Serbian war criminals: Slobodan Milosevic

Serbian war criminals: Slobodan Milosevic profile

Ratko Mladic was the last of three Serbian leaders wanted for war crimes following the capture of Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic.

Slobodan Milosevic during his war crimes trial Photo: REUTERS

Milosevic, the former Yugoslav President, died of a heart attack in 2006 before his own trial was concluded.

He was born and raised in Yugoslavia, where he studied law before becoming an economic adviser to the Mayor of Belgrade.

In 1987, as number two in the Serbian Communist Party, he was sent to Serbia’s troubled province of Kosovo by his leader Ivan Stambolic.

Amid deepening animosity between Serbs and Albanians, he addressed a crowd of rioting of Serbs, declaring: “No one should dare to beat you again.”

Stambolic would later say that he had seen that day as “the end of Yugoslavia”.

Within two years, Milosevic was president of Serbia. Stambolic was abducted and murdered in 2000, allegedly by Milosevic’s secret police.

Milosevic embraced and promoted nationalism, manipulating the grievances of Serbs.

In 1991, when Slovenia and Croatia seceded from Yugoslavia, Serbia went to war. Croatia, Slovenia and later Bosnia were pounded and besieged under his rule.

Ethnic cleansing became a reality as whole populations were forced from their homes and hundreds of thousands were killed. All three wars were fought and lost.

Milosevic reinvented himself, signing the Dayton Peace Treaty on behalf of Bosnian Serbs in 1995. In abandoning claims for a Greater Serbia he was rewarded with a partial lifting of international sanctions. In 1997, Milosevic became Yugoslav president.

But the following year, Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians rose up against Serbian rule, demanding independence.

During the Kosovo war, Milosevic was indicted for war crimes.

In 2000, the struggling leader called an election and lost. The new Serbian government handed him to the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague the following year and six months later he was tried for crimes against humanity.

In his last interview before his arrest, Milosevic denied any responsibility for the carnage and chaos wreaked during his 13 years in power.

“I did my best to defend my people and I did not make any move detrimental to the interests of the country, people and citizens,” he said.

He claimed that his indictment by The Hague tribunal for war crimes was the result of score-settling by foreign enemies collaborating with his political opponents and former colleagues within Yugoslavia.

He died mid-trial in his cell in 2006.

Sarajevo

A short history of Sarajevo and region

Timeline: A short history of Sarajevo and region
On many Sarajevo apartment buildings that were located near sniper positions in the siege of the early 1990s, scars from shelling remain, and sometimes makeshift window coverings as well. (Chris Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

SARAJEVO TIMELINE

15th century: Sarajevo is founded by the Ottoman Empire. The city grows around a Turkish-style marketplace, adding mosques and roadside inns.

16th century: The city’s first Orthodox church appears in historical records. Sephardic Jews arrive, fleeing persecution in Spain and Portugal.

1878: Sarajevo and the rest of Bosnia-Herzegovina are annexed to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

1914: Assassination of Austro-Hungarian Empire’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand sparks World War I.

1918: Austro-Hungarian Empire collapses. Bosnia-Herzegovina becomes a part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, later known as the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

1939-1945: World War II. Nazis occupy Sarajevo, then place it under control of pro-Hitler Croatian fascists, who send thousands of Serbs, Jews and Roma (then commonly called Gypsies) to death camps. The city’s Jewish population, once near 10,000, falls to less than 1,000.

1945: Liberated by partisans led by Marshal Josip Broz Tito, Sarajevo and Bosnia-Herzegovina become part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

1984: Sarajevo hosts Winter Olympics.

1992: As Yugoslavia crumbles, Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats (mostly Catholic) vote for Bosnia-Herzegovina independence. But Bosnian Serbs, mostly Orthodox and backed by Serbia, want Sarajevo and other Bosnian territories to be part of a greater Serbia.

1992: Bosnian Serbs besiege Sarajevo, ignoring U.N. protests.

1995: Dayton Accords end the siege and war by creating a many-layered government that includes a federation of Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats that shares power with a republic of Bosnian Serbs. Most of Sarajevo’s territory and more than 90% of its residents fall within the federation of Bosnian Muslims and Croats.

Bosnian Genocide 1992

In April 1992, the government of the Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina declared its independence from Yugoslavia. Over the next several years, Bosnian Serb forces, with the backing of the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army, perpetrated atrocious crimes against Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) and Croatian civilians, resulting in the deaths of some 100,000 people (80 percent of them Bosniak) by 1995. It was the worst act of genocide since the Nazi regime’s destruction of some 6 million European Jews during World War II.

SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC

In the aftermath of World War II, the Balkan states of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, Slovenia and Macedonia became part of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia. After the death of longtime Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito in 1980, growing nationalism among the different Yugoslav republics threatened to split their union apart.

This process intensified after the mid-1980s with the rise of the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, who helped foment discontent between Serbians in Bosnia and Croatia and their Croatian, Bosniak and Albanian neighbors. In 1991, Slovenia, Croatia and Macedonia declared their independence.

During the war in Croatia that followed, the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army supported Serbian separatists there in brutal clashes with Croatian forces.

RADOVAN KARADZIC

In Bosnia, Muslims represented the largest single population group by 1971. More Serbs and Croats emigrated over the next two decades, and in a 1991 census Bosnia’s population of some 4 million was 44 percent Bosniak, 31 percent Serb, and 17 percent Croatian.

