Editorial and obituary following the death of Slobodan Milosevic

Slobodan Milosevic - death of a tyrant and a loser (leading article)

When the Bosnian journalist Mirna Jancic went to The Hague to report on the trial of Slobodan Milosevic, she was repelled by the way in which the defendant, not infrequently, managed to turn the proceedings into a soap opera with himself as leading man. In the blandly modern courtroom, which reminded her of the command deck of Starship Enterprise, Milosevic, conducting his own defence, rudely questioned the veracity of prosecution witnesses who had lost family and friends in the wars that he had instigated. In spite of reproofs from the court, he rambled on in self-important fashion, quoted proverbs, cited supposed historical parallels, told jokes, and made, or at least began to make, political speeches. He insisted on calling a long list of witnesses who could offer no factual evidence but seemed to be there mainly to demonstrate that he, Milosevic, was a man with many connections. Yet, even so, Jancic wrote, "In my eyes the court represented victory over nihilism. Here was something that would not allow things to be forgotten or crimes to go unpunished."

Milosevic's determined filibustering drew out the trial month after month, and some may fancifully see his death, natural or otherwise, as a kind of triumphal last manoeuvre. Yet Milosevic's behaviour in court was of a piece with his political career as a whole. Tactically shrewd, strategically inept and morally void, he went down the road to war without ever really considering why he was doing so, what the human costs would be, and whether there was any real chance of building an enlarged Serbia on the ruins of the Yugoslav federation. His own commitment to the Greater Serbia idea was lukewarm. It was a vehicle useful to him rather than a vision he served. Other Serbian leaders and intellectuals were genuine believers in that project, which does not excuse, but goes some way to explain, the crimes for which they were responsible.

But, for Milosevic, all that mattered, it seemed, was to stay on top and to stay ahead of the game. Because he was wily and sharp, he time and again escaped the consequences of his miscalculations, aided in this by western leaders so fearful of involvement in the Balkans that they allowed themselves to be taken in by his apparent rationality, his charm and his quickness of mind. A judicious assessment of the situation in the former Yugoslavia should have led to a much earlier understanding of the fact that Milosevic and Serbia were bound to be losers in the end, given the potential strength of Croatia and Bosnia. Even when the military balance began to shift against Serbia, western countries continued to deal with Milosevic, giving him a major role in the flawed Bosnian settlement, and opening the way towards the final tragedy of the Kosovo war. It was only then that the scales really fell from western eyes.

Milosevic's legacy will nevertheless be the opposite of what he would have wished for. His actions helped establish the idea of liberal intervention that emerged in the 90s after the first Iraq war and in response to the Rwandan massacres and the Balkan conflicts. Assuming a right to violently intervene in the affairs of Serbia's neighbours, he ended by provoking a series of interventions against Serbia that established the principle that neither sovereignty nor specious arguments about civil war can protect a leader or a regime guilty of crimes against its own and neighbouring peoples. Expecting that he himself would escape punishment, and indeed would remain in power even if Serbia were defeated, he found himself ejected from office and handed over to a new kind of international court. The trials of others, including Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, seem likely, sooner or later, to follow, unless they cheat justice by taking their own lives. But whatever happens in their cases, the ending of the culture of impunity owes much to Slobodan Milosevic.

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Slobodan Milosevic - ruthless manipulator of Serbian nationalism who became the most dangerous man in Europe (obituary)

Ian Traynor

In an age of infinite European promise - summed up by the annus mirabilis of 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell and the countries of eastern Europe and former Yugoslavia freed themselves from Soviet-style despotism - Slobodan Milosevic, who has died aged 64, was the wild card. The first European head of state to be prosecuted for genocide and war crimes, he emerged to embody the dark side of European endeavour, and to sully the hopes generated by the eastern European and Balkan revolutions of that momentous year. In short, he became Europe's chief menace, the most dangerous figure in post-cold war Europe.

From 1991 to 1999, he presided over mayhem and mass murder in south-eastern Europe. In a long list of villains. he was the central figure. To the civilian victims of Srebrenica and Vukovar, Sarajevo and Dubrovnik, Pristina and Banja Luka, he was the chilling embodiment of the evil men can do.

But though a brilliant tactician who ran rings around his peers and rivals in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, confounded the Serbian opposition and outwitted an endless array of international mediators, Milosevic was a lousy strategist. With no ultimate aim except short-term gain, he won most of the battles and lost all the wars. In the process, he left a legacy of more than 200,000 dead in Bosnia and 2 million people (half the population) homeless. He ethnically cleansed more than 800,000 Albanians from their homes in Kosovo. He had political opponents and former friends and colleagues in Belgrade murdered. In Bosnia, he triggered the worst crisis in transatlantic relations before the Iraq war and left the United Nations and the European Union looking spineless and humiliated, their foreign policymaking and peacekeeping credibility in tatters.

Milosevic was first indicted for war crimes in Kosovo by Louise Arbour, the Canadian chief prosecutor in The Hague, in March 1999. Arbour's successor, the Swiss campaigner Carla Del Ponte, extended the charge sheet to include indictments on Croatia and Bosnia, in the latter case accusing him of genocide for his alleged collusion in the massacre of more than 7,000 Muslim males at Srebrenica in July 1995.

That he ended up in the dock in The Hague at all surprised many who have studied the man and his country's agony through the 1990s. Given his predisposition for violence, his apparent lack of remorse for the pain and suffering he caused, and a troubled family history of suicides and death, it was always thought that Milosevic would go down in a bloodbath in Belgrade or opt to kill himself rather than surrender.

There are many who are convinced that Europe would be a much better place today had Milosevic died, been killed, or been ousted around 1991, before the Bosnian war and at a time when the Serbs' levelling of the Croatian Danube town of Vukovar indicated the mercilessness of the Serbian leadership under Milosevic. Instead, he weathered all the lost wars, the huge demonstrations in Belgrade, and the Nato air campaign; he fiddled lost elections before surprisingly throwing in the towel in October 2000, suddenly agreeing to cede power as Yugoslav president to Vojislav Kostunica who had beaten Milosevic in a presidential election.

The following March, Milosevic was arrested on the orders of the liberal Serbian prime minister Zoran Djindjic, later to be assassinated (obituary, March 13 2003). The initial arrest was for alleged offences at home, but in June, Djindjic did the Americans' bidding and put Milosevic on a helicopter to the US military base at Tuzla, in Bosnia, fr

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