Serb Strongman Led Nation on Ruinous Path

He led his country to ruin, taking it into four losing wars and shrinking it to a fraction of its former self, earning a reputation as a murderous dictator, Europe’s last. Yet Slobodan Milosevic defied the Western world and survived until the thuggish system he created rotted from the inside, to be pushed over in a spasm of anger by rural workers who had supported it for so long.

For more than a decade, Milosevic weathered the West’s military might, America’s best diplomatic scheming, costly international isolation and a war crimes indictment, maneuvering to retain both power and wealth.

Only a bad miscalculation, a popular and mostly peaceful rebellion within his country, and a rival who could appeal to the same nationalist pride that Milosevic exploited, would finally topple the man known in the West as the “Butcher of the Balkans.”

On Friday, Milosevic conceded he had lost to Vojislav Kostunica in a Sept. 24 election he had called to prolong his grip on power.

His actions shaped modern European history, handed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization the largest military mission in its history and left his countrymen exhausted, impoverished and bitter.

A Communist Party technocrat from a troubled family, Milosevic built his career on betrayal and a cynical co-opting of the dream of a Greater Serbia. Under the banner of that dream, he unleashed waves of destruction, wreaking the worst havoc on Europe since World War II.

It was Milosevic who put the term “ethnic cleansing” into the lexicon of a horrified international public. His proxies in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo murdered, pillaged and oversaw large-scale deportations of civilians in a bid to unify Serbs in a common nation devoid of Muslims, Catholics and any non-Serbs.

But ultimately, he did a major disservice to the cause of the Serbian people as well. Whatever their legitimate gripes about the breakup of the old Yugoslav federation, the brutality with which Milosevic’s agents sought to redress them discredited the claims.

Despite the blood on his hands, Milosevic was sought out by successive U.S. governments and world leaders who viewed him as the only Balkan figure able to make and enforce peace--the stabilizer. He charmed some of the diplomats who came to call, sharing lavish meals, good whiskey and ribald jokes told in heavily accented but colloquial English honed while working for a Yugoslav bank in New York from 1978 to 1982.

While Washington and Europe regarded him as a necessary evil, Milosevic rarely faced a serious challenge at home. He divided, weakened or bought off his political opposition. He kept a tight grip on most of the media, the police and the state’s economic levers, surrounding himself with a clique of loyalists. Many of them were old friends of his influential wife, and many profited from breaking international sanctions.

President Won Over Working-Class Serbs

Aside from that tight circle of associates, Milosevic maintained a following, mostly of rural or working-class Serbs who took their world view from the media Milosevic controlled, and depended on the patronage of the Communist system that he represented. He convinced those people they were victims of their fellow Yugoslavs and the world, and then played to their sense of fatalism and persecution. They fought his wars and they suffered the consequences of international isolation that shut factories, destroyed living standards and forced them to endure weeks of NATO bombing.

Milosevic lost the middle class and intellectuals years before. Many emigrated; others focused on the struggle to survive. But when the rural workers came to Belgrade on Thursday, stormed the federal parliament and state television, the system crumbled in a single, euphoric day.

His political career began, and in a sense ended, in Kosovo, the southern Serbian province that holds a near-mystical status as the cradle of Serbian culture. His dramatic leap in 1987 to the head of the Communist Party of Serbia was launched in Kosovo, where minority Serbs lorded over majority ethnic Albanians.

Ethnic violence that left a couple of Serbs injured gave Milosevic his chance; he proclaimed in lavish form that no Serb would ever be beaten again. His pledge appealed to the nationalist sentiments of southern Serbs and catapulted him into a position to overthrow then-President Ivan Stambolic, his mentor.

Kosovo would also be the theater, 12 years later, for a disastrous gamble that probably spelled the beginning of the end. Milosevic dispatched his special forces to fight a fledgling ethnic Albanian armed resistance in the province. The forces carried out massacres and provoked massive expulsions, leading to NATO bombing.

Milosevic, 59, was a mercurial figure who rarely spoke in public and seldom gave interviews. His relationship with his wife, Mirjana Markovic, ridiculed by many Yugoslavs for her unreconstructed Communist views as well as the plastic flowers she wore in her black hair, bordered on obsessive. His daughter runs nightclubs for a living; their son, Marko, races--and frequently crashes--cars on the streets and gained a reputation as a major sanctions-buster.

One of the most famous stories about Milosevic involves his parents, immigrants to Serbia from neighboring Montenegro. His father committed suicide, and his mother followed suit a decade later. A scenario in which Milosevic also would kill himself was one of the favorites of Milosevic-watchers.

Milosevic’s father was a onetime Serbian Orthodox priest, his mother a teacher. Biographers describe Milosevic, born in the Serbian town of Pozarevac, as an unhappy, nerdy child. That changed when he met the young Mirjana. The two became fast friends, then lovers. Slobodan graduated from Belgrade University in 1964 with a law degree, and a year later he and Mirjana married, she already pregnant with their first child.

After a stint as an international banker, Milosevic rose steadily but unremarkably through the ranks of the Serbian Communist Party. He was a diligent, dull apparatchik, biding his time until opportunity presented itself.

