7 Years Ago In TIME

7 YEARS AGO IN TIME

In 1999, NATO air strikes effectively ended the rule of Yugoslav President SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC and led to his jailing for alleged war crimes. His trial was nearing its end when he died of a heart attack. He was buried last week in Serbia.

Who wants to die for Slobodan Milosevic? He is one of the great losers of history. He failed to hold together the former Yugoslavia, and he failed to build in its place a Greater Serbia. In the past 10 years, he has launched four wars and lost three ... As Europe's most disruptive dictator since the fall of the Berlin Wall, he bears responsibility for the extermination of 250,000 in Bosnia and Croatia, for the European revival of concentration camps and massacres, for the displacement of millions in Bosnia and Croatia and Kosovo, for the impoverishment and ostracism of his own country. Now Milosevic has again chosen war. Like a shark that has to keep moving to stay alive, he is willfully exposing the withered state of Serbia to the might of NATO for the sake of his own power. --TIME, April 5, 1999

Read the entire article at time.com/years