[Mb-civic] Crusader for Serb Honor Was Defiant Until the End - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Crusader for Serb Honor Was Defiant Until the End
As a Leader and a Defendant, Milosevic Exuded Pride and Rage

By Daniel Williams and R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, March 12, 2006; A16

ROME, March 11 -- Slobodan Milosevic rode nationalist pride and rage to 
power and led his Serb compatriots into four ethnic wars.

He lost them all.

Yet until the end, Milosevic played the defiant master of his own fate 
and defender of Serb honor. He insisted on managing his defense at the 
U.N. international war crimes tribunal and reveled in ridiculing 
prosecution witnesses even as his ruddy face belied the high blood 
pressure that may have contributed to his death Saturday at age 64.

At the tribunal, which was underway at The Hague, in the Netherlands, 
Milosevic was charged with overseeing the worst wartime atrocities 
against civilians in Europe since World War II. Among them was the 
massacre of about 8,000 Bosnian men and boys who were taken to the 
Bosnian town of Srebrenica and herded off for execution in areas 
throughout the mountainous region.

The trial of the former leader was in its fifth year, and he had been 
urged by the presiding judge to wrap up his defense by May.

Milosevic was one of the driving forces behind the breakup of 
Yugoslavia, a multi-ethnic state held together by the charisma and 
repression of Josip Broz, the World War II fighter and Communist leader 
known as Tito. The Balkan wars of the 1990s ended with the creation of 
five new states: Serbia and Montenegro, Croatia, Bosnia, Slovenia and 
Macedonia.

Only Slovenia and Macedonia broke off from Yugoslavia with relatively 
little bloodshed, while the wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo cost 
200,000 lives, created 3 million refugees and left damages estimated at 
$20 billion to $60 billion. The province of Kosovo is awaiting 
independence through talks aimed at finally determining its status. 
Montenegro, which is still joined with Serbia, is set to vote soon on 
whether to declare independence.

Milosevic was one of four Yugoslav political leaders at the end of the 
Tito era who sought more political control through the formation of an 
ethnically-based state. In Croatia, it was Franjo Tudjman. In Bosnia, 
Alija Izetbegovic. In Kosovo, Ibrahim Rugova.

Milosevic, who spoke in short, sharp sentences, appealed to the Serb 
sense of history and victimization. One phrase, delivered in 1987 on an 
historic battlefield in Kosovo, then a province of Serbia, set his 
career on a path of destruction. "No one will ever beat you again," he 
told a throng of Serbs who were complaining that the majority ethnic 
Albanians in the province were persecuting them.

Nearly three years later, he was elected president of Serbia in its 
first democratic elections held since World War II. He then tried to 
gain Serbian domination of the eight-member Yugoslav presidency, 
prompting resistance by the leaders of the other republics. As they 
sought political independence, he incited the Serbs in Croatia and 
Bosnia to revolt.

His pledge to unify all Serbs in one state turned into an ironic 
promise. Hundreds of thousands of Serbs were driven out of Croatia and 
Kosovo into Serbia proper. Many Bosnian Serbs now live in northern 
Bosnia, in a tense political coexistence with Croats and Muslims living 
in the country's south. Milosevic was born in the central Serbian town 
of Pozarevac to a Serbian Orthodox priest and a teacher. At different 
points in his career, he headed Yugoslavia's state-run natural gas 
company and the state-operated United Bank of Belgrade. In 1986, the 
communist apparatchik was named to head the party.

His wife, Mirjana Markovic, was a theoretician for Milosevic's Socialist 
Party. Serb authorities have charged Markovic and their son, Marko, with 
abuse of power and corruption. Marko is reported to have earned millions 
of dollars through cigarette smuggling. Both are in exile in Russia. 
Milosevic and his wife also had a daughter, Marija.

Critics say Milosevic benefited royally from power. Mladen Dinkic, Serb 
finance minister until earlier this year, wrote that Yugoslavia under 
Milosevic was a country in which "paranormal economic phenomena are an 
everyday occurrence." More than half the country's revenue was deposited 
in so-called special accounts not listed in its budget.

"This is why Serbia is poor," said Milorad Savicevic, who at the end of 
the Milosevic era managed two state-owned corporations. "We had low 
production, no investment and lots of corruption. The result is a nation 
with 4 million really poor people, and 10,000 really rich people" in a 
total population of 10 million, living on agriculturally fertile land.

Milosevic also held power through manipulation of the state-run media. 
His underlings often faxed scripts to state television and radio that 
condemned his local and foreign enemies in foul language, with orders to 
read every word on air. Milosevic appointees reviewed all news 
broadcasts and literally ripped news copy from reporters' hands if 
deemed incorrect.

Milosevic also effectively used his secret police to undermine 
opponents, and even ordered the assassination of several of his 
political rivals, according to criminal charges brought by Serb courts 
after his ouster.

The worst conflict of his years, in Bosnia, ended in 1995, when 
Milosevic signed the U.S.-brokered peace agreement in Dayton, Ohio. 
Nominally, the accord guaranteed Bosnia's statehood within its old 
borders but left the warring populations largely inhabiting separate 
areas of the country.

The Kosovo war climaxed with U.S.-led airstrikes in 1999 of Serb army 
positions in Kosovo and towns and cities in Serbia. The Serb withdrawal 
from the province opened the way to NATO-led occupation. Kosovo refugees 
returned to the province and Serbs fled in fear.

After the conclusion of each war, Milosevic faced political crises that 
he tried to put down with police repression and occasional 
assassinations. In 1996, he overturned local elections and resisted 
protest rallies that threatened his rule.

In September 2000, he lost the first direct vote for president, although 
the election commission declared the need for a runoff. Mobs attacked 
parliament, but police and the army stood by idly. On Oct. 5, Milosevic 
was ousted. The revolt was engineered in part by youthful political 
dissidents who benefited from an infusion of Western cash and training, 
but it was sustained by key military and political leaders who had 
become weary of his increasingly oppressive rule.

A successor and longtime rival, Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, 
engineered Milosevic's extradition to The Hague in April 2001, under 
international pressure. A secret police sniper assassinated Djindjic on 
March 12, 2003, as the Djindjic government began to crack down on the 
Milosevic-era alliance between criminals and security forces. Serbia is 
now ruled by a fractious coalition that includes Milosevic's former 
Socialist Party.

Prosecutors at The Hague called 294 witnesses against Milosevic. 
Milosevic, in turn, named 1,400 people he wanted to question in his 
defense, among them former president Clinton, British Prime Minister 
Tony Blair and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, none of whom has 
been subpoenaed.

In his jail cell, Milosevic read Hemingway and John Updike, a biographer 
has reported, and listened to the music of Celine Dion and Frank 
Sinatra. Sinatra's "My Way" was a favorite.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/11/AR2006031101397.html?referrer=email
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