Milosevic goes on trial for war crimes 2002
On this day in 2002, former Yugoslav president Slobodan
Milosevic goes on trial at The Hague, Netherlands, on charges of
genocide and war crimes in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. Milosevic served
as his own attorney for much of the prolonged trial, which ended without
a verdict when the so-called “Butcher of the Balkans” was found dead at
age 64 from an apparent heart attack in his prison cell on March 11,
2006.
Yugoslavia, consisting of Croatia, Montenegro, Slovenia, Serbia,
Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia, became a federal republic, headed by
Communist leader Marshal Tito, on January 31, 1946. Tito died in May
1980 and Yugoslavia, along with communism, crumbled over the next
decade.
Milosevic, born August 20, 1941, joined the Communist Party at age
18; he became president of Serbia in 1989. On June 25, 1991, Croatia and
Slovenia declared their independence from Yugoslavia and Milosevic sent
tanks to the Slovenian border, sparking a brief war that ended in
Slovenia’s secession. In Croatia, fighting broke out between Croats and
ethnic Serbs and Serbia sent weapons and medical supplies to the Serbian
rebels in Croatia. Croatian forces clashed with the Serb-led Yugoslav
army troops and their Serb supporters. An estimated 10,000 people were
killed and hundreds of Croatian towns were destroyed before a U.N.
cease-fire was established in January 1992. In March, Bosnia-Herzegovina
declared its independence, and Milosevic funded the subsequent Bosnian
Serb rebellion, starting a war that killed an estimated 200,000 people,
before a U.S.-brokered peace agreement was reached at Dayton, Ohio, in
1995.
In Kosovo, a formerly autonomous province of Serbia, liberation
forces clashed with Serbs and the Yugoslav army was sent in. Amidst
reports that Milosevic had launched an ethnic cleansing campaign against
Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians, NATO forces launched air strikes against
Yugoslavia in 1999.
Ineligible to run for a third term as Serbian president, Milosevic
had made himself president of Yugoslavia in 1997. After losing the
presidential election in September 2000, he refused to accept defeat
until mass protests forced him to resign the following month. He was
charged with corruption and abuse of power and finally surrendered to
Serbian authorities on April 1, 2001, after a 26-hour standoff. That
June, he was extradited to the Netherlands and indicted by a United
Nations war crimes tribunal. Milosevic died in his cell of a heart
attack before his trial could be completed.
In February 2003, Serbia and Montenegro became a commonwealth and
officially dropped the name Yugoslavia. In June 2006, the two countries
declared their independence from each other.
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World War II
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