Slobodan Milošević

I

Introduction

Slobodan Milošević (1941-2006), President of Serbia (1989-1997), President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1997-2000), and promoter of Serbian nationalist ambitions in the former Yugoslavia. Milošević was born of Montenegrin descent in Požarevac, Serbia. His father, a schoolteacher, left home when Milošević was in elementary school and committed suicide in 1962; his mother committed suicide in 1973. Milošević married Marjana Marković, a high-school classmate and communist activist from a leading Serbian communist family, and in 1959 joined the Savez Komunista Jugoslavie (SKJ; League of Communists of Yugoslavia), the Yugoslavian communist party. He graduated with a law degree from Belgrade University in 1964.

II

Rise to Power

After graduation Milošević began his career in the state bureaucracy as deputy director of the state gas company Tehnogas (1966-1973), director-general of Tehnogas (1973-1978), and as the director of a leading Yugoslavian bank, the Associated Bank of Belgrade (1978-1983). Milošević also built a career in the SKJ, serving as head of the Belgrade Information Service between 1966 and 1969. In 1984 Ivan Stambolić, the chief of the Serbian branch of the SKJ, made him head of the party’s Belgrade organization. In May 1986 Milošević succeeded Stambolić as leader of the Serbian SKJ. During this time nationalist sentiment was aroused by what Serbs perceived as Albanian threats to sovereignty and communal existence of the Serbs in Kosovo, a Serbian Autonomous Province that is 90 per cent Albanian in population. In April 1987 Stambolić despatched Milošević to Kosovo with the task of resolving the tense situation. Instead, Milošević seemed to publicly side with the Serb cause against the Albanians. In May 1989 he became president of Serbia, ousting Stambolić. The following month he addressed a huge rally at Gazimestan, in Kosovo, the site of a monument to the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, and rich with resonances for Serb nationalists, and warned that Serbs should be prepared for conflict ahead. With his new powers, Milošević revoked the autonomy of Kosovo and another province, Vojvodina, a move that fuelled the growing nationalist sentiment in other parts of Yugoslavia, particularly Croatia and Slovenia.

In Serbia’s first multi-party and direct presidential elections, in December 1990, Milošević was overwhelmingly re-elected president. His party, now called the Socialist Party of Serbia, won 194 of the 250 seats in the Serbian parliament. Declarations of independence by all of Yugoslavia’s republics except Serbia and Montenegro led to civil war in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, both of which have large minorities of Serbs. With support from Serbia and the Yugoslav army (largely commanded by Serbs), they seized large parts of both Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Throughout the Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian War, Milošević remained the leading power on the Serbian side, giving support to Bosnian Serb forces in defiance of international sanctions. However, he gradually distanced himself from more extreme Bosnian Serb nationalist elements to preserve his own position as the war progressively turned against the Serbs. He played a key role in the negotiations in Dayton, Ohio, leading to the November 1995 peace accord which ended the war, and in return sanctions against his state were lifted. However, hardline nationalists as well as moderates now opposed Milošević’s rule. He survived a mass campaign of demonstrations against him from November 1996 to February 1997 by agreeing to respect local election results giving victory to his opponents, which he had earlier attempted to quash. In June 1997, after the expiry of his maximum two terms as president of Serbia (as dictated by the Serbian constitution), he became president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro). His nominee for the Serbian presidency, Milan Milutinović, succeeded him in December 1997. From March 1998 Milošević came under renewed international pressure after ordering armed repression of Albanian separatists in the province of Kosovo.

III

Kosovo

The reported massacres of Kosovo Albanians in January 1999 intensified international pressure for peace talks between the Yugoslav government and the separatists. The failure of negotiations held in Rambouillet, France, during February caused the Western powers to carry out their threat of air strikes against Yugoslavia, a NATO-led operation that lasted 72 days. Milošević responded by intensifying the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, causing a huge refugee crisis as 800,000 Kosovo Albanians fled their homes. As a result, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague unsealed an indictment in May accusing Milošević of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The sustained build-up of troops on the Yugoslav border throughout the duration of the air campaign persuaded Milošević to sign up to a peace plan in June brokered by the former prime minister of Russia, Viktor Chernomyrdin. Terms of the agreement included the withdrawal of all Yugoslav military forces from Kosovo and the deployment of a 50,000-strong UN-led peacekeeping force to ensure the safe return of the Albanian refugees. Opposition protests within Serbia peaked in August, attracting over 150,000 people daily; however, their failure to dislodge Milošević resulted in increasing splits between opposition parties. In February 2000 it was announced that NATO troops would remain in Bosnia and Kosovo as long as Milošević held on to power and UN economic sanctions were extended to increase the pressure on the regime, but despite or even because of this, his grip on power in Serbia seemed increasingly secure.

In July Milošević, with a year of his term to run, changed the method of election for president from a vote in parliament to a nationwide ballot, and called an election for September, reasoning that the much-divided opposition would not be able to mount an effective challenge. However, 18 of the disparate opposition parties forged an alliance, the Democratic Opposition of Serbia, to nominate Vojislav Koštunica, a law professor and firm nationalist, as their candidate. Following the election Koštunica claimed victory, despite the official results claiming that he had failed to get the 50 per cent of the vote necessary to avoid a second ballot. Milošević refused to relinquish power, leading to a series of protests that culminated on October 5 with an uprising in Belgrade that finally forced him to admit defeat. Confirmation of his loss of power came in elections to the Serbian parliament in December, in which his party won only 14 per cent of the vote.

IV

Arrest and Trial

Milošević was permitted to continue to live in Belgrade, where in April 2001 he was arrested by police on corruption charges. Koštunica was initially unwilling to surrender him to the ICTY, but Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic delivered him to tribunal investigators in June, and Milošević was extradited to The Hague. He refused to appoint a defence team or to enter a plea at the court, which he regarded as being illegal—a plea of not guilty was entered by the judges on his behalf. In October, Milošević became the first former head of state to be indicted on a charge of genocide for his alleged role in the massacres of civilians at Srebrenica and elsewhere during the Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian War. At the beginning of February 2002 the court decided to hear all the charges of war crimes in one case, despite Milošević initially being indicted for crimes in Kosovo only. His trial, the most important for international justice since the war crimes trials of Nazi leaders at Nuremberg after World War II, began on February 12. In September 2003 Milošević was indicted in Serbia for the murder of Ivan Stambolić, who had been abducted in August 2000, and the attempted murder of Vuk Drasković, one of his leading opponents. The sheer quantity of evidence, the number of witnesses (among whom were the Kosovo Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova and the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina Paddy Ashdown), and Milošević’s combative style in court all contributed to the slow progress of the trial. Milošević died on March 11, 2006, before proceedings had been completed.