The Hague, Netherlands – Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of Yugoslavia and architect of a decade of war that took more than 250,000 lives and tore the Balkans apart, was found dead in his prison cell Saturday morning, the U.N. war crimes tribunal said.
The tribunal said in a statement that guards had found Milosevic, 64, dead in his bed, apparently of natural causes, while they were on their regular rounds. However, the time of his death was unclear, and the Dutch police and a coroner began a full investigation and autopsy.
Leaders in the region and in Western Europe expressed regret that he would never be convicted for his role in the disintegration of Yugoslavia and in the four wars in the region during the 1990s.
“It’s sad that justice in a way has been cheated,” David Owens, a former peace envoy in the Balkans, told the BBC. “He was the first head of state to be given a trial; he’s been given a very fair trial; it’s taken an extraordinarily long time.”
Milosevic had been in poor health for years, and his heart condition and high blood pressure repeatedly caused lengthy delays in his war- crimes trial on charges of genocide and war crimes in Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. He refused to enter any plea, and he insisted on acting as his own attorney, only later accepting any help from his court-appointed attorneys and often clashing with their advice.
His trial, which has continued in fits and starts since it began in February 2002, recessed just last week while the court weighed his request to subpoena former President Clinton as a witness.
Milosevic had complained in recent weeks that his health was worsening and pressed the court to allow him to seek treatment in Moscow, where his wife and son live, but the court denied his request, saying Russian doctors could come to The Hague.
Less than a week ago, a crucial witness in Milosevic’s trial, the former Croatian Serb leader Milan Babic, who was serving a 13-year sentence in the same prison, committed suicide in his cell.
Milosevic and his pro-Serb, nationalist policies – among them, genocide that became known to the world as “ethnic cleansing” – were a driving force behind a decade of ethnic wars in the Balkans. The conflicts broke Yugoslavia into five independent countries, caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and forced the most brutal population relocations in Europe since World War II.
The Washington Post contributed to this report.