Spremo slobodan milosevic biography

THE ARTICLE: SLOBODAN’S SERB STORY

BRITISH journalist Adam LeBor has produced a highly readable new biography of Slobodan Milosevic, the man associated more than any other with the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s and its descent into a series of wars and ethnic massacres of a kind not seen in Europe since Hitler (though they were not of course on the same scale).

We learn how Milosevic, a mediocre albeit ambitious provincial Communist Party official, became a ruthless warmonger, who launched and lost four wars in the space of a few years. A former bank manager, who enjoyed shopping trips to New York, he ended up as the first head of state to be charged with genocide.

A little over a decade ago he entertained a succession of British and French dignitaries at scenic Yugoslav hunting lodges, and at the 1995 Dayton, Ohio, peace talks, despite his role in ethnic atrocities that had already occurred, he was greeted as a sympathet