In an age of infinite European promise - summed up by the annus mirabilis of 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell and the countries of eastern Europe and former Yugoslavia freed themselves from Soviet-style despotism - Slobodan Milosevic, who has died aged 64, was the wild card. The first European head of state to be prosecuted for genocide and war crimes, he emerged to embody the dark side of European endeavour, and to sully the hopes generated by the eastern European and Balkan revolutions of that momentous year. In short, he became Europe's chief menace, the most dangerous figure in post-cold war Europe.
From 1991 to 1999, he presided over mayhem and mass murder in south-eastern Europe. In a long list of villains. he was the central figure. To the civilian victims of Srebrenica and Vukovar, Sarajevo and Dubrovnik, Pristina and Banja Luka, he was the chilling embodiment of the evil men can do.
But though a brilliant tactician who ran rings around his peers and rivals in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, confounded the Serbian opposition and outwitted an endless array of international mediators, Milosevic was a lousy strategist. With no ultimate aim except short-term gain, he won most of the battles and lost all the wars. In the process, he left a legacy of more than 200,000 dead in Bosnia and 2 million people (half the population) homeless. He ethnically cleansed more than 800,000 Albanians from their homes in Kosovo. He had political opponents and former friends and colleagues in Belgrade murdered. In Bosnia, he triggered the worst crisis in transatlantic relations before the Iraq war and left the United Nations and the European Union looking spineless and humiliated, their foreign policymaking and peacekeeping credibility in tatters.
Milosevic was first indicted for war crimes in Kosovo by Louise Arbour, the Canadian chief prosecutor in The Hague, in March 1999. Arbour's successor, the Swiss campaigner Carla Del Ponte, extended the charge sheet to include indictments on Croatia and Bosnia, in the latter case accusing him of genocide for his alleged collusion in the massacre of more than 7,000 Muslim males at Srebrenica in July 1995.
That he ended up in the dock in The Hague at all surprised many who have studied the man and his country's agony through the 1990s. Given his predisposition for violence, his apparent lack of remorse for the pain and suffering he caused, and a troubled family history of suicides and death, it was always thought that Milosevic would go down in a bloodbath in Belgrade or opt to kill himself rather than surrender.
There are many who are convinced that Europe would be a much better place today had Milosevic died, been killed, or been ousted around 1991, before the Bosnian war and at a time when the Serbs' levelling of the Croatian Danube town of Vukovar indicated the mercilessness of the Serbian leadership under Milosevic. Instead, he weathered all the lost wars, the huge demonstrations in Belgrade, and the Nato air campaign; he fiddled lost elections before surprisingly throwing in the towel in October 2000, suddenly agreeing to cede power as Yugoslav president to Vojislav Kostunica who had beaten Milosevic in a presidential election.
The following March, Milosevic was arrested on the orders of the liberal Serbian prime minister Zoran Djindjic, later to be assassinated (obituary, March 13 2003). The initial arrest was for alleged offences at home, but in June, Djindjic did the Americans' bidding and put Milosevic on a helicopter to the US military base at Tuzla, in Bosnia, from where he was flown to The Hague.
Milosevic's modern political career spanned 13 years, a period bracketed by events in Kosovo in 1987 and 1999. In April 1987, then an ambitious young communist apparatchik, he was dispatched to the region for a spot of local problem-solving by Ivan Stambolic, the Serbian president who was Milosevic's key mentor and once closest friend. (In 2000, Stambolic, long retired but staging a political comeback, was abducted on the streets of Belgrade while out jogging, and murdered, allegedly on the orders of Milosevic's secret police.)
It was during those early visits - two in the same week - that Milosevic rocketed to national prominence in a communist federal Yugoslavia buckling under nationalist tensions. He mesmerised the mob by assuring the minority Serbs in the ethnic Albanian province that no one would ever "beat them" again. Milosevic had already installed key aides in control of Serbian national television, and the footage of his speeches electrified Serbia. Milosevic himself, until then a dour and orthodox communist, appeared to realise his gift for rhetoric and the power of nationalism. He never looked back.
Over the next few years he deployed his keen knowledge of the communist security and media apparatus to purge the Serbian Communist party, and ingratiate himself with the Yugoslav army and secret police to abolish Albanian autonomy in Kosovo. He also took control of the Vojvodina province of Serbia, put his loyalists in charge in Montenegro, before, at the beginning of the 1990s, start to foment ethnic Serb rebellions in Croatia and Bosnia. The Serbs hailed him, initially, as a modern messiah.
