Banker, Leader, ‘Butcher,’ Prisoner

A communist banker who aroused a downtrodden and bitter Serbian spirit, former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic unleashed four wars in a bloody decade of “ethnic cleansing” that recast the map of Europe.

His sinister nationalism propelled a vicious campaign throughout the 1990s that left more than 225,000 people dead and scattered millions of refugees across the continent. The rule of the man known as the “Butcher of the Balkans” ended in disgrace in 2000 when mobs seized parliament. Any chance of recapturing power ended the next year, when police stormed his heavily fortified presidential villa and led him to a Belgrade jail.

His quest for a “greater Serbia” brought the 20th century to a messy end in Eastern Europe. As the continent celebrated the demise of Soviet communism, the ethnically diverse Yugoslavia once held together by Marshal Josip Broz Tito splintered. The region became scarred by mass graves and corruption, and instead of delivering his people to international prominence, Milosevic’s 13 years in power led to a shrunken and bankrupt state.

The nationalist passions exploited by Milosevic and the late Croatian President Franjo Tudjman spawned armies and paramilitary death squads. The boundaries of Europe were redrawn as new nations, such as Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, along with a NATO-occupied Kosovo province, rose unsteadily from the turmoil.

Sipping plum brandy and puffing Dutch cigarillos, the silver-haired Milosevic was defiant and arrogant, relishing his role as the key to stability in the Balkans. The Yugoslav leader frustrated a parade of U.S. and European diplomats by making promises he often broke. His government -- circumventing years of international sanctions -- took on the aura of a tawdry, gangster-run enterprise. Former U.S. Ambassador Warren Zimmermann once called Milosevic “the slickest con man in the Balkans.”

During his years in prison, Milosevic became the stuff of caricature and derision. His outbursts at The Hague flickered across TV screens in bars and taverns throughout Belgrade. He saw himself as a tragic hero in the mold of the Christian Serbian warriors defeated by Muslim armies of the Ottoman Empire in the 1300s. He asserted that he was the victim of a conspiracy led by the United States and Europe to keep Serbs from realizing their greatness.

From the Adriatic Sea to Sarajevo, Milosevic’s nationalist zeal turned villages and cities into killing grounds, such as Srebrenica, where as many as 8,000 Muslim men and boys were massacred in 1995 by Bosnian Serb fighters whom Milosevic supported. Four years later, his security forces in Kosovo killed thousands of ethnic Albanians, and in a matter of weeks forced 800,000 people into exile in a crisis that led to 11 weeks of NATO bombing before Milosevic surrendered.

When asked about Serbian military actions during the Kosovo war, Milosevic told United Press International, “We are not angels. Nor are we the devils you have made us out to be.”

Milosevic’s control of the army and state security police kept him in power. Opposition voices were stifled through purges and intimidation. Milosevic had a keen sense of detecting the weaknesses of his rivals -- including Vuk Draskovic and Zoran Djindjic, who was assassinated while Milosevic was in The Hague -- and he split the opposition by playing one personality off another. He outlasted weeks of rallies by 100,000 protesters in the winter of 1996.

His political astuteness, however, eluded him in September 2000 when he made the miscalculation of his career by calling early elections. Defeated by moderate nationalist Vojislav Kostunica, Milosevic refused to step down as Yugoslav president.

A popular uprising -- led by university students and armed men from the provinces -- swept through Belgrade as protesters stormed parliament and state TV. His once faithful police and the Serbian Orthodox Church abandoned Milosevic as he retreated to his villa. He was arrested after a standoff on April 1, 2001.

Milosevic insisted that the international war crimes tribunal presiding over his genocide trial had no jurisdiction over him. Representing himself in court, he scoffed at prosecutors and was belligerent to witnesses. He made comments to the three-judge panel such as: “We agree on one point, that my conduct was the expression of the will of the people.... I should be given credit for peace in Bosnia, not war.”

Meanwhile, his eccentric and violent family provided an endless loop of soap opera. With black bangs, a fluttery voice and a penchant for political intrigue, Milosevic’s wife, Mirjana Markovic, was known around Serbia as the “red witch.” His son, Marko, was infamous for wrecking sports cars and threatening adversaries with power saws. And his gun-toting daughter, Marija, once quipped to a Belgrade newspaper, “I have not thought about marriage and children. To carry a baby in one arm and a pistol in the other would be complicated.”

Born Aug. 20, 1941, in the Serbian mill town of Pozarevac, Milosevic was the son of Svetozar, a defrocked Orthodox priest, and Stanislava, a teacher and Communist Party activist.

His early childhood was marked by the German invasion of Yugoslavia and a Serbian resistance against the Nazis and their counterparts, the Croatian Ustasha, which executed thousands of Serb partisans.

Both his parents committed suicide -- his father in 1962 and his mother a decade later. In their biography, “Milosevic: Portrait of a Tyrant,” Dusko Doder and Louise Branson wrote, “On the surface, Slobodan was uninspiring and conformist.... A stocky boy with typical Serb features of rounded face and high forehead.”

Milosevic met Mirjana in their hometown, and the couple married while studying at Belgrade University. Both were ardent Communists. Milosevic got a law degree and concentrated on business and banking. It was a time when Tito’s Yugoslavia -- free of Soviet domination -- was one of the most prosperous Communist states. A World War II partisan, Tito understood the combustible mix of Croats, Serbs, ethnic Albanians and other groups that made up Yugoslavia’s six republics. He suppressed nationalistic tendencies and ruled the nation with an unforgiving hand.

The country began to fragment after Tito’s death in 1980. At the same time, Milosevic’s political career was taking shape. In 1984, he became head of the Communist Party in Belgrade and in 1986 he became the Serbian Communist Party chief.

