Bizarre script to final Milosevic exit

For a man who seemed to be a blend of Hitler and a Chicago gangster, it was the only possible ending to the script holed up in a bunker, ringed on all sides by men of the law and yelling that he would never be taken out alive.

Slobodan Milosevic always had a sense of theatre.

It was what carried him to the top in 1987, when he rode the crest of a wave of Serbian anger over Kosovo with his crowd-pleasing speeches on Serbian honour and glory.

That all seemed a long time ago yesterday, amid reports that the 20 or so desperate bodyguards defending his villa from the Serbian police were hopelessly drunk. It added a squalid touch to the surreal drama in the refined Belgrade suburb of Dedinje, where the Milosevic clan lives.

The standoff inevitably drew the nation's mind back to the fact that Milosevic comes from famously suicidal stock: both his parents his withdrawn communist mother and Orthodox clergyman father killed themselves.

The old taunt, "Save Serbia and kill yourself!" was heard again in the Belgrade crowd a night earlier, when Milosevic was first hustled to the Palace of Justice, before scurrying back to his bunker yesterday for the final siege.

The death of the former President by suicide or in a shoot-out would certainly have solved many problems for the new Administration in Belgrade under Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic and President Vojislav Kostunica. The President is bitterly opposed to surrendering his predecessor to The Hague War Crimes Tribunal to answer charges over the mass killing of Kosovo Albanians in 1999 as the West is demanding.

Washington had made it clear that Milosevic's arrest would be a key factor in deciding whether Serbia qualified for US aid.

The charges he faces at home are totally different. They centre on corruption, especially on the way he funnelled millions of dollars out of his bankrupt country to bank accounts in Cyprus and Russia during his terms as President of Serbia and then of Yugoslavia from 1989 to 1999.

A trial at home would satisfy Serbs' curiosity about where all their country's hard currency went, but would not satisfy calls for Milosevic to join the other indicted war criminals from the former Yugoslavia in jail in the Netherlands.

The downfall of Milosevic has an almost epic quality. From Act One, when he was the idol of his country, to yesterday's closing scene in the bunker, it has been a few short years.

Crowds of a million or more (a lot in a country of 10 million) once flocked to hear the great man speak, as they did in Kosovo Polje in June 1989, to celebrate the 600th anniversary of the most famous battle in Serbian history. He had crushed the Kosovo Albanians, arrested their leadership, scrapped their autonomy and seemed to hold Yugoslavia in the palm of his hand.

The Serbs trooped down to Kosovo in their thousands to pay tribute to the man they freely called their saviour. In retrospect, that boiling hot afternoon in Kosovo, when Milosevic received the homage of a nation on a giant dais was his high point.

As he went on to stir the Serbs into revolt in Croatia and Bosnia, Yugoslavia cracked at the seams, and the wars that followed from 1991 to 1995 revealed Milosevic to be a less skilful tactician than many Western analysts predicted.

They nicknamed him the "Balkan Houdini" for his skill in extricating himself from tight corners. But while he succeeded in clinging to power, his country paid a terrible price.

The fighting turned Yugoslavia from the richest country in the old communist bloc into a basket case and a pariah state.

In a gigantic money laundering operation aimed at propping up the regime and the Milosevic family he sucking up every last deutschmark and dollar in private hands in Serbia.

The technology was devastatingly simple. Milosevic simply ordered the state bank in Serbia to print vast amounts of Yugoslav dinars, inflicting Weimar Republic levels of hyper-inflation on the people who trusted him with their lives.

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Herald Online feature: Yugoslavia
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia

Serbian Ministry of Information

Serbian Radio - Free B92

Otpor: Serbian Student Resistance Movement