Slobodan Milošević — toppled by a crowd, dead at the Hague before a verdict

On 5 October 2000, several hundred thousand Serbs converged on Belgrade, stormed the federal parliament and the state television building, and broke the thirteen-year rule of Slobodan Milošević. He had lost the presidential election of 24 September but refused to concede; when his own electoral commission claimed the count required a runoff, the country rose. By the next day, with the police standing aside and his patrons abandoning him, Milošević conceded on television and acknowledged the victory of his opponent, Vojislav Koštunica. The crowd called it “the Bulldozer Revolution,” after a wheel loader that a protester drove into the cordon outside the state broadcaster.

Milošević, born in 1941, had risen through the Serbian communist apparatus and seized the leadership of the republic in 1987, becoming president of Serbia in 1989. He pioneered a populist ethnic nationalism that exploited Serbian grievances — above all over Kosovo — to dismantle Yugoslavia’s federal balance and concentrate power in himself. As the federation broke apart, he backed Serb forces in the wars in Croatia (1991) and Bosnia (1992–1995) and later directed a campaign of repression and expulsion in Kosovo (1998–1999). Those wars killed an estimated 130,000 people and displaced millions; their worst single atrocity, the July 1995 massacre of some 8,000 Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica, was later judged a genocide by international courts.

His fall came not on the battlefield but at the ballot box and in the street. Defeat over Kosovo in 1999, deepening sanctions, the ruin of the Serbian economy, and the loss of an election he could not credibly steal stripped him of legitimacy. When he tried to annul the result, a broad opposition coalition, a mobilized youth movement, striking miners, and finally a vast crowd forced him out within two weeks.

In April 2001 Serbian authorities arrested him, and that June he was extradited to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at The Hague — the first former head of state to face an international war-crimes court. He was charged on 66 counts including genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes across Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo. He died of a heart attack in his cell on 11 March 2006, after a four-year trial, before any verdict was reached. His victims, and the survivors of the wars he fueled, were left without the judgment the proceedings had promised.