Slobodan Milošević, Serbian lawyer and politician, 1st President of Serbia (d. 2006)
Slobodan Milošević (Serbian Cyrillic: Слободан Милошевић, pronounced [slobǒdan milǒːʃeʋitɕ] (listen); 20 August 1941 – 11 March 2006) was a Yugoslav and Serbian politician who served as the president of Serbia within Yugoslavia from 1989 to 1997 (originally the Socialist Republic of Serbia, a constituent republic of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, from 1989 to 1992) and president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1997 to 2000. He led the Socialist Party of Serbia from its foundation in 1990 and rose to power as Serbian president during efforts to reform the 1974 Constitution of Yugoslavia in response to alleged marginalization of Serbia, views that Serbia's autonomous provinces had too much power, making them almost independent from Serbia, and claims of political incapacity to deter Albanian separatist unrest in Serbia's autonomous province of Kosovo.Milošević's presidency of Serbia and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was marked by several major reforms to Serbia's constitution from the 1980s to the 1990s that reduced the powers of Serbia's autonomous provinces. In 1990, Serbia transitioned from a Titoist one-party system to a multi-party system and attempted reforms to the 1974 Yugoslav Constitution. The constituent republics of the country split apart amid the outbreak of wars, and the former Yugoslav republics of Serbia and Montenegro founded the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Milošević negotiated the Dayton Agreement on behalf of the Bosnian Serbs, which ended the Bosnian War in 1995.
During the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, Milošević was charged by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) with war crimes in connection with the Bosnian War, the Croatian War of Independence, and the Kosovo War. He became the first sitting head of state to be charged with war crimes. During the 1990s, numerous anti-government and antiwar protests took place. It is estimated that between 50,000 and 200,000 people deserted the Milošević-controlled Yugoslav People's Army, while between 100,000 and 150,000 people emigrated from Serbia, refusing to participate in the wars.
Milošević resigned from the Yugoslav presidency amid demonstrations after the disputed presidential election of 24 September 2000, and was arrested by Yugoslav federal authorities on 31 March 2001 on suspicion of corruption, abuse of power, and embezzlement. The initial investigation into Milošević faltered due to lack of evidence, prompting Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić to extradite him to the ICTY to stand trial for war crimes instead. At the outset of the trial, Milošević denounced the Tribunal as illegal because it had not been established with the consent of the United Nations General Assembly; therefore, he refused to appoint counsel for his defence. Milošević conducted his own defence in the five-year trial, which ended without a verdict when he died in his prison cell in The Hague on 11 March 2006. Milošević suffered from heart ailments and hypertension, and died of a heart attack. The Tribunal denied any responsibility for Milošević's death and said that he had refused to take prescribed medicines and medicated himself instead.After Milošević's death, the ICTY and the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals found that he was a part of a joint criminal enterprise to remove Croats and Bosniaks from large parts of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) concluded separately in the Bosnian Genocide Case that there was no evidence linking him to genocide committed by Bosnian Serb forces during the Bosnian War. However, the Court did find that Milošević and others in Serbia had violated the Genocide Convention by failing to prevent the genocide from occurring, by not cooperating with the ICTY in punishing its perpetrators, in particular General Ratko Mladić, and by violating its obligation to comply with the provisional measures the Court ordered. Milošević's rule has been described as authoritarian or autocratic, as well as kleptocratic, with numerous accusations of electoral fraud, political assassinations, suppression of press freedom and police brutality.