Quite why Milosevic should have become such a potent tumour in the European body politic was not immediately apparent when he emerged from the dull world of Yugoslav apparatchiks in the mid-1980s. The second son of a Montenegrin Orthodox religious preacher and a Serbian communist schoolmistress, he was born in the small town of Pozarevac, south-east of Belgrade, as Yugoslavia collapsed into civil war under the impact of the Nazi occupation and partition. After the war his parents separated: his father, Svetozar, returned to his native Montenegro and committed suicide in 1962; his mother, Stanislava, killed herself in 1974. Another of Milosevic's favourite uncles also killed himself.
Milosevic was a conservative child and his mother's favourite. A bit of a school swot, he came across to contemporaries as dour and older than his years. He was always smartly dressed, and was said to prefer the company of older children. His teenage sweetheart, lifelong partner and most baleful influence, Mirjana Markovic, whose partisan mother had been tortured to death during the war, was also from Pozarevac. By their teens, the couple were inseparable. Her father, who disowned Mirjana (she was raised by her grandparents), and uncle were leading lights in Tito's wartime partisans and prominent in the postwar communist regime. Her aunt was Tito's secretary, said to be the leader's lover. Mirjana regularly received presents from the dictator.
By the late 1950s, the Milosevic couple had moved to Belgrade to study at the university; he read law and she sociology. His ambition, coupled with her party connections, brought him to the notice of the capital's party establishment. It was at this time that Milosevic forged a close friendship with Stambolic, scion of an elite communist family. Milosevic progressed through the Belgrade communist machine, and, by 1984, he was party chief in the capital, shadowing Stambolic all the while.
Stambolic, five years older than Milosevic, managed Tehnogas, a major Serbian gas extraction company; Milosevic succeeded him as head. Stambolic went to work for Beobanka, Belgrade's biggest bank; Milosevic succeeded him. When Milosevic took over the Belgrade Communist party in 1984, he was replacing Stambolic, who became Serbian party chief. Two years later, Milosevic again stepped into his mentor's shoes as Serbian party chief, before rudely turning on his patron.
In September 1987 Milosevic, having secured the backing of the mighty Yugoslav army and the old Yugoslav party apparatus, ruthlessly purged the Serbian party of all Stambolic supporters and installed his own men. The army, like the old guard, was persuaded that Milosevic was their man. Stambolic was crushed. He retired from political life three months later, yielding the Serbian presidency to a Milosevic crony. Milosevic later took the Serbian presidency himself, occupying the office from 1990 to 1997, when he became Yugoslav president, the office he held when overthrown in October 2000.
As early as the mid-1980s, Milosevic was keenly aware of the value of propaganda, and he quickly took control of Belgrade television and of the respected old Belgrade newspaper, Politika. Television was subsequently central to his rule. In the bloodbaths that were to follow, television and its manipulation in many ways was more important than history. The party machine, controlling the security services, the military, and the industrial bosses, as well as the media, were Milosevic's main instruments. But to maximise his appeal, he needed mass support, while also winning over the influential Serbian intelligentsia. Nationalism, not communism, handed him the key.
By the mid-1980s, a few years after the death of President Tito in 1980, a new Serbian nationalism was asserting itself in Yugoslavia. The constitutional dispensation inherited from Tito entailed a complex system of checks aimed at preserving the country's always delicate ethnic balance and at keeping Yugoslavia's most numerous grouping, the Serbs, from dominating the federation. One way this was effected was by carving the provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo out of Serbia, and giving them autonomy.
Milosevic set about dismantling the Tito legacy with the carefully staged Kosovo appearance in April 1987. Two years later, in June 1989, he returned to the province for the 600th anniversary of the Kosovo battle that inaugurated 500 years of Ottoman rule over the Serbs. He addressed up to a million Serbs and told them to prepare for war.
The rise of Milosevic alarmed the non-Serb republics and reinforced secessionist movements, particularly in Slovenia and Croatia. Well before the wars in January 1990, Milosevic suffered a crushing defeat when he sought to seize control of the ruling Yugoslav Communist party - the key to power and control - at the party congress in Belgrade. The congress was a seminal and under-appreciated event in the break-up of the federation. It was an early and unusual defeat for Milosevic, which, however, only seemed to embolden him. The wily Slovene party chief, Milan Kucan, long the most acute analyst of the Milosevic peril, had called the Serb's bluff. The Slovenes walked out of the congress, forcing the Croats to get off the fence and join them. Milosevic staged a panicked bid to seize control of the party and failed.
