By Tom Hundley,Chicago Tribune

LONDON – Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav leader whose name became synonymous with a decade of ethnic hatred and bloodshed in the Balkans, has died in the Dutch prison cell where he was being held during his trial for war crimes.

In a statement, the U.N. war crimes tribunal said that Milosevic, 64, was found dead in his bed Saturday morning, apparently of natural causes.

“The guard immediately alerted the detention unit officer in command and the medical officer,” the statement said. “The latter confirmed that Slobodan Milosevic was dead.”

Milosevic had been in poor health for several years, with doctors confirming a serious heart condition and high blood pressure. These problems caused repeated delays in his trial, and in December Milosevic petitioned the tribunal to allow him to travel to Moscow for treatment.

The tribunal declined, suggesting that the doctors from Russia could travel to The Hague to treat him.

Dutch police are conducting a full investigation into the death. An autopsy will be performed, but suspicions of conspiracy and foul play are already rampant in Belgrade. A radio station suggested Milosevic had been poisoned; others speculated he had taken his own life.

Steven Kay, a British lawyer who was assisting in Milosevic’s defense, said he doubted that Milosevic had committed suicide.

“He said to me a few weeks ago, “I haven’t fought this case for as long as I have with any intention to do harm to myself,”‘ Kay told the British Broadcasting Corp. “He has a history of suicide in his family – both his parents – but as far as he was concerned, his attitude to me was quite the opposite from that. He was determined to keep fighting his case.”

Carla Del Ponte, the tribunal’s chief prosecutor, said Milosevic’s death was “regrettable for all the witnesses, for all the survivors, for all the victims that are expecting justice.” In truth, the case against Milosevic was problematic, and several legal experts expressed doubt that Del Ponte would have secured a guilty verdict on the most serious charge – genocide.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Tom Casey said Milosevic “was the principal figure responsible for the violent dismemberment of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, including the outbreak of two horrific wars in Bosnia and Kosovo.”

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The breakup of Yugoslavia may have been inevitable, but Milosevic, more than any other leader, guaranteed that it also would be bloody.

His power base was built on ancient grievances and present-day fears of Yugoslavia’s dominant Serb population. He stoked the fire of Serb nationalism and turned it loose on the country’s other ethnic camps – Croats, Bosnian Muslims and, finally, Kosovo Albanians.

Almost 250,000 would die before it was over, and 2 million more would be displaced. Serbia’s economy was left in tatters. Bosnia and Kosovo remain wards of the international community. And by June 2001, Milosevic would be in a jail cell in the Netherlands, the first head of state charged with genocide and crimes against humanity.

Unlike the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic or Croat leader Franjo Tudjman, his main accomplices in the breakup of Yugoslavia, Milosevic never gave the impression of being a dyed-in-the-wool nationalist. For him, it was merely an opportunity to be exploited on the path to personal power.

An obscure apparatchik in the Serbian Communist Party, Milosevic began his ascent in the late 1980s. The decisive moment came in April 1987 when Milosevic was sent to Kosovo – a last minute fill-in for the moderate Serb President Ivan Stambolic – to hear the grievances of the local Serb minority.

“No one will beat you again,” Milosevic supposedly told the Serbs, and a nationalist hero was born.

Two years later, on the 600th anniversary of the Turkish victory over the Serbs in Kosovo – the central myth of Serb nationalism – a million Serbs turned out to hear Milosevic proclaim Kosovo “the heart of Serbia.” Months earlier, he had stripped Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority of the autonomy they had enjoyed for decades.

In the early 1990s, as the old order in Yugoslavia teetered toward collapse, Milosevic maneuvered to put the Serbs in a position of dominance. When the leaders of other ethnic groups objected, Milosevic quietly began to arm Serb militias in Croatia and Bosnia.

Slovenia was the first to leave the Yugoslav federation, gaining independence after a relatively bloodless war in June 1991. Croatia and Bosnia, with their large Serb populations, would be more problematic.

