PROFILE OF SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC

BELGRADE, June 28 (Hina) - Slobodan Milosevic, a former Serbian and Yugoslav president, was extradited to the ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia) on Thursday. The Butcher of the Balkans, as Milosevic was labelled by western officials, will be long known for the wars in Croatia, Bosnia- Herzegovina and Kosovo in which hundred of thousands lost their lives and millions were forced to leave their homes but also for pushing his country to the verge of disaster and for the defamation of the Serbian people. Milosevic was born on 20 October 1941 in the central Serbian town of Pozarevac. His father was a defrocked Orthodox priest and sometime teacher of Russian, and his mother was also a teacher. Both parents committed suicide. Milosevic finished primary and secondary school in his hometown, and graduated from a law school in Belgrade in 1964. When he was 17 he joined the Communist Party. He was very active in the party and rose steadily through the ranks. The party put him in various business positions. From 1969 to 1973 he was a deputy general-director of the "Tehnogas" company, where Ivan Stambolic was the director-general. During the early period of Milosevic's political career, Stambolic sponsored and helped this ambitious politician to rise to power. Later on, Ivan Stambolic became a strong opponent of Milosevic's rule and therefore he was abducted in the final weeks of the Milosevic regime in 2000 since when his destiny has been unknown. In 1983 Milosevic was put at the helm of a major state-run bank. In May 1986 he was elected as the President of Serbian Communists when the then Serbian Communist boss Stambolic became the President of Serbia (one of the federal republics in the then Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia or SFRY). A year later Stambolic sent Milosevic to Kosovo, a volatile area in the then SFRY owing to the Serbian repression over the ethnic Albanian majority. During his meeting with local Serb leaders, a mob of local Serbs gathered in front of the building where the meeting took place asking that the participants in the session to listen to their complaints. On that occasion Milosevic addressed the mob and delivered a fiery speech telling them that "nobody has the right to beat you." This words helped elevate him to a Serbian national leader and hero. Since the establishment of the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) in 1990 he has been at its helm. The party was formed by the merger of the then communists and the Socialist Association of the Working People of Serbia (SSRNS) during the break up of the then Yugoslav federation (SFRY). During the first multiparty elections in Serbia in December 1990, he won the presidential election by a landslide and became the first President of the Republic of Serbia to have been elected directly by the vote of citizens. Two years later he was re-elected. In the early 1990s he launched aggression against Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia. Despite the fact that he lost those wars and caused great suffering to not only other nations (Croats in Croatia and Croats and Moslems in Bosnia) but also to ethnic Serbs in those countries, he managed to remain in power for 13 years. In July 1997 he was elected in the federal assembly as the President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia/Montenegro) and was at that post until 5 October 2000 when a candidate of the united democratic opposition parties (DOS), Vojislav Kostunica, defeated him. Milosevic's attempts to rig the elections did not help him to remain in power and he had to step down after riotous events which were at the brink of the civil war in the wake of the ballot. In May 1999 the International War Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) issued an indictment against Milosevic, charging him with three counts of crimes against humanity and one count of violations of the laws and customs of war committed in Kosovo which he tried to completely clean of the ethnic Albanian population. The international community, which was fed up with his wars in Croatia and Bosnia, eventually reacted and stopped his campaign against ethnic Albanians in 1999 when NATO launched 78-day-long punishing air strikes against military targets in Yugoslavia. The ICTY has announced that Milosevic's indictment is likely to be amended by counts about his liability for war crimes perpetrated in Bosnia and Croatia when local Serbs, encouraged by Milosevic and supported by the then Serb-led Yugoslav army, took up arms and triggered wars in an attempt to carry out plans about a Greater Serbia, drawn up by him and some notorious Serb intellectuals, obsessed about nationalist ideas. Milosevic is married to Mira Markovic, an ambitious politician as well who is believed to give enormous support to his husband in his attempts to create a greater Serbia under the pretext of trying to maintain multi-ethnic Yugoslav federation. They have two children, daughter Marija who is the owner of several radio and television stations in Belgrade, and son Marko, a "successful businessman" and one of the bosses in the business of oil and cigarette smuggling in Yugoslavia. Marko's whereabouts has been unknown since his father's ouster in October last year. According to some speculations, other Serbian mobsters are in the hot pursuit of him owing to his murky deals. (hina) ms