WHO WAS SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC?

Personal life

· Born August 20, 1941, in Pozarevac, Serbia, Yugoslavia

· Parents: Father an Orthodox priest; mother, a teacher and Communist Party activist. Both parents committed suicide.

· Spouse and children: wife: Mirjana Markovic; son: Marko, daughter: Marija

· Education: Law degree from Belgrade University (1964)

· Religion: Serbian Orthodox

Career

· General director of Tehnogas company (1973-1978)

· President of Beogradska Udruzena Banka (1978-1983)

· Member of the Serbian Communist Party's central committee (1982)

· President of the League of Communists of Serbia (1986-1988)

· President of the Socialist Party of Serbia (1990)

· President of Serbia (1989-1997)

· President of Yugoslavia (1997-2000)

· Elected head of Yugoslavia's Socialist Party (2000)

Tribunal

· Since 2002, Milosevic was on trial before the U.N. war crimes tribunal accused of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity committed during the 1990s war in the Balkans.

· He faced 66 charges and was the first head of state to be indicted by a U.N. tribunal.

· According to medical reports, he had high blood pressure, hypertension and cardiovascular conditions that caused the trial to be delayed several times.

· In the Kosovo war, more than 10,000 people were killed; more than 4,000 people were still missing two years after the war.

Milosevic: Architect of Balkans Carnage

Serb leader presided over ethnic cleansing in Bosnia

Milosevic, who died at the age of 64 Saturday in custody at The Hague, Netherlands, was on trial for war crimes in the killing fields of the Balkan states of Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo.

Milosevic rose through the Communist Party ranks to become leader of the Serbian republic and then the leader of multi-republic Yugoslavia. He was president when hundreds of thousands of people were killed and millions were forced to leave their homes as the fall of communism opened the door to ethnic and religious strife.

Today, communist Yugoslavia is no more, broken into several independent states, including Serbia and Montenegro, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia. But in the 1990s, its breakup generated savage bloodshed unseen on the continent since World War II.

The term "ethnic cleansing" became synonymous with Bosnia. Serb forces there, loyal to the Serbian Orthodox Milosevic, tried to carve out a separate state by forcing out the non-Serb civilian population. They did it by bombarding towns and cities, including Sarajevo, with heavy artillery, besieging villages and massacring civilians.

Snipers targeted men, women and children. Markets full of people shopping were shelled. There were concentration camps, mass rape and the forced prostitution of women and girls. The violence peaked with the Bosnian Serb assault on the tiny Muslim village of Srebrenica. The International Red Cross says that about 7,000 Muslim men and boys remain unaccounted for.

Radovan Karadzic and his military chief, Ratko Mladic, Bosnian Serb leaders controlled by Milosevic, were twice indicted for genocide and crimes against humanity. They remain at large.

In 1995, after NATO conducted bombing raids to stop the Bosnian Serbs, Milosevic became the West's partner in the peace that was forged in Dayton, Ohio. But he was as notorious a peace partner as he was a war maker. Having lost both Croatia and Bosnia, Milosevic in 1998 launched one more military campaign, this time in the tiny Serbian province of Kosovo. It was his undoing.

NATO again took up arms to stop him. After 78 days of bombing, Milosevic capitulated.

NATO forces and the U.N. administration took over Kosovo. Hundreds of thousands of deported Albanian residents came home, and survivors started looking for their dead. The war crimes tribunal started on-site investigations.

After losing Kosovo, Milosevic called new elections -- a grave miscalculation. After supporting him for 10 bloody years, the Yugoslav people had now had enough and voted Milosevic out. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to celebrate his downfall and the end of what many called their nightmare years.

Milosevic's downfall paved the way for his arrest. By April 2001, only a few hundred die-hards mustered the will to protest against his being sent to Belgrade's central prison. He had been indicted for war crimes in May 1999 by the tribunal at The Hague. Yugoslavia's government also accused him of corruption, political killings, election fraud, money laundering and, most recently, war crimes.

In June 2001 Belgrade sent Milosevic to the war crimes tribunal at The Hague. His trial started there in February 2002 and was continuing at the time of his death.

Milosevic, who earned a law degree from the University of Belgrade in 1964, defended himself during the trial. He was feisty and combative during the lengthy hearing.

Srebrenica: 'A triumph of evil'

By CNN's Graham Jones

LONDON, England (CNN) -- It is now remembered as the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II.

In a five-day orgy of slaughter at Srebrenica in July 1995, up to 8,000 Muslims were systematically exterminated in what was described at the U.N. war crimes tribunal as "the triumph of evil."

A judge at The Hague tribunal was later to describe what happened in Srebrenica as "truly scenes from hell written on the darkest pages of human history." Thousands of Bosnian Muslims had sought refuge in the spa town of Srebrenica in 1995 as the Bosnian Serb army marched towards them. They were protected by just 100 lightly equipped Dutch peacekeepers, who proved no match for the advancing, heavily-armed Serb army.

Denied reinforcements, the Dutch were forced to stand aside while Serb troops intent on "ethnic cleansing" did their worst. The peacekeepers even witnessing the summary execution of civilians.

In the days before the onslaught, 30,000 Muslims fleeing the advancing Serb army were crammed into the town. Within days, there was not one Muslim left.

A great number fled, only for many of them to be wiped out in Serb ambushes, but the men who stayed fared the worst. Thousands of men and boys as young as 10 were rounded up and murdered. Those who tried to hide in their homes were, according to evidence at the trial of Serb General Radislav Krstic at The Hague in March 2000, "hunted down like dogs and slaughtered."

Serbian TV footage shows woman and children being separated from the men and put on buses. In a sickening show of "reassurance" Bosnian Serb commander-in-chief General Ratko Mladic told the women everyone would be taken out by bus out and safely reunited. When the cameras were turned off the real face of the Serb army emerged as the slaughter began.

More than 60 truckloads of refugees were taken from Srebrenica to execution sites where they were bound, blindfolded, and shot with automatic rifles. Some of the executions were carried out at night under arc lights. Industrial bulldozers then pushed the bodies into mass graves. Some were buried alive, a French policeman who collected evidence from Bosnian Muslims, Jean-Rene Ruez, told The Hague tribunal in 1996.

He gave evidence that Bosnian Serb forces had killed and tortured refugees at will. Streets were littered with corpses, he said, and rivers were red with blood. Many people committed suicide to avoid having their noses, lips and ears chopped off, he said.

Among other lurid accounts of mass murder, Ruez cited cases of adults being forced to kill their children or watching as soldiers ended the young lives. "One soldier approached a woman in the middle of a crowd," he said. "Her child was crying. The soldier asked why the child was crying and she explained that he was hungry. The soldier made a comment like, 'He won't be hungry anymore.' He slit the child's throat in front of everybody."