Two Decades Since the Death of Slobodan Milosevic: From Absolute Power to the Defendant’s Bench

Milosevic passed away on March 11, 2006, from a heart attack. At the request of his family, after a request for him to be buried in Belgrade with state honors was denied, he was buried in the courtyard of the family home in Pozarevac.

Milosevic was one of the key figures during the wars in the former Yugoslavia and in Kosovo and Metohija, and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague indicted him on charges of crimes against humanity.

He was extradited to the Hague Tribunal on June 28, 2001, where he was tried for war crimes in Kosovo and Metohija, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The trial began on February 12, 2002. During the proceedings, in which he chose to represent himself, the process was interrupted more than 15 times, due to his health condition and was ultimately suspended several days after his death.

Milosevic’s rule lasted a little over a decade and effectively began with his speech at Gazimestan on Vidovdan, June 28, 1989, marking the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo - an event attended, according to reports at the time, by about one million people.

In Serbia’s first multiparty presidential elections in December 1990, he ran as the candidate of the Socialist Party of Serbia and received 3.3 million votes (65.34 percent), becoming the first President of Serbia after the restoration of the multiparty system.

On July 25, 1997, he was elected President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia by the Federal Assembly.

His rule ended after the elections held on September 24, 2000, when he was defeated in the race for the presidency of Yugoslavia by the candidate of the Democratic Opposition of Serbia, Vojislav Kostunica.

At that time, Milosevic refused to acknowledge defeat, which led to mass protests across Serbia, culminating on October 5, with a large rally in front of the Federal Assembly building.

Milosevic was arrested on April 1, 2001, and extradited to The Hague on Vidovdan by the government of Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, who was assassinated in 2003.

He was the initiator of changes to the constitutional status of the autonomous provinces within Serbia and one of the signatories of the Dayton Agreement, which formally ended the war in the territory of the former Yugoslavia after five years.

He was also linked to the murder of former President of the Presidency of Serbia Ivan Stambolic and to the quadruple killing on the Ibar Highway, as well as to direct or indirect influence over events on all battlefields in the former Yugoslavia, particularly those in Vukovar and Srebrenica.

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