Slobodan Milošević

Slobodan Milošević (born August 20, 1941, Požarevac, Yugoslavia [now in Serbia]—died March 11, 2006, The Hague, Netherlands) was a politician and administrator, who, as Serbia’s party leader and president (1989–97), pursued Serbian nationalist policies that contributed to the breakup of the socialist Yugoslav federation. He subsequently embroiled Serbia in a series of conflicts with the successor Balkan states. From 1997 to 2000 he served as president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

Milošević was born in Serbia of Montenegrin parents and joined the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (from 1963 the League of Communists of Yugoslavia [LCY]) when he was 18 years old. He graduated from the University of Belgrade with a law degree in 1964 and began a career in business administration, eventually becoming head of the state-owned gas company and president of a major Belgrade bank. He married Mirjana Marković, a staunch communist who became his political adviser. Milošević entered politics full-time in 1984 as a protégé of Ivan Stambolić, head of the League of Communists of Serbia (LCS). Milošević took over as head of the local communist party organization in Belgrade that year.

Milošević soon introduced a new populist political style to Serbia, appealing directly to the Serbian people over the heads of LCY officials and calling for an “antibureaucratic revolution.” He used his rising popularity to oust his former mentor Stambolić as leader of the LCS in December 1987. As Serbia’s party leader, Milošević demanded that the federal government restore full control to Serbia over the autonomous provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo. And at a time when the federal government was trying to introduce free-market reforms in order to relieve the faltering Yugoslav economy, he emerged as a leading defender of the socialist tradition of state economic intervention, attacking economic reform for its social costs.

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Serbia: The rise of Slobodan Milošević

In 1988 Milošević replaced the party leadership in Vojvodina and Kosovo provinces with his own supporters, and in 1989 the Serbian assembly ousted Stambolić from the republic’s presidency, replacing him with Milošević. In 1990 Milošević pushed through changes to the Serbian constitution that curtailed the provinces’ autonomy. He resisted a growing movement in favour of multiparty elections, and he sought to use the extensive Serbian diaspora throughout Yugoslavia in his fight against confederalism, a looser union of sovereign republics that was advocated by the leaders of Croatia and Slovenia. But Milošević’s policies created an anti-Serb backlash in the other republics, and Serbia’s continuing resistance to political and economic reform accelerated the breakup of the Yugoslav federation. The LCY split into separate republican parties in 1990, and multiparty elections later that year brought noncommunist governments to power in both Croatia and Slovenia. Milošević transformed the LCS into the Socialist Party of Serbia and in December 1990 was returned to office by a huge majority. He was reelected to the Serbian presidency in 1992.

In 1991 Milošević faced popularly elected leaders from Croatia and Slovenia who continued to press for the transformation of Yugoslavia into a confederation. A negotiated settlement proved impossible, and in 1991 first Slovenia and Croatia and then Macedonia (now North Macedonia) declared their independence. In 1992 the Bosniaks (Muslims) and Croats of Bosnia and Herzegovina also voted to secede. In response, Milošević backed Serbian militias who were fighting to unite Bosnia and Croatia with Serbia. After three years of full-scale warfare in Bosnia, however, Serbian militias were unable to overwhelm the Bosniak and Croatian forces there, and in 1995 the Croatian army swept almost the entire Serbian population out of its historic enclaves in Croatia. By this time Serbia’s economy, which had never recovered from the political crises of the late 1980s, was suffering severely from trade sanctions that had been imposed on Yugoslavia by the United Nations (UN) in 1992. In order to lift the sanctions, Milošević agreed on behalf of the Bosnian Serbs to a peace accord in November 1995, thus effectively ending the fighting in Bosnia.

During 1998 the long-standing dispute between Serbia and the ethnic Albanians of Kosovo deteriorated rapidly into open armed conflict between federal security forces and the guerrilla Kosovo Liberation Army, which had begun killing Serbian policemen and politicians. In the early spring of 1999 the Serbs launched a major offensive aimed at defeating the insurgents. NATO forces retaliated by initiating a massive aerial bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, expecting that Milošević would quickly capitulate. Unexpectedly, many Serbs previously critical of his government rallied in support of their country; capitalizing on this, he ordered a program of ethnic cleansing of the Kosovar Albanians that drove hundreds of thousands of them into neighbouring countries as refugees. By June, however, Milošević had agreed to a peace accord with NATO that obliged him to withdraw Serbian forces from Kosovo.

As Serbia’s president, Milošević had continued to dominate the new Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which had been inaugurated in 1992 and consisted of only Serbia and Montenegro. He maintained power by his repression of political opponents, his control of the mass media, and the opportunistic alliances he formed with parties across the political spectrum, including Yugoslav United Left, the party led by his wife. Having served two terms as president of Serbia, Milošević was constitutionally barred from serving a third term. He retained power, however, by having the federal parliament elect him to the presidency of Yugoslavia in 1997. Milošević’s attempt to cling to power by taking the federal presidency exposed him to indictment by the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague. It had been difficult to charge Milošević when he was president of Serbia before 1997 with any possible offenses committed by Yugoslav troops during the war with Bosnia, but, as president of Yugoslavia, he was also the commander in chief of the federal armed forces. He was thus deemed responsible for any offenses against international law committed during the Kosovo conflict and was indicted in May 1999.

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Unrest under Milošević’s rule and a faltering economy grew in 2000, and in the September presidential elections he was defeated by opposition leader Vojislav Koštunica. Milošević was arrested by the Yugoslav government in 2001 and turned over to the ICTY for trial on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. The trial began in February 2002 but experienced numerous delays because of the poor health of Milošević, who served as his own defense lawyer. On March 11, 2006, he was found dead in his prison cell.