Milošević, Slobodan

Milošević, Slobodan (b. 29 Aug. 1941). President of Serbia 1989–92; President of Yugoslavia 1992–2000 Born at Pozarevac (Serbia) of Montenegrine parents, he studied law at Belgrade University and in 1959 joined the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. He became chairman of the university committee on ideology before graduating in 1964. He was an economic and legal adviser to the Belgrade Communist Party, while working in industry, where in 1978 he was made President of Beobanka, the United Bank of Belgrade. He became a full-time party worker as leader of the Belgrade party in 1984 and General Secretary of the Serbian Communist Party in 1987. He ended the autonomy of Kosovo and integrated it into Serbia. In 1989 he became President of Serbia. Re-elected in 1992 as the President of ‘rump’ Yugoslavia (composed of Serbia and Montenegro) on a nationalist platform, he effectively accepted the breakup of the old Yugoslav state and the independence of Slovenia and Croatia. At the same time, he insisted on Serbian regional leadership, and for years supported the Bosnian Serbs in the Bosnian Civil War, until this policy became too costly for the Serbian economy in the face of international sanctions.

In 1997 Milošević lost his absolute majority in the Serbian parliament, as the ultra-nationalist Radical Party surged ahead and became the second largest parliamentary party. This extremist opposition encouraged Milošević to pursue his nationalist agenda, which included the sanctioning of ethnic cleansing against Albanians in Kosovo. Milošević refused to compromise and recognize the Albanian majority's right to self-determination there, calculating wrongly that the US and the EU would continue to procrastinate on the matter. In March 1999 NATO started military action in Kosovo, which forced the Serbian police and armed forces to leave Kosovo. Milošević clung on to power, but after flagrantly manipulating the vote in the 2000 presidential elections, he was forced from power by a series of mass demonstrations. He was put under house arrest, and on 28 August 2001 he was extradited by the Serbian authorities to the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague. Perhaps feeling that his conviction was inevitable, Milošević, who defended himself without recognizing the Court's authority, used his trial, which commenced in 2002, to embarrass his accusers and justify himself.