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Ex-Yugoslav leader Milosevic dies in cell
(AP/Reuters)
Updated: 2006-03-12 08:55 Zdenko Tomanovic, the defendant's legal adviser, told Serbia's independent
B-92 radio from The Hague that Slobodan Milosevic had complained that "someone
wants to poison" him. Tomanovic later told state Serbian TV that Russian experts
would be permitted to attend Sunday's autopsy.
The White House said it was waiting for more information.
A picture of former
Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is adorned with a black cloth of
mourning at the Socialist Party headquarters, on Saturday, March 11, 2006.
Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian president who orchestrated the
Balkan wars of the 1990s and was on trial for war crimes, was found dead
in his prison cell at the U.N. detention center near The Hague.
[AP] | "We have seen the news that Slobodan
Milosevic has died in his prison in The Hague," spokesman Blair Jones said. "We
do not have all the details yet."
There was no comment from Milosevic's wife, Mirjana, who often was
characterized as a power behind the scenes during her husband's autocratic rule
and has been in self-imposed exile in Russia since 2003. Their son, Marko, also
lives in Russia, and their daughter, Marija, lives in Montenegro.
Milosevic's trial and Saddam Hussein's war crimes proceeding in Iraq were
widely seen as together constituting the most important legal test for the
international community since German and Japanese leaders were tried after World
War II.
Both trials drew stiff criticism over frequent interruptions and the ability
of the defendants to use the courtroom as a stage to launch vitriolic
anti-Western diatribes. Reveling in the spotlight, Milosevic insisted on being
his own defense lawyer.
He was able to stay as the Serbs' leader for 13 years despite a crumbling
economy and increasing international isolation. He once described himself as the
"Ayatollah Khomeini of Serbia," assuring his prime minister, Milan Panic, that
"the Serbs will follow me no matter what."
Ivica Dacic, a ranking Socialist Party official, said in Belgrade that
Milosevic's death was a "great loss for Serbia, for the entire Serb nation and
for the Socialist party."
"Milosevic was carrying out not only his own defense but also the defense of
Serb honor," Dacic said. "The entire country must thank him for this."
But in the end, his people abandoned him: first in October 2000, when he was
unable to convince most Yugoslavs that he had staved off electoral defeat by
Vojislav Kostunica, and again on April 1, 2001, when he surrendered after a
26-hour standoff to face criminal charges.
"It is a pity he didn't live to the end of the trial to get the sentence he
deserved," Croatian President Stipe Mesic said.
Milosevic was born in Pozarevac, a factory town in central Serbia best known
as the home of one of the country's most notorious prisons.
His father was a defrocked Orthodox priest and sometime teacher of Russian.
His mother also was a teacher. Both committed suicide.
In high school, he met his future wife, the daughter of a wartime communist
partisan hero. She also was the niece of Davorjanka Paunovic, private secretary
and mistress of Josip Broz Tito, the communist guerrilla leader who seized power
in Yugoslavia at the end of World War II.
Milosevic graduated from law school in 1964 and joined the Communist Party.
The party put him in various business positions, and in 1983 he was appointed
director of a major state-run bank. He became friends with several Western
figures, including former U.S. Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger and
banker David Rockefeller.
He also befriended Ivan Stambolic, who became leader of the Communist Party
in Serbia in 1984. Stambolic picked Milosevic for the powerful post of party
leader in the capital, Belgrade.
When Stambolic was elevated to Serbia's presidency in 1986, Milosevic
succeeded him as Serbian communist boss.
A year later, Stambolic sent Milosevic to Kosovo, where ethnic Serbs were
demanding protection from the province's ethnic Albanian majority. During a
meeting of local Serb leaders, hundreds of angry Serbs gathered outside and
demanded the leadership hear their grievances.
Milosevic faced the crowd and delivered a fiery speech, telling them: "Nobody
has the right to beat you."
Those words shattered the myth of ethnic "brotherhood and unity" that had
been the slogan of Tito's communist regime 锟斤拷 and transformed Milosevic into a
Serb hero.
Months later, in September 1987, he publicly accused his old friend Stambolic
and others of anti-communist and anti-Serbian policies during a party meeting
televised nationally. All were forced to resign in a de facto coup.
In 1989, Milosevic became president of Serbia in an election widely
considered rigged. His rise alarmed the other peoples of the Yugoslav federation
锟斤拷 Slovenes, Croats, Macedonians, Albanians and others.
In 1991, Croatia and Slovenia declared independence from Yugoslavia.
Milosevic sent tanks to Slovenian borders, triggering a brief war that ended in
Slovenia's secession.
But ethnic Serbs in Croatia, encouraged by Milosevic, took up arms. Milosevic
responded by sending the Serb-led Yugoslav army to intervene, triggering a
conflict that killed at least 10,000 people.
Three months later, Bosnia-Herzegovina declared its independence. Milosevic
bankrolled a Bosnian Serb rebellion, triggering a war that killed an estimated
200,000 people before a U.S.-brokered peace agreement was reached at Dayton,
Ohio, in 1995.
Milosevic's term as Serbian president ended in 1997 and the constitution
prevented him from running again. However, he exploited legal loopholes to have
parliament name him president of Yugoslavia, which then included only the
republics of Serbia and Montenegro.
But it was Kosovo, his springboard to power, that finally set the stage for
his downfall.
In February 1998, Milosevic sent troops to crush an ethnic Albanian uprising
there, drawing sanctions from the United States and its allies. In 1999, after
Milosevic refused to sign a Western-dictated peace accord, NATO conducted 78
days of airstrikes on Yugoslavia.
Before Milosevic gave in and handed over the province's administration to the
United Nations in June 1999, the U.N. tribunal charged him and four top aides
with war crimes and crimes against humanity in Kosovo. It later broadened the
charges to include genocide.
Milosevic sought to hold on to power by pushing through a constitutional
change in July 2000 to permit the election of president by popular vote rather
than parliament. But he misjudged his popularity, and Yugoslavs exhausted by
years of war and upheaval backed Kostunica in the election.
The Milosevic-controlled election commission tried to force a runoff, but
hundreds of thousands of people converged on Belgrade, setting off a daylong
riot on Oct. 5, 2000. The police and army refused to intervene, and Milosevic
conceded defeat the following day.
He remained sequestered in an opulent villa in Belgrade until his arrest in
April 2001. He was extradited to The Hague that June.
Proceedings are continuing against 72 war crimes suspects. Tribunal figures
show 47 of them are at the detention unit where Milosevic died, and the rest
have been freed until their trial begins.
The most prominent suspects 锟斤拷 former Bosnian Serb leader
Radovan Karadzic and his top military officer, Ratko Mladic 锟斤拷 remain at large.
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