Former Yugoslav Leader Milosevic Found Dead

Former Yugoslav Leader Milosevic Found Dead

By Molly Moore, Fred Barbash and R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, March 11, 2006; 10:06 AM

PARIS, March 11 -- Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav leader who presided over the Balkan wars of the 1990s, was found dead Saturday in his cell at a United Nations prison near The Hague where he was on trial for war crimes, among them genocide in the form of "ethnic cleansing."

The 65-year-old Milosevic "was found lifeless on his bed in his cell," according to a statement issued by war crimes tribunal.

Officials said Milosevic, who had been in poor health and whose trial has been interrupted often because of his chronic heart condition, appeared to have died of natural causes.

He was charged by a U.N. war crimes tribunal in May, 1999 with crimes against humanity, specifically, directing, encouraging and supporting a campaign of terror, violence and murder against ethnic Albanian civilians in Kosovo in 1999. Additional charges followed, including genocide in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo stemming from a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing against non-Serbs during the collapse of the Yugoslav federation.

The trial was recessed last week to await his next defense witness.

Milosevic, 64, was the driving force behind a decade of ethnic wars in the Balkans. He was a provocateur and firebrand of Serbian nationalism.

But he was a convert to that cause, having begun his political career as a Communist party apparatchik in the era of Yugoslavia's legendary leader Marshal Tito, who died in 1980.

While in power, Milosevic represented a dwindling group of authoritarian leaders who clung to office at the price of isolating their countries from the outside world.

He stepped down after 13 years in power following a popular revolt in October, 2000, but remained free until April, 2001. Under mounting foreign pressure, he was arrested by the successor government in Serbia and charged with corruption and abuse of power.

In the dark of night on June 29, 2001, in an extradition engineered by Serbian leaders, Milosevic was flown out of the country to the Netherlands and became the first head of state to face charges before a court created to track down and try war criminals from Europe's worst bloodletting since World War II.

There was mourning of a different sort across Europe Saturday, not over his death but over the lost opportunity of a full trial.

"What can I say," commented Vuk Draskovic, foreign minister of Serbia-Montenegro.

"Milosevic organized many many assassinations of people of my party, of people of my family. He ordered a few times assassination attempts against my life," he told wire services. "I can say it's a pity he didn't face justice in Belgrade."

"It's a pity that Milosevic did not live through the trial and get his deserved sentence," said a statement issued by the office of Croatian President Stjepan Mesic. "It's pity that Milosevic did not live through the trial and get his deserved sentence."

Former Balkans envoy David Owen said, "It's sad that justice in a way has been cheated. He was the first head of state to be given a trial, he's been given a very fair trial, it's taken an extraordinarily long time."

"I think people everywhere, but particularly in the former Yugoslavia and in Bosnia were wanting this verdict," Owen told wire services. "They now will feel cheated and it's a tragedy in a way that justice has not been able to give the verdict which we was important to hear."

Ivica Dacic, of Milosevic's Socialist Party, expressed a different view: "It's a big loss for Serbia and for the Socialist party. He was being systematically killed in the Hague and finally he died."

Fred Barbash and R. Jeffrey Smith reported from Washington.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company

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March 12, 2006
An Appraisal
To His Death in Jail, Milosevic Exalted Image of Serb Suffering
By ROGER COHEN

To the last, a solitary death yesterday in a United Nations cell near an international court he derided, Slobodan Milosevic clung to the notion that all the Balkan destruction he ignited and presided over was no more than a response to aggression against his long-suffering Serbian people.

"My aim is to present the truth, and that takes time," the former Serbian president told the tribunal in The Hague, a prelude to painstaking circumlocutions that sought over more than four years to cast the author of Yugoslavia's destruction as a misunderstood man bent only on that country's defense.

In fact, the truth for Mr. Milosevic was always a commodity to be manipulated in the single-minded pursuit of power. Everyone — Croats reinvented as World War II fascists, Bosnian Muslims recast as marauding Ottoman Turks, multiplying Kosovo Albanians redrawn as agents of "demographic genocide" against the Serbs — was fit material for Mr. Milosevic's overriding myth of Serbian suffering.

That myth held a heady power over many years. As Communism collapsed in Europe and his own Yugoslavia in the late 1980's, Mr. Milosevic seized the potential of nationalism as what Miroslav Hroch, a Czech political theorist, has called "a substitute for factors of integration in a disintegrating society."

