Slobodan Milošević

Born in Serbia during its time being occupied by Germany in 1941, Slobodan Milošević showcased the promising signs of being an intelligent leader from a young age. He studied at a faculty of Law of the University of Belgrade, where he got his qualifications become a lawyer. It was during his time at university was where he became the head of the ideology committee for the Yugoslavia Communist League's League of Socialist Youth of Yugoslavia.

For most of his life, the now former Yugoslavia was kept relatively at peace thanks to the efforts of dictator Josip Broz Tito during his time. Ethnic conflict between Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, among other ethnicities in the state was kept to a minimum. However, once Josip Broz Tito died from gangrene in 1980, the tensions began to rumble again. These South Slavic ethnic groups had a lot of differences between each other that a lot of the time were just incompatible for the one nation. As a result, in the early 1990s, some of these South Slavic states decided to break free like Slovenia followed by Croatia. Serbia, which was the leading state of the Yugoslavic nations, didn't want this to want the union to break up and as a result, various wars occurring within the crumble in Yugoslavia. Slobodan witnessed this as he entered the world of politics.

His law qualifications saw him become President of Serbia between 1989 and 1997, and he was President of the federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1997 until he was overthrown, 3 years later. The bulk of his political career following the 1980s was during the Yugoslav Wars, he played a major role during this period he became the first sitting head of state charged with war crimes. The bulk of his war crimes were in relation to the killing and harming various ethnic groups within the former Yugoslavia, especially Bosnians and ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. He had the most violent and glory seeking of Bosnian Serbs to go after these innocent people such as the recently deceased Butcher of Bosnia, Ratko Mladić, who could essentially be described as a Balkan Klaus Barbie. Slobodan Milosević only cared about Serbs and Bosnian Serbs, everyone else was dead meat. As NATO bombed the former Yugoslavia during May 1999, Milosević was charged for war crimes, and crimes against humanity all because of what he was doing to the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. Obviously justified, the United Nations set up a value to trial those who committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in the former Yugoslavia, called the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia or ICTY.

Slobodan also censored the press. Police brutality was rampant in Serbia during this time. As a result of his autocracy, government corruption, political violence and arrests of Otpor! activists, Slobodan was eventually overthrown during the Bulldozer Revolution in Autumn 2000. His status of a war criminal left him and his family with limited options as to where to flee to after being overthrown. That ended up being a lesser problem for him when he was extradited to The Hague in The Netherlands for trial following his arrest in 2001, and he was later charged with war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Before a verdict could be given, Milosević died in his prison cell of a heart attack on the 11th March 2006 at the age of 64. Sadly, Serbia still glorifies its war criminals to this day.