Kosovo War: NATO suspends its airstrikes after Slobodan Milošević agrees to withdraw Serbian forces from Kosovo.
Slobodan Miloevi (Serbian Cyrillic: , pronounced [slobdan mileit] (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. Formerly a high-ranking member of the League of Communists of Serbia (SKS) during the 1980s, he led the Socialist Party of Serbia from its foundation in 1990 until 2003.
Born in Poarevac, he studied law at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Law and joined the League of Socialist Youth of Yugoslavia as a student. During the 1960s he served as an advisor to mayor of Belgrade Branko Pei, and was later appointed chairman of Tehnogas and Beobanka, roles which he served until the 1980s. Miloevi rose to power in 1987 by promoting populist and nationalist views, arguing for the reduction of power of Serbia's autonomous provinces and increased centralism. He was elected president of Socialist Republic of Serbia in 1989 and led the anti-bureaucratic revolution, after which he reformed Serbia's constitution by transitioning Serbia to a multi-party system, and reduced the power of autonomous provinces. Following the 1990 general elections, Miloevi enacted a dominant-party rule while his party retained control over key economic resources of the state.The constituent republics of the Yugoslavia split apart amid the outbreak of the Yugoslav Wars, while Serbia and Montenegro formed the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Miloevi played a major role in the wars, and negotiated the Dayton Agreement on behalf of Bosnian Serbs, which ended the Bosnian War in 1995. During his reign, numerous anti-government and anti-war protests took place, while it is also estimated that between 50,000 and 200,000 people deserted the Miloevi-controlled Yugoslav People's Army, and that between 100,000 and 150,000 people emigrated from Serbia, refusing to participate in the wars. During the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, Miloevi 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. Observers have described his political behavior as populist, eclectic and opportunist. Miloevi 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 Miloevi faltered due to lack of evidence, prompting prime minister Zoran ini to extradite him to the ICTY to stand trial for war crimes instead. At the outset of the trial, Miloevi 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. Miloevi 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. Miloevi suffered from heart ailments and hypertension, and died of a heart attack. The Tribunal denied any responsibility for Miloevi's death and said that he had refused to take prescribed medicines and medicated himself instead.After Miloevi'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 Miloevi 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 Mladi, and by violating its obligation to comply with the provisional measures the Court ordered. Miloevi'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.
The Kosovo War was an armed conflict in Kosovo that started 28 February 1998 and lasted until 11 June 1999. It was fought by the forces of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (i.e. Serbia and Montenegro), which controlled Kosovo before the war, and the Kosovo Albanian rebel group known as the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). The conflict ended when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) intervened by beginning air strikes in March 1999 which resulted in Yugoslav forces withdrawing from Kosovo.
The KLA formed in the early 1990s to fight against Serbian persecution of Kosovo Albanians. The KLA initiated its first campaign in 1995 when it launched attacks against Serbian law enforcement in Kosovo. In June 1996, the group claimed responsibility for acts of sabotage targeting Kosovo police stations, during the Kosovo Insurgency. In 1997, the organisation acquired a large amount of arms through weapons smuggling from Albania, following a rebellion in which weapons were looted from the country's police and army posts. In early 1998, KLA attacks targeting Yugoslav authorities in Kosovo resulted in an increased presence of Serb paramilitaries and regular forces who subsequently began pursuing a campaign of retribution targeting KLA sympathisers and political opponents; this campaign killed 1,500 to 2,000 civilians and KLA combatants.After attempts at a diplomatic solution failed, NATO intervened, justifying the campaign as a "humanitarian war". This precipitated a mass expulsion of Kosovar Albanians as the Yugoslav forces continued to fight during the aerial bombing of Yugoslavia (March–June 1999). By 2000, investigations had recovered the remains of almost three thousand victims of all ethnicities, and in 2001 a United Nations administered Supreme Court, based in Kosovo, found that there had been "a systematic campaign of terror, including murders, rapes, arsons and severe maltreatments", but that Yugoslav troops had tried to remove rather than eradicate the Albanian population.The war ended with the Kumanovo Treaty, with Yugoslav and Serb forces agreeing to withdraw from Kosovo to make way for an international presence. The Kosovo Liberation Army disbanded soon after this, with some of its members going on to fight for the UÇPMB in the Preševo Valley and others joining the National Liberation Army (NLA) and Albanian National Army (ANA) during the armed ethnic conflict in Macedonia, while others went on to form the Kosovo Police. After the war, a list was compiled which documented that over 13,500 people were killed or went missing during the two year conflict. The Yugoslav and Serb forces caused the displacement of between 1.2 million to 1.45 million Kosovo Albanians. After the war, around 200,000 Serbs, Romani, and other non-Albanians fled Kosovo and many of the remaining civilians were victims of abuse.The NATO bombing campaign has remained controversial. It did not gain the approval of the UN Security Council and it caused at least 488 Yugoslav civilian deaths, including substantial numbers of Kosovar refugees.