Slobodan Milosevic:
architect of Balkan "ethnic cleansing"
The tribunal said Milosevic, 64, was found dead in his cell on Saturday morning and that although the cause was not yet clear, there was no indication of suicide.
Milosevic's untimely death is a blow to prosecutors, who had been hoping to convict him as being part of a joint criminal enterprise that operated across the former Yugoslavia, intent on setting up a greater Serbian state.
Milosevic faced charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his alleged central role in the wars in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo during the 1990s. He also faced genocide charges over the 1992-95 Bosnia war, in which 200,000 people died.
Mothers and widows of Muslims killed in Srebrenica during the Bosnian war said they regretted that Milosevic's death meant he would never face justice for the killings.
"However, it seems that God punished him already," said Hajra Catic of the Association of Srebrenica mothers.
Serbia-Montenegro's Foreign Minister Vuk Draskovic, who accused Milosevic of organising the assassinations of many of his colleagues and family, said it was a pity the former president had not faced justice in Belgrade.
Both the former Serbian leader's parents committed suicide.
Milosevic's death comes just six days after a fellow Serb prisoner at The Hague, Milan Babic, committed suicide.
The Croatian Serb leader had pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity carried out during the 1991-95 war in Croatia.
Milan Babic:
admitted persecuting the non-Serb population in Krajina
Former Croatian Serb leader Milan Babic has committed suicide in his prison cell in The Hague, the UN war crimes tribunal has said.
Babic, 50, was serving a 13-year prison term for crimes against humanity, after admitting persecuting the non-Serb population in Croatia's Krajina region.
He was a key ally of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic but later testified against him at the tribunal.
He was found dead on Sunday (5 March 2006) evening, the tribunal said in a statement.
Babic was president of the self-declared breakaway Krajina Serb republic, covering about one-third of Croatian territory, after Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1991.
He was jailed in 2004 for crimes committed during Croatia's 1991-1995 war. In return for his guilty plea, prosecutors dropped four other charges of murder, cruelty and the wanton destruction of villages.
It is the second time a detainee in The Hague has committed suicide. The first was Slavko Dokmanovic, another Croatian Serb leader, in 1998.
Slavko Dokmanovic:
responsible for Vukovar massacre
The inquiry decided that he hanged himself with his tie while depressed.
The tribunal's investigation found that on the day of his death, Dokmanovic had already had two unsuccessful suicide attempts. He finally hanged himself from a wardrobe door.
Slavko Dokmanovic, who was considered one of the biggest catches of the tribunal, was found hanging in his cell shortly after midnight on 29 June 1998, just a week before a verdict in his case was due.
Dokmanovic was accused of complicity in the 1991 slaying of more than 200 hospital patients in Vukovar. He was accused of overseeing the eviction of at least two-hundred men, mostly Croats, who'd been sheltering in Vukovar hospital. They were then killed by rebel Serbs, protected by the Federal Yugoslav Army.
Vukovar:
suffered a three-month siege by Serb forces
By the end of its three-month siege at the hands of Serb forces in November 1991, Vukovar had become utterly devastated.
It was, perhaps, the most comprehensively destroyed town of any size in either Bosnia-Herzegovina or Croatia during the wars of the first half of the 1990s.
Capture of the town was an important strategic objective for the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army. It was designed to consolidate Serb control over the region of Croatia known as eastern Slavonia.
That objective was achieved, even though there was little left, apart from than ruins, following the siege.
It was also accompanied by the ethnic cleansing of Croats, who prior to the war were present in Vukovar municipality in roughly the same numbers as Serbs.
Croat defenders of Vukovar later claimed that the town could have been saved from capture by Serb forces if the nationalist President Franjo Tudjman had been willing to send reinforcements.
Mr Tudjman was accused of deliberately sacrificing Vukovar - dubbed the Croatian Stalingrad because of its devastation - so as to reinforce his portrayal of Croatia as the victim of Serb aggression.
Grim events
Whatever the late President Tudjman's intentions, Vukovar has since become a symbol of destruction - and atrocities.
When the Serb forces took control of Vukovar on 19 November 1991, several hundred people took refuge in the town's hospital in the hope that they would be evacuated in the presence of neutral observers.
A deal to that effect had earlier been agreed in negotiations between the Yugoslav army and the Croatian government.
But instead of the hoped-for evacuation, about 400 individuals - including wounded patients, soldiers, hospital staff and Croatian political activists - were removed from the hospital by Yugoslav army and Serb paramilitary forces.
According to The Hague Tribunal's indictment, which was originally issued in 1995, three Yugoslav army officers, Colonel Mile Mrksic, Major Veselin Sljivancanin and Captain Miroslav Radic, oversaw the removal of some 300 men to Ovcara farm, four kilometres outside Vukovar.
The detainees were beaten up. Some died of their injuries and approximately 260 of them were executed and then buried in a mass grave.
Details of the Vukovar massacre soon began to emerge as survivors reported on the events, and doubts began to appear about the large number of missing detainees.
But it took several years of exhumations and painstaking investigations to gather the evidence that formed the basis of the Tribunal's indictment.
Trail of guilt
Subsequently, the Tribunal also issued the first of its sealed, secret indictments; against the wartime Serb mayor of Vukovar, Slavko Dokmanovic.
With the three army officers out of the Tribunal's reach in President Slobodan Milosevic's Yugoslavia, and with the danger that Dokmanovic might escape from eastern Slavonia across the border to Yugoslavia if he were to be publicly indicted, his arrest by UN forces was swiftly accomplished in 1996.
Two years later Dokmanovic hanged himself in prison while awaiting the verdict at the end of his trial in The Hague.
Mrksic and Radic surrendered to the Tribunal after Belgrade began to enact laws on the extradition of indicted war crimes suspects last year.
Sljivancanin's arrest will now make it possible to go ahead with the trial of all members of the group known as the "Vukovar Three".
Vukovar, as part of eastern Slavonia, was the only region of Croatia's rebel Serb-held areas to escape capture by the Croatian army in 1995.
Because it was spared a military campaign in that year with the subsequent refugee exodus, it has also remained the only region with a substantial ethnic Serb community.
After the Dayton peace treaty for Bosnia and the Erdut agreement for Croatia brought the wars in the region to an end, eastern Slavonia was placed under UN administration for two years.
It was finally reintegrated with Croatia in 1998.
Copyright 2003-2006 Azlan Adnan Legal Notice
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