Slobodan Milošević
Slobodan Milošević ruled Serbia and then Yugoslavia from 1989 to 2000, and was the first sitting head of state indicted for war crimes. Born in Požarevac in 1941, both his parents killed themselves — his father in 1962, his mother in 1972 — and he was formed politically by his wife Mirjana Marković, a hardline communist he met at school. He trained as a lawyer, ran a state gas company and then a bank, and rose through the party under his patron Ivan Stambolić, whom he later displaced and who disappeared in 2000, murdered by the secret police. His turn came in April 1987 in Kosovo, where he told a crowd of Serbs that nobody should dare to beat them. He rode Serbian nationalism to control of the party, stripped Kosovo and Vojvodina of their autonomy, and gave the 1989 Gazimestan speech before hundreds of thousands. As Yugoslavia disintegrated, he backed Serb forces in Croatia from 1991 and in Bosnia from 1992, supplying the Bosnian Serb army that besieged Sarajevo for nearly four years and killed some 8,000 at Srebrenica in July 1995. He signed the Dayton Accords that November as the man who could deliver the Serbs. In 1998-99 his forces expelled hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians, and NATO bombed Serbia for seventy-eight days until he withdrew. He was indicted at The Hague in May 1999. He falsified the September 2000 election, and mass protests forced him out; he was arrested in 2001 and handed over. He conducted his own defence across a trial lasting more than four years, and died in his cell in March 2006 before a verdict.
- Lived: 1941 CE – 2006 CE
- Nationality: Serbian
- Roles: president, politician
