Slobodan Milošević

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Slobodan Milošević

Slobodan Milošević listen^ⓘ (Serbian Cyrillic: Слободан Милошевић, pronounced [sloˈbodan miˈloʃevitɕ]); (20 August, 1941 – 11 March, 2006) was President of Serbia and of Yugoslavia. He served as President of Serbia from 1989 to 1997 and then President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1997 to 2000. He also led Serbia's Socialist Party from its foundation in 1992.

He was one of the key figures in the Yugoslav wars during the 1990s and Kosovo War in 1999. He was indicted in May 1999, during the Kosovo War, by the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia for crimes against humanity in Kosovo. Charges of violating the laws or customs of war and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions in Croatia and Bosnia and genocide in Bosnia were added a year and a half after that.

He was forced to resign following a popular uprising against his rule. A year later Milošević was extradited to stand trial in the The Hague but died after five years in prison with just fifty hours of testimony left before the conclusion of the trial. Milošević, who suffered from chronic heart ailments, high blood pressure and diabetes, died of a heart attack.

Early life

Milošević was a Montenegrin Serb by origin, born in Požarevac, Serbia, during the Axis occupation. His parents separated soon after he was born; his father, Svetozar Milošević, a deacon in the Serbian Orthodox Church committed suicide in 1962, and his mother, Stanislava Milošević, a school teacher and also an active member of the Communist Party, hanged herself in 1974, it is said that her death was one of the few occasions when Milošević showed emotion.

He went on to study law at Belgrade University, where he became the head of the ideology committee of the Communist Party's student branch. While at the university, he befriended Ivan Stambolić, whose uncle had been a president of Serbian Executive Council (under Communism, a role equivalent to prime minister). This was to prove a crucial connection for Milošević's career prospects, as Stambolić sponsored his rise through the Communist hierarchy.

On leaving university, Milošević became an economic advisor to the Mayor of Belgrade in 1960. Five years later he married Mirjana Marković, whom he had known since childhood. Marković would have some influence on her husband's political career both before and after his rise to power; she was also leader of Milošević's junior coalition partner, Yugoslav United Left in the 1990s. In 1968 he got a job at the Tehnogas company, where Stambolić was working, and became its chairman in 1973. By 1978, Stambolić's sponsorship had enabled Milošević to become the head of Beobanka, one of Yugoslavia's largest banks; his frequent trips to Paris and New York gave him the opportunity to learn English and French, both of which were to be considerable assets in his political career.

Rise to power

Milošević was elected Chairman of the Belgrade City Committee of the League of Communists in April 1986, again replacing Stambolić, who had moved on to the post of head of the Serbian Communist Party. At this time Milošević publicly opposed nationalism; he prevented the publication of a book containing the works of Slobodan Jovanović, a distinguished Serbian historian, law professor and nationalist politician of the early twentieth century. Milošević also advocated retaining Marxism as a school subject and publicly lambasted Belgrade's youth for their low turnout at the Communist Day of the Youth, claiming that their absence "desecrated" Tito's character and work.

Milošević emerged in April 1987 as the leading force in Serbian politics. His political positions have sometimes been termed as nationalist (though there is no indication of that in quotes or acts from Milošević in those years), although socialism and internationalism also marked his ideology. Later that year, in response to a protestor who complained of being beaten by the Police, Milosevic said "You will not be beaten."

Although Milosevic was only addressing a small group of people around to him -- not the public , a great deal of significance has been attached to his remark. Stambolić later said that "he had seen that day as the end of Yugoslavia".

At the same time, Milošević's message was in accordance with internationalism cornerstone principle of the Communist's party, which tells that no ethnic group has any precedence over another.

Meanwhile, Stambolić had become the President of Serbia. To the dismay of senior figures in the party, he supported Milošević for election as the new party leader. Stambolić spent three days advocating Milošević as leader, managing to secure him party leadership by the narrowest margin in the history of Serbian Communist Party internal elections. This was arguably the biggest mistake of Stambolić's political career, one which he later himself regretted, as soon Milošević would topple him in an act of betrayal at the 8th Session of the Serbian Communist Party.

