hour armed standoff at his Belgrade villa. Over President Koštunica's objections that extradition would violate the Yugoslav constitution, Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić ordered Milošević flown by helicopter from Belgrade to a US airbase in Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and from there to The Hague. A group of donors pledged approximately $1 billion in financial aid to Yugoslavia following the extradition. On the 11th of March 2006, Milošević was found dead in his prison cell in the Scheveningen detention centre. Autopsies confirmed a heart attack. The tribunal had recently denied his request to seek treatment at a cardiology clinic in Russia, and the tribunal stated he had refused prescribed cardiac medications and had medicated himself instead. Posthumous verdicts in four separate ICTY and International Residual Mechanism cases found that he had been part of a joint criminal enterprise that used ethnic cleansing to remove Croats, Bosniaks, and Albanians from parts of Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo. In February 2007, the International Court of Justice found no direct evidence linking him to genocide during the Bosnian War but concluded that he had violated the Genocide Convention by failing to prevent the genocide at Srebrenica and by failing to hold those responsible to account. A private funeral was held in his hometown of Požarevac after tens of thousands attended a farewell ceremony in Belgrade.