Master Manipulator Rose to Power on Hatred--and Fell the Same Way

It’s not only justice staring Slobodan Milosevic in the face, but something he has always wanted: his rightful place in the pantheon of martyrs.

A man who not only lived by the sword--at least vicariously--but also fully expected to die by it, the former Yugoslav president may be in detention, but his legend as a nationalist hero runs as free as the despair across the wreckage of the Yugoslav federation.

Opponents now in power in Belgrade may put him on trial, torture him or turn him over for prosecution on international war crimes charges, but history will make the final judgment about this obsessive Serbian strongman who lost both parents to suicide. Milosevic will be remembered not only for the suffering he inflicted on fellow Yugoslavs during his 13-year rule, but also for the subtle manipulations that allowed an unremarkable banker to become the most hated person in Europe.

Ruthless by nature but gifted with a chameleon-like capacity for persuasion and charm, Milosevic came to power by betraying his mentor and presenting himself as the savior of the Serbian nation.

He first stoked the smoldering embers of ethnic hatred between fellow Serbs and Kosovo Albanians by portraying the Muslims, who vastly outnumber Serbs in the province, as descendants of the Ottoman Turks who occupied the land and persecuted Balkan Slavs for 500 years. Serbia is the dominant republic of what remains of the former Yugoslav federation.

Milosevic won the hearts and loyalty of many Serbs throughout the Balkans by convincing those in Kosovo that they were the rightful lords of the territory where ethnic brothers fell in a 1389 battle that slowed the Turks’ advance. The Battle of Kosovo Polje was Serbia’s most glorious defeat and shaped the national consciousness of a warrior people who made galling sacrifices for foreigners.

It was during a 1987 visit to Kosovo Polje, the “Field of the Blackbirds,” that Milosevic saw the chance to rouse dormant feelings of injustice among the Serbian minority steadily losing ground and authority to the ethnic Albanians who, as now, made up 90% of Kosovo’s population.

“No one is allowed to beat you,” Milosevic told a crowd of Serbian demonstrators on that fateful visit, empowering Kosovo’s minority with his unspoken promise to back any moves they made to reassert control over the Serbian province.

Meanwhile, back in Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, he engineered the ouster of the Communist Party father figure who shaped his early political career and, step by step, planted his cronies in positions of power within the party, army and government. By the time he had finished, he had dismantled the constitutional protections accorded all Yugoslav ethnic groups.

When Kosovo’s autonomous status was rescinded in 1989--the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo Polje--ethnic Albanians rioted and gave Serbian police a pretext for the crackdown that was to penetrate every social and political activity for a decade, leaving the province in a state of virtual apartheid.

Once firmly in control of the federal political machinery, even though he was nominally only a Serbian republic official, Milosevic turned his attention to a latent Serbian resentment of Croats, many of whom sided with the Nazis during World War II.

He armed, financed and instigated rebellion by the Serbian minority in Croatia when that republic, along with Slovenia, began contemplating independence.

When Slovenia and Croatia both declared independence in June 1991, Milosevic’s powerful Yugoslav military machine attacked the two republics.

The Yugoslav forces faced an unexpectedly determined resistance in tiny Slovenia, from which they beat a strategic retreat after little more than a week, but then intensified their campaign to capture as much of Croatia as possible. Western mediation in Croatia led to a shaky truce in January 1992 and, later, a U.N. peacekeeping mission. Not long after, the federal army began its next bloody onslaught, the April 1992 assault on neighboring Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Always able to keep such deadly choreography at arm’s length, Milosevic directed the Bosnian war through the republic’s own Serbian nationalist leader, Radovan Karadzic, and its military commander, Gen. Ratko Mladic.

Karadzic and Mladic were indicted on war crimes charges by U.N. prosecutors after the 1995 peace accords that ended Bosnia’s war. The two were charged with genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity for their roles in the infamous practice of “ethnic cleansing” that killed more than 250,000 Bosnians and displaced nearly half the republic’s 4 million people.

Milosevic’s empire of Serbian enclaves--including Bosnia’s Republika Srpska and seized territory in Croatia--never really functioned, because it was subjected to economic boycotts and travel restrictions. Resentment was rife among both the citizens of rump Yugoslavia, who saw their living standards eroded to Third World levels, and the alleged Bosnian Serb victors left in isolation and ruin.

With each territorial loss and diplomatic setback, Milosevic had to beat back opposition protests in Belgrade. And although he succeeded in doing so, he lost political ground with each confrontation.

When the 1999 North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombardment of his country forced Milosevic to cede control of Kosovo to international peacekeepers, the loss of territory most Serbs regarded as their Holy Grail began fraying his last shreds of authority.

By the time of Yugoslav presidential elections last autumn, the near-hypnotic power Milosevic had held over his fellow Serbs had evaporated. His attempts to claim victory in the vote--which was actually won by a more moderate rival, Vojislav Kostunica--incited nationwide protests that finally forced him from office in October.

The picture of thuggish confidence to the end, he steadfastly denied responsibility for the devastating violence that racked his country for a decade, boasting to a television interviewer in December: “I can sleep peacefully, and my conscience is completely clear.”