Dragiša Pavlović, a Stambolić ally and Milošević's fairly liberal successor at the head of the Belgrade Committee of the party, opposed Milošević's policies towards Kosovan Serbs. Contrary to advice from Stambolić, Milošević denounced Pavlović as being soft on Albanian radicals. Milošević had prepared the ground by quietly replacing Stambolić's supporters with his own people; on 23 September and 24 September, during a thirty-hour session of the Communist Central Committee broadcast live on state television, Milošević had Pavlović deposed. Embarrassed and under pressure from Milošević's supporters, Stambolić resigned a few days later.

In February 1988, Stambolić's resignation was formalized, allowing Milošević to take his place as President. Twelve years later, in the summer of 2000, Stambolić was kidnapped; his body was found in 2003 and Milošević was charged with ordering his murder. In 2005, several members of the Serbian secret police and criminal gangs were convicted in Belgrade for a number of murders, including Stambolić's.

Milošević spent most of 1988/1989 focusing his politics on the "Kosovo problem". His supporters organized public demonstrations – the so-called "anti-bureaucratic revolution" – which led to the leaderships of Vojvodina (6 October, 1988), and Montenegro (10 January, 1989) resigning. Azem Vllasi, leader of the Kosovo Albanian Communist Party, was arrested for inciting rioting amid a strike by Kosovo-Albanian miners.

On 28 March 1989, the National Assembly of Serbia, under Milošević's leadership, amended the Serbian constitution to greatly reduce the autonomy of its two provinces. The decision was hugely controversial, especially in Kosovo, where many Albanians had never accepted the legitimacy of Serbia's annexation of the province in 1912. A harsh regime was imposed which attracted widespread criticism from international human rights organisations, transnational bodies such as the European Community and other foreign governments. This caused great alarm in the other republics of Yugoslavia, where concerns were expressed that their own autonomous status could come under threat.

As nationalism grew within Yugoslavia, Milošević sought major constitutional changes. The 1974 Yugoslav Constitution had organised the country so that Serbia's status as the largest and most populous republic was counterbalanced by the way that the other republics were represented. The socialist Yugoslavia was at the time governed by an eight-member Presidency, representing the six republics plus Kosovo and Vojvodina. By ousting the government of Montenegro and replacing it with a more compliant one, Milošević effectively secured that republic's vote for himself; likewise the abolition of the autonomous governments of Vojvodina and Kosovo ensured that he controlled those votes as well. The Presidency was thus divided down the middle between Milošević's supporters and his opponents in the other republics, with four votes for each side. The result was stalemate and an increasing paralysis of Yugoslavia's federal government.

At the 14th Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia in January 1990, Milošević's Serbian delegation campaigned for major constitutional changes which would give greater political power too. Slovenian and Croatian delegations (led by Milan Kučan and Ivica Račan respectively) strongly opposed this, seeing it as an attack on their own republics' status, and left the Congress in protest. This caused a deep rift in the League of Communists and effectively put an end to the Party as a unified organisation.

With the collapse of the Yugoslav League of Communists, Milošević presided over the Serbian party's transformation into the Socialist Party of Serbia (July 1990) and the adoption of a new Serbian constitution (September 1990) providing for the direct election of a president with increased powers. Milošević was subsequently re-elected president of the Serbian Republic in the direct elections of December 1990 and December 1992.

In the first free parliamentary elections of December 1990, Milošević's Socialist Party won 80.5% of the vote. The ethnic Albanians in Kosovo largely boycotted the election, effectively eliminating even what little opposition Milošević had. Milošević himself won the presidential election with an even higher percentage of the vote. Although the elections could not have been described as wholly free and fair – Milošević controlled much of the media as well as the election system itself – there is little doubt that at this time he genuinely enjoyed mass popular support in Serbia.

Milošević's rise to power happened amidst a growth of nationalism in all the former Yugoslavian republics following the collapse of communist governments throughout eastern Europe. In 1990, Slovenians elected a nationalist government under Milan Kučan, and the Croatians did the same with Franjo Tuđman. Communist single-party rule in Bosnia and Herzegovina was replaced by an unstable coalition of three ethnically-based parties.

