Slobodan Milosevic
... and state enterprises. He became the leader of the Belgrade Communist party in 1984 and Serbia party leader in 1986. Milosevic owed his rise to supreme power to his time spent in the southern part of Kosovo. In April of 1987, Milosevic, then a protégé of former Serbian President Ivan Stambolic, was sent to Kosovo to help calm a crowd of rioting Serbs at a political meeting outside of a town hall (Rozen 2000). The mobs of people were enraged over what they saw as serious mistreatment by the province’s Albanian majority. Milosevic immediately silenced the crowd with a stern speech in which he declared, “No one has the right to beat you! No one will ever beat you again”. After his speech, Milosevic won the affection of the crowd and assumed the responsibility of Defender of greater Serbia (Charles 2000). In 1989, Milosevic had overthrown his former mentor Stambolic to become Serbian president, and in 1990 he orchestrated changes in the Serb constitution to reduce the autonomy of the two Serb provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina. As a result, an anti-Serb backlash erupted in the other Yugoslavian republics. In 1991, Slovenia, Croatia, and Macedonia all declared independence. The fighting continued for three years, causing the term “ethnic cleansing” to become an international household term and establishing Milosevic as a key power broker in the region. Political infighting eventually caused the coalition to unravel, leaving Milosevic firmly in charge. When the Serbian constitution prevented him from serving another term as president in 1997, he had himself named president of Yugoslavia and invested what had been an office of unlimited authority (Charles 2000).. Slobodan Milosevic has been formally indicted by U.N. tribunal for alleged war crimes, accusing him of authorizing a military campaign against civilians in the Serb province of Kosovo. The indictment marks the first time a sitting head of state has been charged with war crimes. Milosevic and four of his subordinates face charges of murder, deportation, and persecution in violation of the laws and customs of war. The former Serb strongman is also charged with crimes against humanity in Croatia from 1991 to 1992, genocide in the 1992-95 Bosnian war, and crimes against humanity in Kosovo in 1999. This trial will be the biggest European war crimes trial held since Hitler’s men were tried at Nuremberg after World War II. United Nations officials have said that the hundreds of thousands of Albanian refugees who have fled Kosovo have reported what they described as a systematic rapes, beatings, detentions, and mass killings at the hands of Serb forces. Milosevic, who lost power to reformists in Belgrade after elections in 2000, has branded the court “illegal” and the charges against him “monstrous”. He also dismissed the charges as a conspiracy by the West to ...