PEOPLE POWER.

• Author: Cohen, Roger

IN YUGOSLAVIA, TEENS TAKE TO THE STREETS TO TELL EUROPE'S BIGGEST WAR CRIMINAL IT'S TIME TO GO

When the end came for Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic, 16-year-old Dejan Stanisavljevic was in the crowd of young people, many in their teens, jammed in front of the Parliament building in the capital city of Belgrade. Their goal? Nothing less than the overthrow of Milosevic, who had dragged his country to defeat in four wars in the 1990s and won worldwide condemnation as an accused war criminal. He had refused to give up power after losing an election to an opposition candidate 11 days earlier.

"Everyone knew there were going to be changes because people badly wanted them," Dejan says. "In the end, thousands of people showed up at the Parliament. I just wanted to raise my voice to change the government."

In those chaotic moments on October 5, hundreds of youths--many of them members of a student opposition group called Otpor--fought their way through the sick burn of the tear gas and burst inside the Parliament building. Soon, black plumes of smoke poured from the building as flag-waving throngs stormed the halls.

Milosevic (mee-LOH-suh-vitch) finally got it. He resigned the next day, saying he wanted to spend more time with his grandson. The day after that, Vojislav Kostunica (koss-TOO-neecha), a mild-mannered constitutional law professor who had soundly defeated Milosevic in the September 24 vote, was sworn in as President.

Milosevic had ruled for 13 years, presiding over the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991 and 1992. Using crude propaganda to whip up nationalist hatred, he led his own republic of Serbia in wars against Yugoslavia's other republics. His armies were charged with war crimes for their "ethnic cleansing," in which non-Serbs were driven from whole regions and thousands of civilians were killed. Milosevic was charged with war crimes himself for his role in the 1999 attack on the Serbian province of Kosovo, which had left 1.5 million ethnic Albanians homeless and as many as 10,000 dead. A NATO bombing campaign that shattered Yugoslav bridges, roads, and power plants convinced Milosevic to withdraw from Kosovo in June 1999. (See "A Bloody Chapter," page 16.)

At first, most Yugoslavs didn't mind Milosevic's warmongering. But they did finally blame him for the international reaction to it--the NATO bombing, economic sanctions that prevented most trade with foreign countries, and the resulting economic deterioration of Yugoslavia.

...