Free Republic

TOMISLAV NIKOLIC, the leader of Serbia’s far-right Radical Party, wants to be clear about one thing in particular: he is not the political reincarnation of Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian strongman who masterminded the Balkan wars of the 1990s that left his country in ruins and at least 125,000 people dead. Not that he thinks Mr. Milosevic was all that bad. “Milosevic was not a criminal, but he made a lot of mistakes,” said Mr. Nikolic, 56, a charismatic and towering man, with brooding eyes and a quick wit, who once oversaw cemeteries in an industrial town and proudly calls himself...

<p>Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav leader who orchestrated the Balkan wars of the 1990s and was on trial for war crimes, was found dead in his prison cell at the U.N. detention center near The Hague, the U.N. tribunal said Saturday. He was 65.</p>

Slobodan Milosevic completed his re-examination of Col. Vlatko Vukovic at the Hague Tribunal on Wednesday. He presented a document detailing the battalion rules of the Yugoslav Army. This document was written in 1988 and used the term “ciscenje” to describe the removal of enemy forces from Yugoslav territory. The term “ciscenje” had been commonplace in Yugoslav Military terminology for more than 10 years before the Kosovo war. Therefore, there is nothing unseemly about the term appearing in the Vukovic’s war diary. During the cross-examination Mr. Nice showed Col. Vukovic a photograph of an Albanian civilian who he said been burned...

In an interview with SPIEGEL, Vldan Batic, 56, the former Serbian Justice Minister, talks about how biased the justice system still is in his troubled nation and how the shadow of former President Slobodan Milosevic continues to hover. Even while on trial for war crimes, Milosevic may still be pulling the strings in Serbia. Slobodan Milosevic, first became president of Yugoslavia in 1989, but many say his influence is still felt. Currently, he is in the Netherlands, facing charges of war crimes at The Hague. In his first six years in power, Milosevic ignited conflicts in Croatia (1991) and Bosnia...

Remember Kosovo? By Cliff Kincaid | December 28, 2004 Clinton's policy was not to bomb those terrorists but to support them and bomb the Christian Serbs. AIM put together a list of the most underreported or buried stories of 2004, and one of them was the resurgence of anti-Serb, anti-Christian violence in Kosovo. Dozens were killed and more Christian churches were destroyed there. Kosovo got some attention near the end of the year when newspapers covered the fact that a former leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the KLA, became prime minister in a new Kosovo-based government. A story in...

Telephone intercepts appear to expose Milosevic role in Croatian and Bosnian conflicts. To anyone unfamiliar with the Balkans, the following exchange would sound more like a Quentin Tarantino movie than a conversation between two presidents. It’s a warm day in July 1991 and a boisterous and self-confident Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic is chatting on the phone with the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic about a conversation he recently had with the German ambassador to Yugoslavia. Preparations were under way by Croatian Serbs to create an autonomous Serb republic within Croatia and it was widely believed that the Yugoslav National Army,...

"Milosevic is a man with severe cardiovascular risk which requires future monitoring," presiding judge Richard May said at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal Thursday. Details of the medical report, ordered by the court in June after Milosevic spent several weeks in bed, were not released. The tribunal recommended that Milosevic, who has led his own defense against war crimes charges, appoint legal counsel to reduce his workload. Responding angrily in court, Milosevic said he had never sought medical examination "not even when I suffered high fever." He again refused to appoint a lawyer saying the court "should not harbor any...