Deploying a blunt slogan — "Serbia does not kneel" — Mr. Milosevic, 64, engineered a giddy apotheosis from what had been a humdrum career as a banker and Communist bureaucrat. He was found dead in his bed, apparently of natural causes, according to the tribunal. An autopsy was to be performed today in the Netherlands. [Page 12.]

His method was unsubtle — the defense of Serbs and a glorious vision of Serbian history — but it played well to a people with a long-held conviction that Tito's Communist Yugoslavia had cheated them of rightful power.

One result was a violence not seen in Europe since 1945. No Stalin, no Hitler, Mr. Milosevic nevertheless proved himself over 13 years in power to be a ruler of exceptional ruthlessness always ready to use force in a series of wars, from Croatia in 1991 to Kosovo in 1999. [Obituary, Page 34.]

In effect, Mr. Milosevic destroyed the delicate balance of the Yugoslavia he professed to defend and then expressed wonderment at its violent destruction. "Who, me?" he always seemed to ask, both as leader and later during his long season in court, when confronted with the repetitive evidence of his own destructiveness.

By the time Yugoslavia began to unravel in 1991 in the wars that left more than 200,000 people dead, Mr. Milosevic has quashed the autonomy of Kosovo and another province, Vojvodina, and installed a subservient leadership in Montenegro. As a result, he controlled four votes in the eight-member collective Yugoslav presidency.

When the leaders of other Yugoslav republics balked, suggesting Mr. Milosevic had transformed Yugoslavia into "Serboslavia," the Serbian leader performed a typical pirouette, declaring that Serbs were on the defensive because they only wanted to remain within a threatened Yugoslav state. Having smashed all the furniture, Mr. Milosevic blamed everyone else for no longer wanting to sit down with him.

Wars followed — briefly in Slovenia, then in Croatia, most devastatingly in Bosnia, and finally in Kosovo. As they did — and that delicate early 20th-century creation, Yugoslavia, was destroyed as utterly as the old Ottoman bridge at Mostar — Mr. Milosevic never wavered in attempting to portray himself and the Serbs as victims of "Muslim propaganda" or other baleful forces beyond his control.

"The national and historic being of Serbs is a liberating one," Mr. Milosevic declared during his rise to power in the 1980's. It was to this vision that he and many of his disoriented people clung through the discovery of an array of Serbian concentration camps in Bosnia in 1992 and even through the killing of thousands of Muslims near the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica in 1995.

During his trial on charges of crimes against humanity and genocide, Mr. Milosevic, acting as his own lawyer, called dozens of witnesses, from former Communist Party aides to Russian politicians, in an attempt to bolster his case that none of the killings and forced evictions known as "ethnic cleansing" took place at his instigation.

Wars are nasty, he argued in essence, and bad things happen to everyone. But, he insisted, the notion of a plan for a Greater Serbia brutally emptied of non-Serbs was an invention of the many enemies of his people.

His argument ignored multiple realities — the systematic arming of Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia; the coordinated nature of the camps in which tens of thousands of unarmed Muslim civilians suffered or were killed in 1992; the conversion of the Serbian-dominated Yugoslav army into an agent of Serbian expansionism; the financing of that operation from Belgrade; and the deployment of highly trained Serbian militias in Bosnia and later in Kosovo.

But reality was never Mr. Milosevic's preferred domain. He only ventured into Bosnia once, the better to conserve the fantasies that fed his rise to power.

Borislav Jovic, a senior aide to Mr. Milosevic, was much more forthright. In interviews with the BBC for a documentary on the destruction of Yugoslavia, he explained that the aim was always to use wars in Croatia and Serbia to consolidate areas with large Serb population into a Greater Serbia.

Before war broke out upon Bosnia's declaration of independence from Yugoslavia in April 1992, planning was already in place. "We knew that when Bosnia was recognized, we'd be seen as aggressors because our army was there," Mr. Jovic said. "So Milosevic and I talked it over, and we realized we'd have to pull a fast one. We transferred all the Bosnian Serbs in our Yugoslav army to their forces and promised to pay all the costs."

