'Slobodan Milošević' (
IPA ;
Serbian Cyrillic: Слободан Милошевић) (
Požarevac,
Kingdom of Yugoslavia,
20 August 1941 –
The Hague,
The Netherlands,
11 March 2006) was
President of Serbia and of
Yugoslavia. He served as the President of
Serbia from 1989 to 1997 and then as President of the
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1997 to 2000. He also led Serbia's
Socialist Party from its foundation in 1990. He was from the
Vasojevići Montenegrin clan.
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 violating the
laws or customs of war, grave breaches of the
Geneva Conventions in Croatia and Bosnia and
genocide in Bosnia were added a year and a half later.
He conceded defeat and resigned after
demonstrations, following the disputed presidential election of October 2000. Within nine months of his ousting, he was arrested by security forces in Yugoslavia on charges of corruption whilst in power, and within a very short time, was extradited to stand trial in the
The Hague.
At the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Milošević conducted his own defense. He died after five years in prison with just fifty hours of testimony left before the conclusion of the trial. Milošević, who began to suffer from heart ailments, high blood pressure and diabetes after he was imprisoned, died of a heart attack.
Early life
Milošević was a
Montenegrin Serb by origin, born in
Požarevac (today in
Serbia) during the
Axis occupation. His parents separated soon after the war; his father, Svetozar Milošević, a
deacon in the
Serbian Orthodox Church committed
suicide in 1962, and his mother, Stanislava Milošević née Koljenšić, a school teacher and also an active member of the Communist Party,
hanged herself in 1974.
He went on to study
law at
Belgrade University, where he became the head of the ideology committee of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY) student branch. While at the university, he befriended
Ivan Stambolić, whose uncle
Petar Stambolić had been a president of Serbian Executive Council (a Yugoslav equivalent to the post of prime minister). This was to prove a crucial connection for Milošević's career prospects, as Stambolić sponsored his rise through the LCY 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. Marković 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.
In private Milošević was
patriarchal and
conservative, devoted to his family and wife. His personality was marked by stubbornness—a trait of which he was proud; and his most devoted followers were older people, who had spent most of their lives in an era characterised by a moral code which they believed Milošević embodied flawlessly. His stubbornness and unwillingness to compromise may be partly credited for the political problems and wars which marked his years in power, as well as his unrelenting defence in his trial. His lifelong devotion to his wife was reflected in the place of his burial, which is under the tree where they first kissed in
1958.
Rise to power
Milošević was elected Chairman of the Belgrade City Committee of the League of Communists in April 1986, 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 emigré Serbian historian, law professor and nationalist politician of the first half of the twentieth century. Milošević also advocated retaining
Marxism as a school subject and said that low turnout of Belgrade youth at the Communist ''Day of the Youth'' "desecrated"
Tito's character and work.
Milošević emerged in April 1987 as the leading force in
Serbian politics. Some international journalists have stated that his political positions were
nationalist, with elements of socialism and
internationalism.
Later that year, in response to a protester who complained of being beaten by the Police, Milošević said "You will not be beaten"
[1]
Although Milošević was only addressing a small group of people around him -- not the public,
[2], Yugoslavian journalists noted that a great deal of significance has been attached to his remark. Stambolić, after his reign as President, said that he had seen that day as "the end of Yugoslavia".
At the same time, Milošević's message was in accordance with an international, cornerstone principle of the LCY, which states that no ethnic group takes any precedence over another.
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 party leadership by the narrowest margin in the history of the League of Communists of Serbia (LCS) internal elections. This was arguably the biggest mistake of Stambolić's political career, one which he later regretted, as Milošević would soon topple him at the
8th Session of the League of Communists of Serbia.
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 Kosovar 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 Central Committee of the LCS 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". In 1988 in Belgrade, Milošević delivered an aggressive nationalistic speech, saying "At home and abroad, Serbia's enemies are massing against us. We say to them 'We are not afraid'. 'We will not flinch from battle'."
[1] In his campaign against Serbia's "enemies", his supporters organized public demonstrations – the so-called "
anti-bureaucratic revolution" – which led to the overthrow of the leaderships of
Vojvodina (
6 October,
1988), and
Montenegro (
10 January,
1989) resigning.
[3]Azem Vllasi, leader of the League of Communists of Kosovo, was arrested for inciting rioting amid a strike by Kosovo-Albanian miners.
[4]
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 relations between Serbs and Albanians have a long history of tension. 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
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