Milosevic dies in jail cell
Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav leader whose name became synonymous with a decade of ethnic hatred and bloodshed in the Balkans, has died in the Dutch prison cell where he was being held during his trial for war crimes.
In a statement, the U.N. war crimes tribunal said that Milosevic, 64, was found dead in his bed Saturday morning, apparently of natural causes.
“The guard immediately alerted the detention unit officer in command and the medical officer,” the statement said. “The latter confirmed that Slobodan Milosevic was dead.”
Milosevic had been in poor health for several years, with doctors confirming a serious heart condition and high blood pressure. These problems caused repeated delays in his trial, and in December Milosevic petitioned the tribunal to allow him to travel to Moscow for treatment.
The tribunal declined, suggesting that the doctors from Russia could travel to The Hague to treat him.
Dutch police are conducting a full investigation into the death. An autopsy will be performed, but suspicions of conspiracy and foul play are already rampant in Belgrade. A radio station suggested Milosevic had been poisoned; others speculated he had taken his own life.
Carla Del Ponte, the tribunal’s chief prosecutor, said Milosevic’s death was “regrettable for all the witnesses, for all the survivors, for all the victims that are expecting justice.” In truth, the case against Milosevic was problematic, and several legal experts expressed doubt that Del Ponte would have secured a guilty verdict on the most serious charge – genocide.
In Washington, State Department spokesman Tom Casey said Milosevic “was the principal figure responsible for the violent dismemberment of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, including the outbreak of two horrific wars in Bosnia and Kosovo.”
The breakup of Yugoslavia may have been inevitable, but Milosevic, more than any other leader, guaranteed that it also would be bloody.
He stoked the fire of Serb nationalism and turned it loose on the country’s other ethnic camps – Croats, Bosnian Muslims and, finally, Kosovo Albanians.
Almost 250,000 would die before it was over, and 2 million more would be displaced. Serbia’s economy was left in tatters. Bosnia and Kosovo remain wards of the international community. And by June 2001, Milosevic would be in a jail cell in the Netherlands, the first head of state charged with genocide and crimes against humanity.
An obscure apparatchik in the Serbian Communist Party, Milosevic began his ascent in the late 1980s. The decisive moment came in April 1987 when Milosevic was sent to Kosovo – a last minute fill-in for the moderate Serb President Ivan Stambolic – to hear the grievances of the local Serb minority.
“No one will beat you again,” Milosevic supposedly told the Serbs, and a nationalist hero was born.
In the early 1990s, as the old order in Yugoslavia teetered toward collapse, Milosevic maneuvered to put the Serbs in a position of dominance. When the leaders of other ethnic groups objected, Milosevic quietly began to arm Serb militias in Croatia and Bosnia.
Slovenia was the first to leave the Yugoslav federation, gaining independence after a relatively bloodless war in June 1991. Croatia and Bosnia, with their large Serb populations, would be more problematic.
Milosevic’s plan for “Greater Serbia” was built on a strategy of using terror and violence to expel non-Serbs from territory in Croatia and Bosnia that the Serbs planned to claim for their new national homeland. The project became known as “ethnic cleansing” and would eventually result in Milosevic’s indictment for genocide.