March 11, 2006

  • Slobodan Milosevic Found Dead in Cell


    AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - Former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic, the so-called "butcher of the Balkans" being tried for war crimes after orchestrating a decade of bloodshed during his country's breakup, was found dead Saturday in his prison cell. He was 64.


    Milosevic, who suffered chronic heart ailments and high blood pressure, apparently died of natural causes and was found in his bed, the U.N. tribunal said, without giving an exact time of death.


    He had been examined by doctors following frequent complaints of fatigue or ill health that delayed his trial, but the tribunal could not immediately say when he last had a medical checkup. All detainees at the center in Scheveningen are checked by a guard every half hour.


    Milosevic's death will be a crushing blow to the tribunal and those looking to establish an authoritative historical record of the Balkan wars.

    "Justice was late," said Hashim Thaci, the leader of ethnic Albanian insurgents against Milosevic's forces in 1998-1999 in Kosovo's capital, Pristina. "God took him."

    Though the witness testimony is on public record, history will be denied the judgment of a panel of legal experts weighing the evidence of his personal guilt and the story of his regime.

    "It is a pity he didn't live to the end of the trial to get the sentence he deserved," Croatian President Stipe Mesic said.


    The death "does not alter in any way the need to come to terms with the legacy of the Balkan wars," Austrian Foreign Minister Ursula Plassnik, whose country holds the rotating EU president, said in Salzburg.

    Milosevic, a figure of beguiling charm and cunning ruthlessness, was a master tactician who turned his country's defeats into personal victories and held onto power for 13 years despite losing four wars that shattered his nation and impoverished his people.

    Milosevic led Serbia, the dominant Yugoslav republic, into four Balkan wars during the 1990s. The secret of his survival was his uncanny ability to exploit what less adroit figures would consider a fatal blow.

    He once described himself as the "Ayatollah Khomeini of Serbia," assuring his prime minister, Milan Panic, that "the Serbs will follow me no matter what." For years, they did — through wars that dismembered Yugoslavia and plunged what was left of the country into social, political, moral and economic ruin.

    But in the end, his people abandoned him: first in October 2000, when he was unable to convince the majority of Yugoslavs that he had staved off electoral defeat by his successor, Vojislav Kostunica, and again on April 1, 2001, when he surrendered after a 26-hour standoff to face criminal charges stemming from his ruinous rule.

    Bosnia also has sued Serbia, accusing it of genocide in the first case of a country standing trial for humanity's worst crime.