The Yugoslav Wars

Yugoslavia's collapse became inevitable by the start of 1991, with the federal institutions completely deadlocked between pro- and anti-Milošević forces. The indictment against Milosevic alleges that in a televised address on 16 March 1991 Milošević declared that Yugoslavia was finished and that Serbia would no longer be bound by decisions of the Federal Presidency. This allegation was shown to be false when a transcript of the speech was exhibited at the Milosevic trial on January 25, 2006.

In June 1991, Slovenia and Croatia seceded from the federation, followed by the republics of Macedonia (September 1991) and Bosnia and Herzegovina (March 1992). The Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) sought unsuccessfully to prevent Slovenia's secession by the use of force; however, Slovenia's Ten-Day War ended in a disastrous defeat for the federal forces. At this point, Milošević adopted a policy of establishing "all Serbs in one state," based on the ostensible premise that the large Serbian populations in Croatia (580,000) and Bosnia (1.36 million) should have the right to stay in Yugoslavia as they desired, arguing that the Yugoslav Constitution gave the right of self-determination to nations (Serbs, Croats, etc as a whole), not republics ( Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, etc).

This policy – characterised by critics as a "Greater Serbia" in all but name – was, however, certain to produce a violent conflict. The Serb minorities lived, for the most part, in ethnically mixed areas with large non-Serb populations in their midst. Their areas were also not contiguous with Serbia itself.

Croatia's Serbs began campaigning for autonomy or independence from Croatia as early as mid-1990 after the election of the Croatian nationalist Franjo Tudjman, with Milošević's full support. Through 1991 and early 1992, together with the Yugoslav People's Army, they engaged in a war against the Croatian government. The first leader of Serbs in Croatia, Milan Babić, has stated that Milošević was responsible for this and his successor Goran Hadžić publicly bragged about how he was "the extended hand of Slobodan Milošević".

War crimes prosecutors subsequently characterised the creation of the separatist Republic of Serbian Krajina as a "joint criminal enterprise" whose goal was "the forcible removal of the majority of the Croat and other non-Serb population from the approximately one-third of the territory of the Republic of Croatia that he planned to become part of a new Serb-dominated state." At the trial of Milan Babić, the ICTY found that the Serbian government was directly involved in the Croatian Serb rebellion, providing supplies, weapons, money and leadership.

In 1992, Bosnia and Herzegovina was plunged into war even before its formal declaration of independence. Bosnian Serb forces soon captured as much as 70% of the country, expelling hundreds of thousands of non-Serbs and killing many thousands more, often in atrocities such as the Srebrenica massacre. Again, war crimes prosecutors have characterised this as a "joint criminal enterprise" in which Milošević played a leading part. The ICTY likewise found that the Serbian government was directly involved in the conflict.

By 1995, however, the ongoing wars in Croatia and Bosnia had become an unsupportable burden for Serbia. The country had experienced hyperinflation and a drastic worsening of living standards, due to an economic collapse and the effect of international sanctions. Milošević sought to force the Croatian and Bosnian Serbs to the negotiating table but was rebuffed by their nationalist leaderships. In response, despite his earlier support for their rebellions, he let it be known that they were on their own.

The Croatian War was brought to an end in August 1995 when Croatia's Operation Storm rapidly overran the Republic of Serbian Krajina. Almost the entire Croatian Serb population was expelled from Croatia in the process, fleeing into Bosnia and Serbia. Only a month later, the Bosnian Serbs were brought to the brink of military collapse by a combination of NATO air strikes (Operation Deliberate Force) and a joint Croatian/Bosniak ground offensive (Operation Mistral). Again, many hundreds of thousands of Serbs were forced into exile.

Milošević subsequently negotiated the Dayton Agreement in the name of the Bosnian Serbs, ending the conflict. As the agreement finally brought an end to the war in Bosnia, Milošević was credited in the West with being one of the pillars of Balkan peace. But crucially, the Dayton Agreement did not grant amnesty for the war crimes committed during the conflict – an omission on Milošević's part that was to pave the way for his eventual prosecution.

Milošević was limited to two terms as President of Serbia, but at the end of his term of office he instead stood for the hitherto relatively unimportant post of President of Yugoslavia (which by this time consisted of only Serbia and Montenegro). He won easily and assumed office on 23 July, 1997. His old post passed into the hands of Milan Milutinović, a political ally. In Montenegro, however, the pro-Milošević old guard was pushed aside by the ambitious Milo Đukanović, who became President of Montenegro and emerged as an increasingly bitter opponent of Milošević.

