Slobodan Milošević

Slobodan Milošević: The Bureaucrat Who Started Four Wars

Slobodan Milošević spent the first two decades of his career as an unremarkable Communist Party functionary — a banker, an economic adviser, a company executive who traveled to the United States on business. Then, in 1987, he traveled to Kosovo to address a crowd of aggrieved Serbs and discovered, in the crowd's response, that ethnic nationalism, not doctrine, was the fastest route to absolute power. He rode that discovery through four wars, the deaths of an estimated hundred thousand people, and a UN indictment for genocide, and died in a cell at The Hague before any court could deliver a verdict.

From Banking to the Party

Milošević was born on 20 August 1941 in Požarevac, in eastern Serbia. His parents were both teachers; his father left the family in the late 1940s and, by differing accounts, went on to teach Orthodox theology, while his mother remained a committed Communist. Both parents later took their own lives — his father while Milošević was still a student, his mother in 1974. He earned a law degree from the University of Belgrade, where he had already joined and led the Yugoslav Communist League's student branch, graduating in the mid-1960s. He then built a conventional career as an economic adviser and bank executive, rising in 1978 to the presidency of the Bank of Belgrade, a post that brought him into contact with Western institutions and business travel to the United States — an ordinary apparatchik's résumé with no hint of the ethnic-nationalist leader he would become.

The Kosovo Turn

Milošević became head of Belgrade's Communist Party in 1984 and of the Serbian Communist Party in 1986. The following year marks the clearest hinge in his career: sent to address a gathering of Kosovo Serbs who felt threatened by the province's Albanian majority, he abandoned Communist orthodoxy in favor of Serbian nationalism, discovering in the crowd's response a source of popular power that party discipline had never given him. Over 1987 and 1988 he purged thousands of officials who stood in his way and consolidated control of Serbia's political machinery, becoming president of Serbia in 1989 and, after two terms in that office, president of the rump Yugoslav federation in July 1997.

Four Wars

As the former Yugoslavia broke apart through the 1990s, Milošević armed and directed Serbian paramilitary forces and irregulars fighting in Croatia and then Bosnia and Herzegovina, backing campaigns that established detention camps and carried out systematic ethnic cleansing of non-Serb populations; the Bosnian war alone killed an estimated 100,000 people and displaced nearly three million between 1992 and 1995. Investigators found no single order in his own hand directing specific killings, but held him responsible for controlling the state media apparatus that stoked the ethnic hatred underlying the violence, and for directing the political and military structures that carried it out. By the late 1990s he turned the same machinery against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, a campaign of repression severe enough to provoke a seventy-eight-day NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999 — the first time the alliance had gone to war against a sovereign state over its treatment of its own citizens.

The Fall

Milošević's grip finally broke after he attempted to falsify the results of the September 2000 presidential election. Mass protests in Belgrade, later remembered as the Bulldozer Revolution, forced his resignation on 5 October 2000. He was arrested by Serbian police the following year and extradited to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at The Hague to face charges spanning Kosovo, Croatia and Bosnia — including genocide, crimes against humanity, murder, torture, persecution and deportation, among the gravest charge sheets any European leader had faced since the Nuremberg trials.

A Trial Without a Verdict

His ICTY trial opened on 12 February 2002; the prosecution's case ran until early 2004, and his own defense was underway when, on 11 March 2006, Milošević was found dead in his cell at the tribunal's detention facility, apparently of a heart attack, before any judgment was rendered. The tribunal lifted confidentiality over parts of the case file afterward to help establish the circumstances of his death. His death meant the historical and legal record on his personal culpability was never formally closed by a verdict, even as the surrounding record of the wars he directed was extensively documented through the trial's proceedings. His death also produced large demonstrations of continuing support among Serbian nationalists, underlining how deeply his rhetoric had embedded itself even after the wars, the bombing, and the economic ruin that followed him from office.

Why Slobodan Is Called a Genius

Whatever is meant by calling Milošević a genius has nothing to do with intellect in any admirable sense, and the honest answer is that the label mostly describes a cold, specific talent for exploiting institutions and grievance for personal power — a genius, if the word applies at all, for manipulation rather than creation. He read the vacuum left by Communism's collapse more astutely than his rivals, recognized that ethnic nationalism could substitute for the ideology he had spent decades serving, and used state media, purges of the bureaucracy, and control of paramilitary proxies to hold power through the collapse of an entire federation and four consecutive wars. That is a real, if repugnant, set of political skills: reading a crowd, controlling information, and directing violence at arm's length while retaining public deniability. It is not genius in any sense that deserves admiration, and it should not be confused with one. He stands indicted for genocide and crimes against humanity by the United Nations' own tribunal, his policies produced roughly a hundred thousand deaths in Bosnia alone, and he died before any court could formally adjudicate his guilt — a case where the word "genius," if used uncritically, risks laundering a record of mass atrocity into a compliment.

Legacy

Milošević's legacy is the wreckage of Yugoslavia itself: a federation dissolved into war, a genocide charge left legally unresolved by his death, and a template — nationalist grievance harnessed through state media and paramilitary violence — that historians and prosecutors have spent decades since trying to fully document and prevent from recurring.

Achievements

• Educated at University of Belgrade Faculty of Law and Požarevac Gymnasium
• Worked as politician