Serbian Communist Party bureaucrat called “the Butcher of the Balkans” for his efforts toward “ethnic cleansing.” Formerly a law student, he was the CEO of one of the largest banks in his country before becoming the founder and president of the Socialist Party of Serbia, a hard-liner communist.
He was the product of a trouble youth; his dad Svetozar, a teacher of religion from Montenegro, abandoned the family when the boy was in elementary school, and in 1962, committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. His mother: Stanislava, a fervent Communist activist; committed suicide by hanging herself in her living room, 1974 . An army general uncle also committed suicide by shooting himself. Milosevic was a loner in school with no personal friends. He earned a law degree from Belgrade University in 1964; at school, he was active in student politics.
He married a fellow communist, Mirjana Markovic, Ph.D., a high school classmate activist from a prominent Serbian communist family and tenured professor of sociology at the University of Belgrade. They had two kids, son Marko and daughter Marija. His religion is Serbian Orthodox. He suffers from diabetes.
When Slovenia and Croatia seceded from Yugoslavia in 1992, Milosevic stirred up ancient rivalries. At least 10,000 Croatians were killed and Bosnia became a charnel house of some 19,000 dead. The Serb-officered army shelled, burned, looted, massacred and raped their way to control some 70% of Bosnian territory.
No longer a national hero, Milosevic conducted outrageous propaganda and vote rigging to win the 12/20/1992 election.
On 3/24/1999, NATO and American troops began bombing Yugoslavia when he refused to accept a peace agreement for Kosovo, a pact that had been signed in Paris the prior week by ethnic Albanians who make up most of Kosovo’s population.
On 5/27/1999, the world tribunal indicted Milosevic for atrocities in his homeland. After several years standoff, Riot police attempted to arrest him with a warrant on 3/31/2001, but he calmly denied the action, refusing to leave his Belgrade villa. After a 26-hour armed standoff, he yielded and was taken to Belgrade’s Central Prison on 4/01/2001.
On the morning of March 11, 2006, the former dictator was found dead in his cell at the United Nations detention center at The Hague. Although hints flew that his death was caused by accidental or intentional poisoning at his own hand or another’s, an autopsy report stated that a heart attack was the cause of death.
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