That same year, an armed rebellion broke out in Kosovo against Serbian rule. The separatist Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) began to launch attacks against Serbian and Yugoslav security forces as well as Serbian officials and those Albanians, Serbs and others whom the KLA regarded as "collaborators". Although the Serbian response was initially fairly restrained, by 1998 hundreds had died in escalating retaliations and 100,000 Kosovo Albanians were reported to have been made homeless.

The conflict culminated in the Kosovo War of 1999, during which over half of the province's Albanian population fled and several thousand people died. A NATO campaign of air strikes (Operation Allied Force) eventually forced Milošević to back down. The subsequent Kumanovo Agreement saw Kosovo being handed over to a United Nations protectorate along with the total withdrawal of Yugoslav forces. In the aftermath of the war, the majority of Kosovo's Serb and Roma population fled into Serbia proper, fearing or experiencing persecution by vengeful Albanians and adding to the country's already large refugee population.

This time, though, Milošević was not lionised as a peacemaker. On 27 May 1999, he was indicted by the ICTY for war crimes and crimes against humanity allegedly committed in Kosovo. The possibility of his standing trial seemed remote at this point; despite the loss of Kosovo, he still appeared to retain popular support.

Downfall of presidency

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Milošević poster defaced with mud

On 4 February, 1997, Milošević recognized the opposition victories in some local elections, having contested the results for 11 weeks.

Constitutionally limited to two terms as Serbian president, on 23 July, 1997, Milošević assumed the presidency of the Yugoslav Federation (the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia).

Armed actions by Albanian separatist groups and Serbian police and military counter-action in Serbia's previously autonomous (and 90% Albanian) province of Kosovo culminated in escalating warfare in 1998, NATO air strikes against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia between March and June 1999, and finally a full withdrawal of all Yugoslav security forces from the province.

During the Kosovo War he was indicted on 27 May, 1999, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity allegedly committed in Kosovo, and he was standing trial, up until his death, at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, which he asserted was illegal, having been established in contravention of the UN-charter.

The Yugoslav constitution called for a second election round with all but the two leading candidates eliminated, in the event that no candidate won more than 50% of the vote. Official results put Koštunica ahead of Milošević but at under 50%. Opinion polls suggested that supporters of most of the minor candidates would go to Milošević as would numbers of people who abstained in the first round but would oppose an opposition supported by the NATO powers.

Milošević's rejection of claims of a first-round opposition victory in new elections for the Federal presidency in September 2000 led to mass demonstrations in Belgrade on 5 October and the collapse of the regime's authority. Opposition-list leader Vojislav Koštunica finally took office as Yugoslav president on 6 October when Milošević publicly accepted defeat.

He was forced to accept this reality when commanders of the army whom he had expected to support him had indicated that in this instance they would not. Ironically, Milošević lost his grip on power by losing in elections which he scheduled prematurely (before the end of his mandate) and which he did not even need to win in order to retain power which was centred in the parliaments which his party and its associates controlled. This downfall is known as the Bulldozer Revolution.

Following a warrant for his arrest by the Yugoslav authorities on charges of corruption and abuse of power, Milošević was forced to surrender to security forces on Saturday, 31 March, 2001 following an armed stand off at his fortified villa in Belgrade. On 28 June of the same year, Milošević was transferred by Yugoslav government officials from the gaol in Belgrade where he was being held to United Nations custody just inside Bosnian territory. He was then transported to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav Constitution explicitly prohibited extradition of Yugoslav citizens and President Koštunica formally on legal grounds opposed the transfer that has been ordered by Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić.

Trial

Following Milošević's transfer, the original charges of war crimes in Kosovo were upgraded by adding charges of genocide in Bosnia and war crimes in Croatia. On 30 January, 2002, Milošević accused the war crimes tribunal of an "evil and hostile attack" against him. The trial began at The Hague on 12 February, 2002, with Milošević defending himself while refusing to recognize the legality of the court's jurisdiction.