That moment came in the 1987 Kosovo spectacle, a move orchestrated by Milosevic and his wife, who by then was calling herself Mira, the nom de guerre of her mother, a Communist fighter in World War II who was eventually shot to death by her comrades for having revealed to the Gestapo, under torture, the names of fellow partisans.

Milosevic Played on Ethnic Tensions

Milosevic was able to take advantage of the malaise settling into Yugoslavia in the late 1980s. For decades after World War II, Yugoslav strongman Josip Broz Tito had held the country together, papering over ethnic and communal differences and promoting the concept of unity and brotherhood.

Tito was a Communist dictator, but he allowed a more permissive and indigenous brand of communism that created a certain comfort level for its citizens.

When Tito died in 1980, the delicate balance among Yugoslavia’s six republics--Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia and Macedonia--began to unravel. By the end of the decade, ethnic tensions were on the rise, and the heavily centralized economy beginning to falter.

While Communist leaders throughout the region fell to a wave of popular rebellion across the then-Soviet bloc, Milosevic found a shrewd survival strategy. He dropped his Communist ideology and became a hard-line nationalist.

Becoming president of Serbia in 1989, he rallied huge crowds of Serbs and told them that their rights and privileges would be protected under his guidance. And so he guided them into war.

Serbs were threatened by the reemergence of nationalism in other parts of Yugoslavia, the argument went. Those republics could leave the federation if they wanted to--but the Serbs who lived there had a right to unite the Serbs into a mega-state, Greater Serbia.

The death of Yugoslavia commenced in earnest in 1991. Milosevic survived his first great crisis in March of that year, bringing tanks onto the streets of Belgrade to disperse thousands of demonstrators, and then outmaneuvering opposition leaders.

Faced with Serbian domination of the central government in Belgrade, both Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence in June 1991. A short war with Slovenia ended with a Slovenian victory; the war in Croatia was far more vicious. Serbs took control of about a third of Croatia. They besieged and destroyed the graceful Danube city of Vukovar, which became a symbol of the fight. By the time an uneasy peace descended on Croatia, an estimated 10,000 people were dead.

Bosnia-Herzegovina was next. The Muslim president, Alija Izetbegovic, held a referendum on independence. Bosnian Serbs, who made up about a third of Bosnia’s people, boycotted the vote, and the cause of independence won. On March 3, 1992, Izetbegovic declared Bosnia its own country. War broke out almost immediately as the Bosnian Serbs, led by Radovan Karadzic and Gen. Ratko Mladic, rebelled. They were backed, financed and armed by the powerful Yugoslav army under the direction of Milosevic.

In the next 3 1/2 years, Bosnian Serbs took control of two-thirds of the country, imposing a reign of terror on Muslims and Croats as an estimated 200,000 people were killed. Although atrocities also were committed against Serbs, it was the Serbian aggression and its aftermath that shocked the world: relentless shelling of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo; camps near Prijedor and Foca where thousands were raped or killed; mass graves; and finally the capture of the enclave Srebrenica and the slaughter of an estimated 7,000 men and boys.

NATO bombing eventually forced a cease-fire in Bosnia, and with Serbian forces suddenly on the run in both Bosnia and Croatia, Richard Holbrooke and other U.S. diplomats eventually worked a peace deal in negotiations held over a month’s time in Dayton, Ohio, in the fall of 1995.

Milosevic sat at the table, representing the Bosnian Serbs, alongside Croatia’s Franjo Tudjman and Izetbegovic. Reviled as a “butcher,” Milosevic had become regarded as a peacemaker.

Serbs make up the largest contingent of suspects eventually indicted by the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Milosevic himself became the first sitting head of state to be indicted for war crimes last year, after the bloodletting in Kosovo that ended in NATO’s 11-week bombing campaign over Yugoslavia in 1999.

Throughout the 1990s, as the unrest he unleashed raged to the west and south, Milosevic remained in Belgrade, where he built up a cadre of ideologically sterile, quasi-private businessmen, war profiteers and sanctions-busters.

Milosevic engineered constitutional tricks and fraudulent elections to retain power. In 1996, he faced another crisis when, as in recent weeks, he refused to recognize election results. Milosevic stood firm despite weeks of nightly demonstrations across Yugoslavia before finally giving in and recognizing opposition control over many Serbian cities and towns.

However, once more he outfoxed the divided opposition, and soon he reasserted control.

Diplomats who met with him in recent years also reported an increased isolation and sense that he was losing touch with reality. The lawlessness of his system gradually caught up with those who benefited from it, most notably the warlord Zeljko Raznatovic, better known as Arkan, who was gunned down in a Belgrade hotel Jan. 15.

Prophetically, Milosevic’s most prolific biographer, former journalist Slavoljub Djukic, wrote in a 1997 book that the Serbian strongman was far more fearful of crowds massing in the streets than he was of a coup d’etat or any challenge by organized political parties.

And, Djukic wrote at the time, Milosevic “believes he will rule forever.”

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Wilkinson, The Times’ Jerusalem Bureau chief, covered the Balkans from 1995 to 1998.