Ivan Stambolic

Ivan Stambolic made Slobodan Milosevic's career, was removed by him, and was abducted and shot fourteen years later while jogging in a Belgrade park. The two men were close friends from Belgrade University; Stambolic was the older, the nephew of a senior Yugoslav official, and he pulled Milosevic after him through the gas company, the bank and the party apparatus. He became president of the Serbian League of Communists and then of Serbia itself, and in 1986 he arranged for Milosevic to succeed him as party chief, over the objections of colleagues who did not trust him. The break came in 1987. Milosevic was sent to Kosovo Polje to calm a crowd of Serbs complaining about the Albanian majority, told them that nobody should dare to beat them, and returned a national figure; at the eighth session of the Serbian central committee that September he had Stambolic's ally Dragisa Pavlovic removed, and Stambolic himself was forced out in December. He spent the next decade in business and out of public life, and gave interviews and published a memoir critical of what his protege had built. In August 2000, with an election approaching in which the opposition was pressing him to stand, he was seized in Kosutnjak park by men in a white van. His body was found in 2003 in a lime pit in Vojvodina. Members of the Serbian state security special operations unit were convicted of the killing, and the court found that the order had come from Milosevic. Milosevic was already at The Hague when the bodies were found and was never tried for it. Stambolic s widow pursued the case for years. The special operations unit also killed the Serbian prime minister Zoran Djindjic in 2003.

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