In this period of establishing power, he was everywhere, displaying his formidable talents for public oratory. This energy and dynamism were, however, out of character. He was a loner. Throughout the 1990s, he was a recluse, rarely making a speech in public even during election campaigns. When Nato started bombing Serbia in March 1999, for example, it was six weeks before the president made a public address.
The television did his speaking for him. The emphasis was on creating the other, dehumanising the enemy by whom Serbia was surrounded. The Croats were genocidal fascists; the Muslims of Bosnia were Islamic fundamentalists; the Albanians of Kosovo were rapists and terrorists; the Slovenes were secessionist, German-worshiping lackeys; the Germans and Austrians were bent on destroying Yugoslavia to erect a fourth reich. Then there were American imperialists, Turkish nostalgics for the Ottoman days and Iranians ambitious for Islamic terrorism in the Balkans.
By 1988, Milosevic had also secured the backing of the Serbian intellectual elite. In January 1987, prominent intellectuals at the Serbian Academy issued their celebrated memorandum, which pushed for the expansion of Serbia to include the 2 million-strong diaspora in the other Yugoslav republics, mainly Croatia and Bosnia. The memorandum was fuelled by a profound Serbian persecution complex, a deep sense of historical grievance that Serbia had sacrificed itself for Yugoslavia, first in 1918 and then in 1945. Never again. This became Milosevic's programme, the Greater Serbian manifesto requiring redrawing of borders and population transfers.
Despite Milosevic's espousal of first communism and then nationalism, both movements were simply vehicles for his ambitions. He was the first of the east European leaders to read the runes and make the jump from communism to nationalism to stay in power. Milos Vasic, a Belgrade political commentator, said: "If freemasonry were the thing tomorrow, he would instantly become the grandmaster of the first Serbian lodge. He is a great operator, a great talent, but he is ideologically empty."
The lies broadcast on Belgrade television for years reflected one of the most salient characteristics of the Milosevic personality - mendacity. The capacity for barefaced lying infuriated and exasperated the legions of diplomats and mediators who dealt with Milosevic, for years treating him as the chief fireman rather than chief arsonist. For many years, climaxing in the Dayton ceremony in late 1995 that ended the Bosnian war, the international community treated Milosevic as the key to a settlement of the conflicts he had planned and supervised. He became, for example, a guarantor of the Bosnia peace after his subordinates had destroyed Bosnia.
Before the wars started in 1991, Warren Zimmerman, the late US ambassador in Belgrade told me: "Milosevic can utter the most egregious falsehoods with the appearance of the utmost sincerity. He is a Machiavellian character for whom truth has no inherent value of its own. It's there to be manipulated."
The compulsive lying continued long after Milosevic stepped down and entered the dock. In The Hague, he argued that President Jacques Chirac of France should be made to answer for the Srebrenica massacre since it was perpetrated by French-paid mercenaries. This despite the mass of factual evidence accrued in several other trials at The Hague and the exhaustive investigations made of the 1995 atrocities.
Perhaps Milosevic actually believed his own lies, or was at least capable of switching personalities between perceiving outside realities accurately and then ignoring those realities and retreating into a fantasy world when it suited him. CIA psychiatrists who profiled the Serbian leader during the crises of the 1990s concluded he had "a malignant narcissistic personality ... strongly self-centred, vain and full of self-love".
The other constant leitmotifs of the Milosevic career were treachery and betrayal on a grand scale. Spurred on by his scheming wife, who, with her gangster son Marko, sought refuge in Russia, Milosevic betrayed and abandoned almost everyone who served him - from Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, the political and military masterminds of the war in Bosnia, to his patron Stambolic, the former Yugoslav president Dobrica Cosic, Jovica Stanisic and his long-time secret police chief - not to mention the Serbs of Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo whom he used and encouraged for the wars before simply dropping them when the going got tough.
By the end of Milosevic's 13 years in power, Serbia was a shrunken and broken rump run by a cabal of nationalist extremists in cahoots with the underworld. In a regime where Milosevic acted as a godfather - remote and above the fray but all-powerful - it was difficult to discern where politics ended and organised crime began. Serbia's gross domestic output was less than half what it had been when he took over, industrial output was at around a quarter of the 1988 level. In the months ahead, Serbia is likely to shrink further still, with Kosovo granted independence and Montenegro poised to end its loose union with Serbia. Shrunken, battered and unloved, it will need a generation to recover from the rule of the "malignant narcissist".
Milosevic is survived by his wife, his daughter and his son.
· Slobodan Milosevic, politician, born August 20 1941; died March 11 2006.