Slobodan Milosevic
Slobodan Milošević (pronounced /milóshevich/, 
pronunciation (?·i); in Serbian Cyrillic alphabet: Слодан Милошеви,, pronounced /slo.(Požarevac, Serbia, August 20, 1941-The Hague, the Netherlands, March 11, 2006), was a Serbian politician. He held the presidency of Serbia from 1989 to 1997 and Yugoslavia from 1997 to 2000. He was the first elected president of Serbia and the founder of the Socialist Party of Serbia.
Before his political activity
Slobodan Milošević was born in the Serbian town of Požarevac into a wealthy family who came from Montenegro. His mother was a teacher, his father was a theologian.
In 1953 he joined the then League of Communists of Yugoslavia, the name by which the Communist Party of Yugoslavia was known from 1952. He studied law at the University of Belgrade, graduating in 1964. At that time It is in which he began his professional activity in the administration of the Socialist Republic of Serbia, and more specifically in the city hall of the then Yugoslav capital of Belgrade, first as an adviser to the mayor and then as head of the municipal information service.
In 1965, he married Mirjana Marković, who came from a partisan family and held the chair of Marxist Theory at the University of Belgrade.
In 1968 he moved into the business world, where he held positions of responsibility in the self-managed company, characteristic of the Yugoslav economic regime, based on the so-called self-managed socialism. He started working at the state energy company Technogas, where in 1973 he was appointed CEO. Ten years after leaving the Belgrade consistory, in 1978, he became director of the largest bank in Yugoslavia, the United Bank of Belgrade (Beogradska Banka).
Political activity
The beginnings and his rise to the presidency of Serbia
After Tito's death in 1980, Milošević began to make his way into the world of politics. Although he appeared as a man of introverted character, in 1983 he was elected a member of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Serbia and, the following year, chairman of the Municipal Committee in Belgrade. On May 15, 1986, he replaced Ivan Stambolić in the presidency of the Central Committee of the LCS, being re-elected in 1988. In May 1989 he was elected president of the Socialist Republic of Serbia. This rapid journey, which in seven years elevated him from the merely technical posts outside the political world to the presidency of the most important autonomous republic of Yugoslavia, was surprising to all. Milošević had the profile of a bureaucratic technician.
His rapid political rise coincided with a radicalization of nationalism that was operating in Yugoslav society, at a time when socialism was losing strength: that same year he decided to transform the Serbian section of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia into the Party Serbian Socialist. Under his leadership, and similarly to Franjo Tuđman, an institutional affirmation of Serb identity began, to the detriment of the other Yugoslav national minorities. On June 28, 1989, in full nationalist effervescence, Milošević organized in Kosovo Polje, the scene of the Battle of Kosovo, on the 600th anniversary of the defeat against the Turks, where, before a crowd of one million people, he pronounced the famous Gazimestán Speech, an exaltation of the battle, which brought serious confrontations and future consequences, which many analysts consider the "starting gun" to the Yugoslav Wars.
In this context, he agreed with Franjo Tuđman, then president of Croatia, the Karađorđevo Agreement for the division of Bosnia (already oriented towards independence) between Serbs and Croats. Also, from his new position of power, he decides to annul all the autonomous concessions to the province of Kosovo and modify the Magna Carta to grant more executive power to the president. In the opposition, some voices began to rise against the nationalist threat (Belgrade Circle), but on December 20, 1992 Milošević was again re-elected as president, this time in elections with direct universal suffrage.
The Yugoslav Wars
Shortly after he came to power at the end of the 1980s, speculation began about the danger that Milosevic's attitude posed to the future of Yugoslavia and the significant threat that the Yugoslav federation would end up breaking up in various countries at war with each other. yes or Milosevic ruling with a military dictatorship with strong ethnic repression of non-Serbs. In the early 1990s, the intention to declare war came. .
He was unable to enter US territory in October 1995 to participate in peace negotiations with Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, the so-called Dayton Accords. The 1996 municipal elections were considered a fraud by some quarters, triggering a large wave of protests, with daily demonstrations in Belgrade throughout December of that year and early 1997.
