[ALBSA-Info] NEWSMAKER-Milosevic's rule in balance in Yugoslavia

[Gazhebo at aol.com]

NEWSMAKER-Milosevic's rule in balance in Yugoslavia

BELGRADE, Oct 5 (Reuters) - President Slobodan Milosevic's grip on Yugoslavia 
hung in the balance on Thursday as hundreds of thousands of his opponents 
demonstrated in Belgrade to drive him from power. 

A pragmatist who embraced war and peace, communism and nationalism as the 
situation demanded during his 13-year-long rule, he allowed himself to run 
last month for the first time against an opponent with a serious chance of 
winning power. 

Milosevic conceded that opposition nationalist Vojislav Kostunica won more 
votes, but sought to deny him an outright victory with more than 50 percent 
of the poll. 

But his mastery of political manoeuvres, which enabled him to defy the 
outside world for years, could provide no guarantee for his future under 
opposition pressure at home and demands that he quit from abroad. 

Milosevic, accused by a U.N. tribunal of masterminding war crimes in Kosovo 
last year, changed the constitution in July to enable himself to win a second 
term by popular ballot and thereby avoid any possibility of arrest and 
extradition. 

He did so over the protests of the pro-Western leadership of Montenegro, the 
other smaller Yugoslav republic, which argued that his moves violated the 
federal constitution. 

It was the latest of many such manoeuvres, but appears to have backfired. 

A former communist functionary and onetime chief of the state-owned gas 
company, Milosevic, 58, muscled his way to the top of Yugoslav politics in 
the power vacuum left by the 1980 death of post-World War Two Yugoslav 
dictator Marshal Tito. 

CONSOLIDATED GRIP ON POWER 

Through 13 turbulent years that saw the collapse of multi-ethnic Yugoslavia 
and terrible wars in Bosnia and Croatia, Milosevic consolidated his iron 
grip, as president first of Serbia and then of the Yugoslav federation. 

At times Milosevic appeared to dream of carving a mini-empire for all Serbs 
out of the bloodstained Balkans. 

But he withdrew support for ethnic kin in breakaway Yugoslav republics -- 
Croatia and Bosnia -- when they became too costly to save. 

His crackdown on ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, a region linked to Serbs by 
historical and emotional ties, ended by bringing down the wrath of NATO last 
year. 

After a destructive bombing campaign, Milosevic was forced to accept NATO 
peacekeepers in Kosovo and was indicted as a war criminal by the United 
Nations tribunal in The Hague. 

But careful control of the Serbian media and deft political footwork at home 
kept him secure for the time being, despite the resounding defeat of the 
Greater Serbia project. 

Milosevic made his name in Yugoslavia by his pledge to protect Kosovo's 
minority Serbs, whose domination of the ethnic Albanian majority was 
threatened by the province's wide-ranging autonomy. 

Milosevic not only revoked Kosovo's autonomy in 1989, fuelling separatist 
sentiment, but by his intransigence provoked the ethnic conflicts that tore 
apart the six-republic Yugoslav federation in Europe's bloodiest wars for 
half a century. 

He played the nationalist card in the Croatian and Bosnian wars, but left the 
dirty work to agents like Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and Bosnian 
Serb General Ratko Mladic. 

They were dropped when close association became uncomfortable. 

ROLE AT DAYTONA 

His most prominent role on the world stage came in 1995 when he consorted 
with world leaders, including U.S. President Bill Clinton, for the signing 
ceremonies of the Dayton peace accord that ended the Bosnian war. 

It was a high point for Milosevic who, according to one observer at the 
talks, ``seemed to view himself as the equal of the people with whom he was 
dealing.'' 

Showing a taste for cigars and good whisky, Milosevic exuded a sense of 
cheery bonhomie on the international stage. 

But Western goodwill evaporated as Kosovo slipped closer to a state of 
all-out war last year and Yugoslavia, still hit by U.N. sanctions imposed 
after the previous wars, slid deeper and deeper into economic despair. 

Milosevic faced a big domestic challenge in 1996 from a loose grouping of 
students and a coalition of mostly moderate opposition leaders calling 
themselves ``Zajedno'' (Together). 

The coalition mounted daily protest marches for three months, rallying up to 
500,000 people at the peak of a campaign against local election fraud. 

But through shrewd manipulation, including giving the opposition control of 
mostly bankrupt towns and cities, Milosevic managed to split the coalition, 
which dissolved into infighting. 

Later in 1997, Milosevic finessed his way around a law barring him from 
running again for president of Serbia by being elected president of 
Yugoslavia. He typically turned the formerly figurehead post into the seat of 
real power. 

Milosevic was born in Pozarevac, southeast of Belgrade, in 1941, the son of a 
theology teacher. Both his father and mother committed suicide. 

A lawyer by training, he is said to be heavily influenced by his wife, 
Mirjana, a Belgrade University sociology lecturer and neo-communist from whom 
he has been inseparable since high school. They have a son and a daughter.