Milosevic’s plan for “Greater Serbia” was built on a strategy of using terror and violence to expel non-Serbs from territory in Croatia and Bosnia that the Serbs planned to claim for their new national homeland. The project became known as “ethnic cleansing” and would eventually result in Milosevic’s indictment for genocide.

But Milosevic was a skilled tactician. He used proxies to carry out his plans in Croatia and Bosnia. He avoided leaving a paper trail and gave the appearance of being above the fray. Diplomats from Europe, the United States and the United Nations could not decide whether they should treat Milosevic as the chief villain or the key to peace.

Eventually, after a series of military setbacks in Croatia and a NATO bombing campaign that halted the Serb advance in Bosnia, the United States and Europe decided Milosevic would be assigned the role of statesman at the 1995 Dayton peace conference. Milosevic played his part, and the war in Bosnia ended.

His undoing would be Kosovo. When the first signs of armed resistance to Serb rule in Kosovo appeared at the end of 1997, Milosevic moved swiftly and brutally to crush it.

As the Kosovo crisis worsened, Serb opinion temporarily rallied around Milosevic. But when another NATO air campaign – this one hitting targets in Belgrade – ended in yet another Serb defeat, Milosevic’s days were numbered.

In elections in September 2000, Milosevic was soundly defeated by Vojislav Kostunica. He tried to nullify the result, but he was warned by the army and the secret police that a popular revolt was brewing and he could no longer count on their loyalty.

A few weeks later, on Oct. 5, tens of thousands of demonstrators backed by a few bulldozers massed in Belgrade. When they marched on the parliament building and state television headquarters, police refused to intervene. The next day, Milosevic announced he was stepping down to “spend more time” with his grandson.

In March 2001, after a two-day standoff at his residence during which the disgraced leader brandished a pistol and threatened to kill himself and his family, he was arrested and jailed by Serb authorities. Three months later, he was whisked away to The Hague.

Milosevic’s death before a verdict will leave many with a sense of frustration.

“It’s sad that justice in a way has been cheated,” Lord David Owen, a British envoy to the Balkans, told the BBC.

“I’m sorry for the death of any human being, and of course I am sorry for Milosevic’s death. But more than that, I’m sorry that with his death the full truth will never be known,” said Salina Stratijevic, 41, a marketing representative in Belgrade.

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Milosevic was born Aug. 20, 1941, in Pozarevic, a bland industrial town in central Serbia. His father was a former Orthodox priest and his mother a teacher.

In high school, he met his future wife, Mirjana Markovic, who eventually became his closest adviser and only confidante.

Slavoljub Djukic, a Serb journalist who wrote an authoritative biography of the couple, said Milosevic and his wife were devoted to each other. In the last years of his rule, she became a behind-the-scenes power and is widely suspected of being responsible for ordering a spate of political assassinations.

At the end, however, Milosevic was alone. Soon after his arrest, Markovic moved to Russia, where she lives in self-imposed exile. Son Marko, a petty thug, also is in Russia, and a daughter, Marija, lives in Bosnia.

Milosevic never acknowledged the legitimacy of the U.N. tribunal and insisted on defending himself, using the tribunal as a platform to portray himself as the defender of the Serb nation.

A few in Serbia still see him that way.

“He was a real leader and a real Serb. It’s a shame that he was poisoned in The Hague,” said Milojko Jovanovic, 57, a Belgrade pensioner. “It was easy for (the tribunal) to give him some wrong medication and be finished with him. They were afraid of the truth.”

But most Serbs tired of him long ago, and few will mourn his passing.

“I don’t feel bad about his death. Not at all. He almost destroyed this country,” said Tomislav Nedeljkovic, 47, a Belgrade doctor.

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(Dejan Zdravkovic in Belgrade contributed to this report.)

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(c) 2006, Chicago Tribune.

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Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

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