His popularity among the Serbs and Yugoslavs again rose sharply once the trial had begun, as his supporters see it as a travesty of justice and violation of national sovereignty. In addition, the rules of procedure and the Statute of the ICTY are widely considered among legal experts as less-than-democratic by standards of modern (U.S.) jurisprudence (i.e. admission of hearsay as evidence, ex-post facto changes to rules of procedure, etc.)

Milošević had a team in Belgrade that helped him, often sending him information available from the secret police files. Serbian insiders often supported Milošević's point of view, while Bosnian and Croatian witnesses have offered much testimony supporting the indictments.

The tribunal had to prove that Milošević had command responsibility in Croatia and Bosnia, at least de facto, since formally as a President of Serbia at the time he was not in charge. His influence may have gone beyond his formal duties, but there is little to no evidence to support the prosecutor's case.

Milošević was not considered by some contemporaries to be a radical nationalist himself (although some of his followers were). Milošević's rhetoric did not make use of hate speech, though it may have been implied at times.

At one point during the Yugoslav wars, Serbia had rejected further cooperation with the Croatian Serbs (the Republic of Serbian Krajina), and also with the Bosnian Serbs (the Republika Srpska, in 1993, when Serbia closed the border over the Drina river). This action by Milošević was regarded as treason by many Serbs.

After the Dayton Agreement in 1995, the Serbian nationalists (Vojislav Šešelj's radical party) became his sturdy opponents, up until 1998 when they joined his party in a coalition government.

The trial was a controversial issue and has featured many conflicting and strange testimonies, which are viewed by all sides of the argument to support theories of cover-ups and dishonesty by the opposing parties. For example:

• the statement by William Walker, the US former ambassador to El Salvador during its war, that he did not remember phoning several senior US officials to say that, at Racak, he had discovered a justification for a NATO war, but did not dispute that officials who said they had received his calls were telling the truth,

• the testimony by General Wesley Clark that Milošević had told Gen. Mladic not to attack Srebrenica and in the same evidence that NATO had no links to the KLA.

• the statement by Rade Marković that a written statement he had made implicating Milošević had been extracted from him by ill-treatment legally amounting to torture by named NATO officers,

• the statement by Lord Owen (author of the Vance Owen Plan) that Milošević was not a racist, a radical nationalist or an "ethnic purist". Owen said he didn't think "that he (Milošević) was one of those who wanted all Muslims out of Republika Srpska any more than he wanted all Muslims out of Serbia."

The prosecution took two years to present its case in the first part of the trial, where they covered the wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. Throughout the two-year period, the trial was being closely followed by the publics of the involved former Yugoslav republics as it covered various notable events from the war and included several high-profile witnesses.

Milošević became increasingly ill during this time (high blood pressure and severe flu), which caused intermissions and prolonged the trial by at least six months. In early 2004, when he finally appeared in court in order to start presenting his defense (announcing over 1,200 witnesses), the two ICTY judges decided to appoint him two defense lawyers in accordance with the medical opinions of the resident cardiologists. This action was opposed by Milošević himself and the pair of British lawyers appointed to him.

In October 2004, the trial was resumed after being suspended for a month to allow counsel Steven Kay, who complained Milošević was not cooperating, to prepare the defense. Steven Kay has since asked to be allowed to resign from his court appointed position, complaining that of the 1200 witnesses he has only been able to get five to testify. Many of the other witnesses refused to testify in protest of ICTYs decision not to permit Milošević to defend himself.

In late 2004, former Soviet Premier Nikolai Ryzhkov became the first high profile witness to testify for the defence.

It was considered likely that, if allowed to present his case, Milošević would attempt to establish that NATO's attack on Yugoslavia was aggressive, thus being a war crime under international law and that, while supporting the KLA, were aware that they had practiced and intended to continue practicing genocide, which is a crime against humanity. If a prima facie case for either claim were established, the ICTY would be legally obliged under its terms of reference to prepare an indictment against the leaders of most of the NATO countries, even though the Prosecutor already concluded an "inquiry" against the NATO leaders.

