Former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic, who was buried on Saturday, carved out his own niche in European history as a bully firebrand who stoked brutal ethnic conflict and presided over disaster.
The “Butcher of the Balkans,” who embodied post-Cold War nationalism gone crazy, defied international sanctions and Nato bombs over nearly a decade of strife in the former Yugoslavia.
He fuelled conflicts that killed up to 200 000 people, left nearly three million homeless and the Serbian economy in ruins, and was unmoved by charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
He made no apologies for his actions in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, where his drive for a Greater Serbia “cleansed” of Croats and Muslims sparked a rash of grisly massacres and finally a showdown with the West.
“I’m proud for everything I did in defending my country and my people,” he told United States television network Fox News in a phone interview in 2001 from his jail outside The Hague, where he was awaiting trial. “All my decisions are legitimate and legal, based on the constitution of Yugoslavia and based on the rights to self-defence.”
Milosevic was the first former head of state to appear before an international criminal court and faced life in jail if convicted. But he portrayed himself as a besieged statesman who struggled to keep the crumbling Yugoslav federation intact against separatists and “terrorists”.
The wily Serb matched bluff and cockiness with what one commentator called “a Machiavellian flare for shedding identities which are of no more use to him”.
He started as a faceless Communist minion, later fashioned himself into a successful businessman and technocrat, and bullied his way into prominence as a ruthless champion of the Serb cause.
Western officials were often caught flat-footed by Milosevic, who was widely seen both as the source of Balkan tensions and the key to regional peace in 1995. He went from political pariah to partner and back again.
Richard Holbrooke, who helped broker the 1995 Dayton peace accords to end the Bosnian war, had no love for him but remembered him as a hard-drinking, cigar-chomping negotiator who could be “smart, charming and evasive”.
But Milosevic’s 1998-1999 crackdown on ethnic Albanians in Kosovo swung the pendulum definitively. Many adopted US Senator Joseph Biden’s view that he was “one of the most dangerous and maniacal European leaders since Hitler”.
Milosevic was born on August 20 1941 in the eastern Serbian town of Pozarevac, the son of an Orthodox priest and ardently communist schoolteacher. His parents committed suicide 10 years apart.
He graduated from Belgrade University with a law degree and climbed through the ruling ranks of Tito’s Yugoslavia, developing a reputation as a communist “apparatchik’s apparatchik”.
Milosevic headed both the state-run gas company and the state-run bank. But he was still a relatively little-known official until April 24 1987, when he found the voice that would later rock the Balkans.
On that day he was summoned to help calm a crowd of Kosovar Serbs protesting mistreatment by the province’s Albanian majority. As riot police beat back the throng, Milosevic was anything but calming.
“No one has the right to beat you. No one will ever beat you again,” he raged from a platform. The Serb battle cry was born and ethnic hatreds that had been welling up since Tito’s death in 1980 were unleashed.
Milosevic took over as president of the Serbian republic in 1989, quickly revoking Kosovo’s autonomous status and ratcheting up the Serbs’ jingoistic spirit as Yugoslavia broke apart in 1991.
As president of Serbia and later head of the rump Yugoslav republic that joined it with Montenegro, Milosevic was a cunning leader who used the state media to the hilt to inflame Serb passions and stifle dissent.
He ruled with an iron fist, aided by his wife, Mira, his childhood sweetheart whose intellect and fierce drive earned her the sobriquet “Lady Macbeth of the Balkans”.
But after the wars in Croatia and Bosnia, the ethnic cleansing campaign in Kosovo and the 11 weeks of Nato air strikes it prompted were the last straw for a beleaguered people.
Increasingly targeted by Serbian demonstrations and strikes, Milosevic ran for a new term as Yugoslav president but, pig-headed as usual, refused to cede victory to Vojislav Kostunica.
It sparked a two-week popular uprising that reached a flashpoint on October 5 2000, when hundreds of thousands took to the streets. Finally cornered, he resigned two days later.
Six months later, he was arrested at his home in Belgrade on suspicion of abuse of power and misappropriation of state funds, surrendering only after holding a gun to his head and threatening to kill himself.
His transfer to the United Nations war-crimes court in The Hague on June 28 2001 — ironically a major day in the Serb calendar as the anniversary of their defeat by the Turks in 1389 — hardly produced a ripple in Belgrade.
His March 11 death of a heart attack in his prison cell left many victims lamenting that he had finally escaped justice. — AFP