Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

MILOSEVIC, SLOBODAN
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themselves from “foreign”—that is, Croatian and Bosnian Muslim—rule. To make their
defense possible, Milosevic provided the “threatened” Serbian minorities within those
two newly independent states with weapons, inciting them to wage ethnic war. The result
saw the practice of ethnic cleansing introduced throughout the Balkans, with the Bosnian
Muslims ultimately suffering genocide at the hands of the Serbs. In July 1995, Serb troops
took over Srebrenica and Potocari and, as Dutchbat (the Dutch Battalion whose mandate,
under the auspices of the UN, was to protect the so-called safe area of Srebrenica)
looked on haplessly, some seven thousand to eight thousand Muslim boys and men were
taken out into the woods and murdered. The genocide was “the largest massacre in Europe
since the Holocaust.”
In 1997 Milosevic became president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). Over
the years, Milosevic was the prime mover of the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia along
ethnic lines. He came close to achieving his goal of a Greater Serbia, and might have
done so had it not been for two major interventions from the outside by the international
community. The first was the peace settlement bringing an end to the Bosnian War of
1992–1995, the Dayton Agreement (November 21, 1995). As a result of the Dayton
Agreement, the fighting in Bosnia was ended through the introduction of NATO troops,
whose task was to supervise the disengagement of the belligerent parties and monitor the
resulting peace. Despite this, the new map of Bosnia incorporated many of the military
gains won through force of arms by Serbian militias and regular forces. Although it was
certainly a victory of sorts for Milosevic, it stopped short of giving him total mastery over
Bosnia, which remained independent. The second foreign intervention preventing his creation
of Greater Serbia was the agreement made in Rambouillet, France, on February 23,
1999, to resolve the crisis over Kosovo. Milosevic’s refusal to cease violence against the
Kosovar Albanian population led to the intense and controversial NATO bombing
between March and June 1999. As NATO bombed, the Serbs carried out a massive
campaign of “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo. Milosevic was forced to surrender, desist from
ordering attacks against the Kosovars, and evacuate all military, paramilitary, and police
forces from the area. In the end, Milosevic, though not his countrymen, considered the
battle a victory. The defeat in Kosovo eventually led to his political downfall in October
2000.
In 2000, Milosevic called for elections in September 2000, but lost the election to opposition
leader Vojislav Kostunica (b. 1944). Milosevic, though, refused to acknowledge the
fact of his loss, and that resulted in huge rallies of protest against Milosevic. Fed up with
Milosevic and his policies, the people—numbering in the hundreds of thousands—went
on strike and, ultimately, in their anger and frustration, set fire to both the parliament and
the state television station.
On June 28, 2001, the newly elected government of Vojislav Kostunica, after some
hesitation, turned Milosevic over to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former
Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, which had, on May 21, 1999, indicted Milosevic for
alleged war crimes in Kosovo. Soon the charges against him were recast to include genocide
in Bosnia and war crimes in Croatia. When his trial began on February 12, 2002, he
refused to recognize the legitimacy of the tribunal, and chose to represent himself rather
than accept court-appointed counsel. The trial was controversial from the beginning,
with Milosevic still enjoying a high level of support within Serbia and the Serb areas of
Bosnia known as Republika Srpska. Other critics voiced concerns about the extent to