Elections held in late 1990 resulted in a coalition government split between parties representing the three ethnicities (in rough proportion to their populations) and led by the Bosniak Alija Izetbegovic.

As tensions built inside and outside the country, the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and his Serbian Democratic Party withdrew from government and set up their own “Serbian National Assembly.” On March 3, 1992, after a referendum vote (which Karadzic’s party blocked in many Serb-populated areas), President Izetbegovic proclaimed Bosnia’s independence.

STRUGGLE FOR CONTROL IN BOSNIA

Far from seeking independence for Bosnia, Bosnian Serbs wanted to be part of a dominant Serbian state in the Balkans—the “Greater Serbia” that Serbian separatists had long envisioned.

In early May 1992, two days after the United States and the European Community (the precursor to the European Union) recognized Bosnia’s independence, Bosnian Serb forces with the backing of Milosevic and the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army launched their offensive with a bombardment of Bosnia’s capital, Sarajevo.

They attacked Bosniak-dominated towns in eastern Bosnia, including Zvornik, Foca, and Visegrad, forcibly expelling Bosniak civilians from the region in a brutal process that later was identified as “ethnic cleansing.” (Ethnic cleansing differs from genocide in that its primary goal is the expulsion of a group of people from a geographical area and not the actual physical destruction of that group, even though the same methods—including murder, rape, torture and forcible displacement—may be used.)

Though Bosnian government forces tried to defend the territory, sometimes with the help of the Croatian army, Bosnian Serb forces were in control of nearly three-quarters of the country by the end of 1993, and Karadzic’s party had set up their own Republika Srpska in the east. Most of the Bosnian Croats had left the country, while a significant Bosniak population remained only in smaller towns.

Several peace proposals between a Croatian-Bosniak federation and Bosnian Serbs failed when the Serbs refused to give up any territory. The United Nations refused to intervene in the conflict in Bosnia, but a campaign spearheaded by its High Commissioner for Refugees provided humanitarian aid to its many displaced, malnourished and injured victims.

SREBRENICA MASSACRE

By the summer of 1995, three towns in eastern Bosnia—Srebrenica, Zepa and Gorazde—remained under control of the Bosnian government. The U.N. had declared these enclaves “safe havens” in 1993, to be disarmed and protected by international peacekeeping forces.

On July 11, 1995, however, Bosnian Serb forces advanced on Srebrenica, overwhelming a battalion of Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed there. Serbian forces subsequently separated the Bosniak civilians at Srebrenica, putting the women and girls on buses and sending them to Bosnian-held territory.

Some of the women were raped or sexually assaulted, while the men and boys who remained behind were killed immediately or bussed to mass killing sites. Estimates of Bosniaks killed by Serb forces at Srebrenica range from around 7,000 to more than 8,000.

After Bosnian Serb forces captured Zepa that same month and exploded a bomb in a crowded Sarajevo market, the international community began to respond more forcefully to the ongoing conflict and its ever-growing civilian death toll.

In August 1995, after the Serbs refused to comply with a U.N. ultimatum, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) joined efforts with Bosnian and Croatian forces for three weeks of bombing Bosnian Serb positions and a ground offensive.

With Serbia’s economy crippled by U.N. trade sanctions and its military forces under assault in Bosnia after three years of warfare, Milosevic agreed to enter negotiations that October. The U.S.-sponsored peace talks in Dayton, Ohio, in November 1995 (which included Izetbegovic, Milosevic and Croatian President Franjo Tudjman) resulted in the creation of a federalized Bosnia divided between a Croat-Bosniak federation and a Serb republic.

INTERNATIONAL RESPONSE

Though the international community did little to prevent the systematic atrocities committed against Bosniaks and Croats in Bosnia while they were occurring, it did actively seek justice against those who committed them.

In May 1993, the U.N. Security Council created the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague, Netherlands. It was the first international tribunal since the Nuremberg Trials in 1945-46, and the first to prosecute genocide, among other war crimes.

Radovan Karadzic and the Bosnian Serb military commander, General Ratko Mladic, were among those indicted by the ICTY for genocide and other crimes against humanity.

The ICTY would eventually indict 161 individuals of crimes committed during conflict in the former Yugoslavia. Brought before the tribunal in 2002 on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, Milosevic served as his own defense lawyer; his poor health led to long delays in the trial until he was found dead in his prison cell in 2006.

BUTCHER OF BOSNIA

In 2007, the International Court of Justice issued its ruling in a historic civil lawsuit brought by Bosnia against Serbia. Though the court called the massacre at Srebrenica genocide and said that Serbia “could and should” have prevented it and punished those who committed it, it stopped short of declaring Serbia guilty of the genocide itself.

After a trial lasting more than four years and involving the testimony of nearly 600 witnesses, the ICTY found Mladic, who had been dubbed the “Butcher of Bosnia,” guilty of genocide and other crimes against humanity in November 2017. The tribunal sentenced the 74-year-old former general to life in prison. Coming on the heels of Karadzic’s conviction for war crimes the previous year, Mladic’s long-delayed conviction marked the last major prosecution by the ICTY.

Bosnia and Herzegovina is a country on the Balkan Peninsula in southeastern Europe. Its countryside is home to medieval villages, rivers and lakes, plus the craggy Dinaric Alps. National capital Sarajevo has a well preserved old quarter, Baščaršija, with landmarks like 16th-century Gazi Husrev-bey Mosque. Ottoman-era Latin Bridge is the site of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which ignited World War I.