One result was that for the initial year of the war, Serbs enjoyed a crushing military domination that they put to use emptying wide swathes of eastern, northern and northwestern Bosnia of Muslims and laying siege to Bosnia's multiethnic capital, Sarajevo, whose plight became a symbol of the Balkan madness set in motion by Mr. Milosevic.

The Bosnian campaign was led by Radovan Karadzic, the political leader of the Bosnian Serbs, and by Gen. Ratko Mladic, its military architect, both of whom remain fugitives.

But as Mr. Karadzic's risible little headquarters in the skiing village of Pale always made clear, the prosecution of the war was unthinkable without coordination and financing from Mr. Milosevic's Belgrade.

Still, the Serbian capital and its ruler, enveloped in the drumbeat of propaganda, long contrived to keep the war at some distance. Indeed, many Serbian illusions survived a full decade after the end of the Bosnian war, until 2005, when the showing of videotape of the execution of six Muslim men near Srebrenica by a Serbian paramilitary police unit provoked widespread shock.

That the killings of six men could have such an effect in Serbia after the killings of tens of thousands of Muslims at Serbian hands was one measure of the powers of Mr. Milosevic as an illusionist. Convinced that Serbs were eternal victims, he contrived to persuade his countrymen that they remained so as Yugoslavia disintegrated.

Even today, as a democratic but still traumatized and relatively isolated Serbia tries to move toward membership of the European Union, the country's ability to face what happened under Mr. Milosevic often appears limited. Croatian and Bosnian Muslim crimes against Serbs, whose existence is well documented, are always seized upon to mask the far greater crimes of Serbs themselves.

Both American and United Nations investigations of war crimes in Bosnia concluded that a vast majority of them — 90 percent, according to a C.I.A. report — were committed by Serbs.

The trial of Mr. Milosevic, endlessly long and now forever inconclusive, seems to have done little to provide the sort of clear accounting that would have served a Balkan future by making history, and particularly Serbian responsibility, clear. An old nostrum holds that justice delayed is justice denied; its validity in this case seems hard to deny.

Such a failure, or at least absence of success, is no more than one of many. The United States and Europe, disoriented by the cold war's end, took a very long time to confront Mr. Milosevic and stop him.

At the Dayton talks of 1995, which ended the Bosnian war, he was still an accepted interlocutor. Not until the Kosovo war of 1999 did NATO try — successfully — to undermine Mr. Milosevic and force him out.

As for Mr. Milosevic himself, nothing he said during more than four years in court suggests he ever engaged in self-reproach or questioning of any kind. The myriad victims of his heady nationalism, among those he fought and the Serbs he professed to defend, never appeared to impinge on his stubborn defiance.

Robert C. Frasure, an American diplomat who died in an accident near Sarajevo in 1995, dealt extensively with Mr. Milosevic and said he was reminded of "a Mafia boss who desperately wants to get out of the business."

As the Serbian nationalist tide ebbed during the 1990's, there is little question that Mr. Milosevic tried to extricate himself from the frenzy of killing he had inspired. Greater Serbia gave way to what an American official described as "Greater Serbia Lite"; that in turn gave way to nothing more than "Greater Slobo," which is perhaps what drove the whole crazed enterprise from the outset. Serbia's much vaunted military prowess proved largely empty in the end.

A joke at the start of the Bosnian war held that the Serbian Tourism Ministry's slogan was: "Visit Serbia before it visits you." By the time Mr. Milosevic was ousted in 2000, that slogan might have been recast as: "Visit Serbia before it disappears entirely."

The unraveling that Mr. Milosevic set in motion has proved immensely costly to his people and his region. The "Serbian Question" is still not solved; it is still unclear, long after the 19th-century emergence of a Serbian nation state in modern Europe, where Serbia's borders lie. The independence of Kosovo is being discussed; Montenegro may choose to leave its partner in a truncated federation.

"Nobody should dare to beat you," Mr. Milosevic declared in Kosovo on April 24, 1987, to thunderous cries of "Slobo" from the Serbian crowd. "Your ancestors would be defiled," he said, if Kosovo Albanians had their way.

The words had a ring to them and set a bloody tide in motion. But it is precisely the past noble deeds of Serbs — not least those during World War I that led to the very creation of Yugoslavia — that have been most defiled by Mr. Milosevic's crushing defeat and failure in the name of a terrible but persistent Serbian illusion.

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