Milosevic remained in power after the war, presiding over a state that resembled a gangster's paradise more than a real country. He was indicted for war crimes committed in Kosovo the international tribunal is investigating similar claims against him from the wars in Bosnia and Croatia In the end, the West won the war and smashed Milosevic's country, bombing deep in the heart of Serbia, wrecking buildings, bridges and power plants. And Milosevic took his revenge as hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians fled the province. His troops cracked down severely, raising the indignation of the West, which threatened war if Milosevic didn't move his forces out. But an ethnic Albanian uprising that began in Kosovo in 1998 tested, taunted and ultimately destroyed Milosevic, who could not be seen giving up land that is considered the cradle of Serbian civilization. The Dayton accords that ended the Bosnian war provided stability, for a time. All that was left of Tito's Yugoslavia was Serbia, with Montenegro as an appendage. Those were the words that would light the Balkan tinderbox as Milosevic rode ethnic passion to power after Tito's death.ĭuring a dark decade, Europe looked on as Yugoslavia burned, a multiethnic country ripped with age-old hatreds as war came to Croatia and Bosnia while Slovenia and Macedonia managed to slip mostly unscathed out of the Yugoslav federation. Standing at the place where Ottoman Turks vanquished the Serbs more than five centuries previously, Milosevic shouted, "No one will ever beat you again." He was dispatched to the Serbian province of Kosovo, where Serbs were staging riots to protest their treatment at the hands of the majority, ethnic Muslim Albanians. In April 1987, Milosevic made a speech that would forever change his career and his country. In 1986, he made his move for power, gaining a key party post in Serbia, a year later becoming de-facto party boss and later removing his political godfather, Ivan Stambolic, as Serbian president. She became a sociology professor at Belgrade University, cementing a reputation as an ideologist who would later run a strident party, the Yugoslav Left. He rose in the political ranks of postwar Yugoslavia, receiving a law degree at Belgrade University, taking economic jobs within the Communist Party and then posts with a state-owned gas company and bank. Her mother, Vera Miletic, was executed in 1943, whether by the Nazis or more likely by Tito's Communists, who may have viewed her as a traitor, no one is quite certain. Two years later, Milosevic's parents split up both later also committed suicide.Īt school the teen-age Milosevic, nicknamed Slobo, met his future wife, known as Mira, who was also the product of a shattered family. Koljensic committed suicide in 1948, without bothering to leave a note. Milislav Koljensic, a war hero and member of Tito's military intelligence unit. His central Serbian hometown was occupied by the German army during World War II and later became a stronghold for Communist partisans who rallied to Yugoslavia's postwar leader, Josip Broz Tito. 29, 1941, in Pozarevac, Milosevic was a child of both war and communism, living in an unheated and presumably unhappy home. How a poverty-stricken son of a defrocked Serbian Orthodox priest and a schoolteacher could become an international pariah and symbol of evil is one of the more perplexing personal and political tales of modern times.īorn Aug. In essence, he was nothing more than a corrupt opportunist who inflamed the Balkans and is alleged to have plundered hundreds of millions of dollars from his country. To his people, he presented himself as a Serbian nationalist who would create a Greater Serbia carved out of Yugoslavia. To the West, Milosevic tried to pass himself off as the guarantor of Balkan peace, a posture that worked for a time as the international community patched together an imperfect deal in 1995 in Dayton, Ohio, to end a dreadful war in Bosnia. "For 10 bloody years, Milosevic, his wife, their fascist supporters and a coterie of domestic traitors have engaged in deception, cynically inciting and justifying crimes, killing, stealing and lying," Milosevic's former information minister, Alesandar Tijanic, said in the biography. The explanation provides a clue to how this volatile southeastern corner of Europe revolved around Milosevic and then splintered in blood-stained shards during his rule.
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