Mirjana, whom many Serbian writers have likened to Lady Macbeth, grew more influential in her husband’s career and was ruthless in her pursuit of power. She often called Milosevic “puppy” and “kitten” and, according to police and analysts, masterminded his political gambits, including assassination attempts.

The fate of former Serbian President Ivan Stambolic was emblematic of the risk one took angering the couple. Milosevic’s political mentor and the best man at his wedding, Stambolic arranged in the 1970s and 1980s for Milosevic to take key jobs at a state-owned gas company and Belgrade’s largest bank. The relationship soured over political differences. In 2000, Stambolic was kidnapped from a Belgrade park and killed. Police alleged Milosevic and Mirjana orchestrated the slaying to keep their onetime friend from emerging as a rival.

Milosevic was not so calculating on April 24, 1987, when he unwittingly found the voice that would propel his political ascent. As a Communist Party leader, Milosevic traveled to Kosovo to lend support to minority Serbs complaining of abuses by the majority population of ethnic Albanians. During his meeting, Serbs clashed with local police and Milosevic stepped outside and proclaimed, “No one should dare to beat you.”

Those dramatic unscripted words from an otherwise colorless apparatchik resonated with Serbs across the country.

The phrase was uttered in the most hallowed Serbian landscape: In Kosovo in 1389, Serbian armies were defeated by Turkish legions in a place known as the Field of Blackbirds. The battle has echoed through Serbian folklore and literature for centuries -- epitomizing the Serbian struggle for independence and the belief that history had treated them cruelly.

Milosevic’s irony was that he was not an ideologue, but an opportunist who conveniently switched from Communist bureaucrat to nationalist hero. With bristly dark hair and hard eyes, he projected a certain scrappiness. Yet he was a dour and often uninspiring speaker who preferred back-room cleverness to the more public duties of political life.

“His success,” according to “The Fall of Yugoslavia,” by Misha Glenny, “lay in the shameless exploitation of the most effective tools of Balkan politics: deception, corruption, blackmail, demagoguery and violence.”

Milosevic returned to the Kosovo wellspring in 1989 to reignite Serbian pride on the 600th anniversary of the battle. This collided with the Croatian nationalism fomented by Tudjman and the secessionist desires of Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic. That year, Milosevic was elected president of Serbia as Yugoslavia’s restive republics began to break away.

Slovenia and Croatia declared independence in June 1991. Slovenia split with little fighting, but Croatia, with a 12% Serbian population, went to war with the rump Yugoslavia. Macedonia declared independence in September 1991. A few months later, Bosnia, the most ethnically diverse of all the republics, sought independence, leading to the worst European conflict since World War II. Milosevic instructed his Yugoslav army to support Serbian paramilitaries in Bosnia and Croatia. He frightened Serbs living in these regions with the prospect that as minorities they would be slaughtered. He funneled weapons and money to Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, now a fugitive war crimes suspect.

This triggered a wave of ethnic cleansing as Croats, Serbs and Muslims -- many of whom once shared neighborhoods -- began killing one another.

NATO planes bombed Bosnian Serb positions around Sarajevo in August 1995. At the same time, a Bosnian Croat offensive was routing Serb rebels to the west. Milosevic -- his quest of a greater Serbia dwindling -- was forced to enter U.S.-backed peace talks in Dayton, Ohio, with Tudjman and Izetbegovic. The Dayton agreement was signed in Paris on Dec. 14, 1995.

“Milosevic could switch moods with astonishing speed,” former envoy Richard Holbrooke wrote in “To End a War,” a diplomatic chronicle of the Bosnian conflict and Dayton negotiations. “He could range from charm to brutality, from emotional outbursts to calm discussion of legal minutiae. When he was angry, his face wrinkled up, but he could regain control of himself instantly.”

In 1997, Milosevic had parliament name him president of the new Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, made up of only Serbia and Montenegro. The country was mired in unemployment and poverty a year later when rumblings of conflict began in the Serbian province of Kosovo, where the poorly trained Kosovo Liberation Army began launching attacks on state security forces.

Sensing another chance to stoke Serbian nationalism and deflect attention from the nation’s miserable economy, Milosevic, who called the Kosovo Liberation Army a terrorist organization, waded into war.

He rebuffed diplomatic attempts by President Clinton, European leaders and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to stop the fighting. Peace talks headed by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright at a castle in Rambouillet, France, failed. Shortly after 8 p.m. on March 24, 1999, NATO warplanes and cruise missiles struck Milosevic’s military and government targets. The Yugoslav army began expelling 800,000 Kosovo Albanians to neighboring Macedonia and Albania.

He surrendered after 3,000 NATO bombing missions. The tribunal at The Hague charged him with war crimes.

Milosevic remained president for the next year. In an uncharacteristic gamble, he called for early elections and lost. But it wasn’t over yet.

He hunkered down in the presidential villa with his family, cronies, dozens of automatic rifles and 40 grenades.

Milosevic told a Serbian TV station at the time, “I can sleep peacefully and my conscience is completely clear.”

Months passed as the new Serbian government -- under increasing pressure from Washington to arrest Milosevic -- was unsure how to act. On April 1, 2001, Serbian police stormed the villa. An unshaven and exhausted Milosevic was arrested and charged with federal corruption and abuse of power.

“We had a comic end to this,” said Doder, author of the Milosevic biography. “He vowed to kill himself and his wife and daughter, and then he settled for surrendering, provided he’s driven in his own limousine by his own driver to jail.”

For two months, Kostunica refused to extradite Milosevic to the war crimes tribunal. The new government did not want to appear to be capitulating to U.S. pressure. But Serbia was poor and war-ravaged. It needed Western investment and a chance to reenter Europe. In the early morning of June 29, 2001, Milosevic landed in The Hague.