Defenders of Milošević

Some writers and journalists, among them political scientist Michael Parenti in his book To Kill a Nation, have argued that the actions of Milošević, and of the Serbs more broadly, were systematically exaggerated by the Western media and politicians during the Bosnian War in order to provide justification for military intervention. Adam Lebor, a biographer of Milošević, states that Milošević was not a dictator, as Tony Blair once described him. Donald Rumsfeld listed Milosevic as a "failed dictator" alongise "Hitler, Stalin, Lenin and Ceausescu"[1], suggesting that Serbia under Milosevic was a totalitarian regime. Lebour points out that the opposition continued to operate throughout his rule, and Slobodan even negotiated with and made concessions to a leader of student demonstrations on one occasion. When election results in Serbia were disputed, the government had called in international observers to evaluate the validity of the elections and accepted their verdict when it was judged that Milosevic's Socialist Party had been involved in electoral fraud.

The Emperor's Clothes website [2], maintained by Jared Israel, has one of the most extensive collections of research and analysis critiquing what it labels as "media misinformation" whitewashing the actions of NATO and its Yugoslav proxies, demonizing the Serbs, and hence creating a "Media Milošević," which it claims is quite different from the real Milošević who it purports was an appeaser.

University of Pennsylvania Professor Francisco Gil-White's Historical and Investigative Research [3] presents what he regards as documentary evidence supporting the claim that the criminality of Milošević's actions as President of Yugoslavia has been exaggerated if not wholly fabricated (as some of his supporters argue).

In her book Fool's Crusade Paris-based journalist Diana Johnstone contends that Milošević's actions during the conflict in the Balkans were marginal at best and no worse than the crimes of the Croats or the Bosnian Muslims, asserting also that the massacre of Srebrenica has been exaggerated. Johnstone's intellectual independence has, however, been called into question by claims that she is a long-standing friend of Milošević's widow, Mirjana Marković, and thus biased in such judgments.

Political scientist Edward Herman endorses Johnstone's findings in his review of Fool's Crusade in the Monthly Review [4]. Yet, in another book, The New Military Humanism, Noam Chomsky, who at times writes collaboratively with Herman, disagrees with Johnstone's views on Milošević, the Serbs, and Srebrenica in particular, while criticizing NATO's intervention and suggesting that the NATO bombing campaign was carried out with prior knowledge that such bombing would escalate the atrocities.

Leadership of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic (ICDSM) [5] includes: Professor Velko Valkanov (President of the Bulgarian Committee for Human Rights, Honorary President of the Bulgarian Antifascist Union, former Member of Parliament, and founder of ICDSM, Bulgaria); Ramsey Clark, former United States Attorney General; Professor Alexander Zinoviev, a Russian philosopher and writer; and Canadian lawyer Christopher Black, co-founder, vice-chairman, and chair of ICDSM's legal committee. In 2004 Ramsey Clark wrote a letter to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan stating that "the Prosecution has failed to present significant or compelling evidence of any criminal act or intention of President Milošević" [6]. Those who have joined the Committee include (in 2001) playwright and Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter, who also signed the "Artists’ Appeal for Milošević" (Mar./Apr. 2004), a statement protesting unfair and biased conduct of the Tribunal, asserting its failure to prove Milošević's guilt justly, and calling for his immediate release [7].

Regarding his personal character, former acquaintances have said that in private Milošević was patriarchal and conservative, devoted to his family and wife. He was proudly stubborn. His most devoted followers were older people, who had spent most of their lives in an era characterised by a moral code which for them Milošević embodied. Some attribute the political problems and wars which marked Milošević's years in power and his unrelenting self-defense during his subsequent trial to his stubborn unwillingness to compromise. His reputed devotion to his wife, however, was memorialized in the choice for his final burial plot, under the tree where they first kissed in 1958.

Death of Milošević

Main article: Death of Slobodan Milošević

Milošević was found dead in his cell on March 11, 2006 in the UN war crimes tribunal's detention centre, located in the Scheveningen section of The Hague.

