Slobo, "The Butcher of the Balkans"

Franjo Tudjman's long and arduous journey from Partizan war hero to president of his country was very unlike that of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, whom the New York Times labeled the "Butcher of the Balkans." Milosevic, an unrepentant hard-line communist in the mold of Joseph Stalin, was a product of communism and the Yugoslav Party-State.

Known to his few friends as "Slobo," he was born in 1941 in Pozarevac, near Belgrade, the son of a Serbian Orthodox priest from Montenegro and a hardline communist school teacher. His father abandoned his family, taking Slobo's brother Bora with him. Both of his parents committed suicide, and Milosevic literally grew up in the Party. He married Mirjana Markovic, a professor of Marxist theory who controlled the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. She was a member of one of Yugoslavia's best known communist families. Milosevic lived such a secretive life at a villa on the outskirts of Belgrade that one of his closest friends admitted to a reporter from the New York Times Magazine that in twenty years he had never seen Milosevic's home or his wife.

Under the mentorship of Ivan Stambolic, the previous Serbian Party boss, Milosevic rose through the ranks from being director of the energy company Tehnogas to the presidency of Belgrade's main bank. In the mid1980's Stambolic elevated him to head of the Communist Party of Serbia. By way of thanks, Milosevic engineered a coup within the Party in the fall of 1987, overthrowing his old friend and mentor, and naming himself the undisputed head of Party and government in Serbia.

Milosevic immediately set to work purging the leadership of Vojvodina, Kosova, and the Republic of Montenegro, bringing those constitutionally autonomous regions into line with his "Greater Serbia" policies. Many who opposed his policies, including Branislav Matic, a key opposition leader in the Serbian Renewal Movement, were murdered. Another opposition leader, George Bozovic, mysteriously fell from a high building.

As the rest of Europe was abandoning Marxism, Milosevic reinstated courses in Marxist theory in Serbia's schools and colleges. In January 1990 at the last Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, Milosevic stormed the podium to declare that communism would go on even without Slovenia and Croatia. But the realities of Europe in the nineties eventually came home to roost even for Milosevic. In the Fall of 1990, he renamed the Communist Party the "Socialist Party" before winning 61 % of the vote in the Party-controlled "free" elections. Milosevic's transformation from Stalinist to "democrat" was thus complete. In April 1992, he finally consented to the removal of the red star from Yugoslavia's flag.

By 1996, Milosevic had come full circle from communist to nationalist back to communist. He had caused the greatest conflict in Europe's post-war era. He was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands, concentration camps, forced labor, slavery, and for the use of rape as an instrument of war. Yet it seemed unlikely that he would ever stand trial as a war criminal. Instead, Milosevic was ready to forget what he termed "nationalist ezcesses."

At the 1996 Socialist Party (the re-named League of Communists of Serbia) Congress, Milosevic stood before almost two thousand hand-picked delegates as the Socialist "Internationale" was played. He was triumphant in his reelection, by a vote of 1,799 delegates to four, even though there were no other candidates, and he had purged two-thirds of the party's leadership. He promised to lead Serbia back to communism in the mold of China and announced a new direction for the twenty-first century - "Serbia 2000." That direction looked very much to the communist past and not to a democratic future.

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