Slobodan Milošević was the Serbian nationalist leader whose pursuit of a "Greater Serbia" helped tear apart the former Yugoslavia and plunged the Balkans into a decade of brutal wars in the 1990s. Born in Pozarevac, Serbia, he trained as a lawyer, worked as a communist party official and banker, and rose through the ranks of the Serbian Communist Party.
He seized national prominence in the late 1980s by championing the grievances of Serbs, especially in the province of Kosovo, riding a wave of nationalism to power as the old communist order collapsed. As Serbia's leader, he stoked ethnic tensions that, as Yugoslavia broke apart, exploded into savage wars in Croatia and then Bosnia.
Milošević backed Serb forces in those conflicts, which were marked by "ethnic cleansing," mass killing, and the worst atrocities in Europe since the Second World War, including the massacre at Srebrenica. International pressure and NATO airstrikes eventually forced him to the negotiating table, and he signed the 1995 Dayton accords that ended the Bosnian war.
His final war came over Kosovo in 1999, when his crackdown on ethnic Albanians prompted a NATO bombing campaign against Serbia that forced his retreat. Defeated and discredited, he was driven from power by mass protests in 2000. Arrested and handed over to the international war-crimes tribunal in The Hague, Milošević was tried for genocide and crimes against humanity, but died in his cell in 2006 before a verdict was reached.