Autopsies soon established that Milošević had died of a heart attack. He had been suffering from heart problems and high blood pressure. However, many suspicions were voiced to the effect that the heart attack had been caused or made possible deliberately - by the ICTY, according to sympathizers, or by himself, according to critics. Shortly before his death, Milošević had requested to be treated in a Russian heart surgery centre, but the Tribunal had refused to permit that, mistrustful of Russian guarantees that an escape would be made impossible. At the same time, Milošević had expressed fears that he was being poisoned. A scandal emerged when it was found that, according to an earlier medical test from January the 12th, Milošević's blood contained rifampicin, a drug that is normally used to treat leprosy and tuberculosis and which would have neutralized some of the effects of his medicines for his high blood pressure and heart condition. Milošević had complained about the presence of a leprosis drug in his blood in a letter to the Russian foreign ministry. After that fact was disclosed, some hypothesized that the Tribunal medical staff had administered the drug deliberately, while others believed that he had taken it himself to worsen his heart condition and thus force the Tribunal to let him travel to Russia and escape. It is, however, questionnable that he would have been able to smuggle in such drugs, since all his visitors were searched at least once before gaining access to him in response to an incident in September 2005 in which he had taken medicine from a Serbian doctor without the approval of the Hague doctors. Blood tests conducted as part of his post mortem showed that it was unlikely that Milošević had ingested rifampicin in the last few days before his death.

Several medical experts, such as Leo Bokeria (the director of the Russian heart surgery centre, where Milošević had requested to be treated) and The Times' medical columnist Thomas Stuttaford, asserted that Milošević's heart attack could and should have been prevented easily by means of standard medical procedures.

The reactions to the death were mixed: officials and sympathisers of the ICTY Prosecution lamented what they saw as Milošević's having remained unpunished, while opponents, mostly Serbian and Russian figures, stressed what they viewed as the responsibility of the Tribunal for what had happened.

A funeral was held in Milošević's home town Pozarevac, after tens of thousands of supporters attended a farewell ceremony in Belgrade. The return of the body of this former president but alleged war criminal to Serbia and of his widow (who had been forbidden to travel there by prior legal proceedings but petitioned to attend his funeral) was very controversial, leading to great difficulties before their resolution.

Further reading

• Noam Chomsky. "A New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo."
• Ivo Daalder & Michael O'Hanlon, "Winning Ugly: NATO's War to Save Kosovo"
• Misha Glenny, "The Fall of Yugoslavia"
• Gow, James, "The Serbian Project and its Adversaries: A Strategy of War Crimes"
• Diana Johnstone, "Fool's Crusade"
• Adam Lebor, "Milošević: A Biography"
• Michael Parenti, "To Kill A Nation: NATO's Attack on Yugoslavia"
• Laura Silber, "Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation"

External links

• Srebrenica Massacre: Frequently Asked Questions
• Was Milošević Poisoned? (by William Norman Grigg)
• Milošević Takes the Truth with Him
• Rewards for Justice page on Slobodan Milošević
• The Times (London): Obituary: Slobodan Milošević
• The Guardian: Obituary: Slobodan Milošević
• The Demonization of the 'Media Milošević': How and why it's been done
• CNN on Milošević; CNN's InDepth Analysis
• PBS Channel13 coverage
• BBC on Milošević; BBC News: Obituary: Slobodan Milošević;
• BBC News - Have Your Say
• Was Milošević Murdered? Historical and Investigative Research Francisco Gil-White.
• Srebrenica genocide blogger
• Answering the Srebrenica Massacre Charge
• Video Archives of ICTY Trial of Milošević
• Carla del Ponte's Pound of Serbian Flesh
• Milošević trial 2001-2004
• Milošević trial news and resources, JURIST
• Court transcripts and other documentation on the trial of Slobodan Milošević
• "The Other Side of the Story" Two Yugoslav generals refute Milošević's Hague Kosovo indictment
• "How Politicians, the Media, and Scholars Lied about Milošević's 1989 Kosovo Speech: A review of the evidence" Historical and Investigative Research Francisco Gil-White.
• Milošević's Kosovo speech: text and PDF files of media and US government translations
• Meltdown at the Milošević Trial: A Much Delayed Rush to Judgment, JURIST
• The Milošević Trial Legacy: If Not Outcome, Hope, JURIST
• Bildt Comments: Slobodan Milošević
• Historian on Serbia Tim Judah's comments
• Photos Slobodan Milošević for The Washington Post
• Chronology of Milošević's career
• Biography of Milošević in Russian
• The Convenient Death Of Slobodan Milošević