In the context of the disintegration of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the three wars that took place there where there were episodes of deliberate attacks against the civilian population, which have been described as "crimes against humanity, genocide and ethnic cleansing", and the responsibility that Milošević had for being President of Serbia, was called, by some media, by a good part of Western public opinion, as well as by his Serbian political adversaries, The Butcher of the Balkans .
After his rise to power, and with the fall of communist regimes in Eastern Europe, Milošević had fostered a nationalist discourse. Several authors have characterized Milosevic's nationalist discourse as "cynical", according to whom he would have been interested in him as a mechanism to maintain power and not so much in Serbia itself. Other authors see in the figure of Milosevic a "scapegoat" who would have been made fall after responsibility for everything that happened in the Balkans during the 1990s.
In October 2000, when his downfall was almost certain after strong protests over the electoral pottery he made, he ordered the tanks to be brought out into the streets to crush his own people, although the order was not obeyed by his officers for the risk of provoking a civil war.[citation needed] He tried to stay as a simple politician and dedicate himself more to the family, as if nothing had happened, but the new Serbian authorities let him They were handed over to the court in The Hague in 2001. When the police went to his house to take him away, he barricaded himself with his family with several weapons and threatened to commit suicide and his daughter fired several shots.
In July 2016, the International Tribunal in The Hague, ten years after Slobodan Milošević, former president of the former Yugoslavia, died in strange circumstances, exonerated him of responsibility for alleged war crimes committed in Bosnia between the years 1992-1995. The sentence also says that in the course of meetings held with Serbs and Bosnian Serb officials, "Slobodan Milosevic had stated that members of other nations and ethnic groups should be protected, and that in the national interest of the Serbs discrimination against other ethnic groups must be included”. On that occasion, "Milosevic also declared that the crime of ethnic groups had to be fought energetically."
Stop
In 2001 the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia requested Milošević's arrest from the government formed by Vojislav Koštunica who came to power after winning the elections, although Yugoslavia had not recognized the jurisdiction of that court at that time. On April 1, 2001, after two tense days of resistance, Milošević accepted an agreed surrender in Belgrade and was transferred to The Hague, without a trial on said extradition taking place in Yugoslavia, as indicated by Yugoslav criminal law..
In the city of The Hague, a legal process began in which he was accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, allegedly occurring during the war in Yugoslavia, as established by the prosecution, and some documents and witness statements.
Death
Milošević was found dead in his cell on March 11, 2006, at the criminal court detention center in Scheveningen, in the Dutch city of The Hague. An official from the prosecutor's office said he was found dead at 10:00 a.m. Saturday. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia said he had a heart condition and his blood pressure was higher than normal. His trial was expected to resume on March 14 of the same year, with the testimony of the former president of Montenegro, Momir Bulatović.
The final investigation report concluded that Milošević died of natural causes, ruling out the presence of any substance that could trigger a heart problem.
Burial
He was buried on March 18, 2006 in the garden of the family home in his hometown, Požarevac, after receiving a tribute on the town's central avenue. He was buried next to the tree where it is said that in his teens he swore love to his wife, Mirjana Marković. His white and gray marble tombstone is inscribed in gold: Slobodan Milošević - 1941-2006.
The burial, which was family in nature according to the guidelines issued by the Serbian government, brought together leaders of the Socialist Party of Serbia, senior officials of the Milošević government, soldiers who served in the Yugoslav Wars, and many people from all over the world. corners of Serbia and the Serbian regions of Bosnia-Herzegovina. His family could not attend because they were not allowed to enter the country.
Debate about his death
Milošević's lawyer, Zdenko Tomanović, showed on television a copy of a handwritten letter from Milošević allegedly addressed to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. In it, he asked for help having discovered, according to him, a conspiracy to assassinate him.
Lavrov had recalled that Milošević asked to be transferred to Moscow for medical treatment, but the ICTY denied his request.
According to the British newspaper The Observer, Milošević's death was a severe blow to the court and to those who wanted to establish an authoritative historical record for the Balkan War...