Slobodan Milosevic

Slobodan Milosevic was found dead in his prison cell Saturday morning. In 1998, Franklin Foer profiled the former Yugoslav president, noting: “Time and again, Milosevic has played the United States for a patsy. His pattern: He behaves in his most Hitlerian way, then promises to improve and weasels away unscathed.” Timothy Noah wondered why U.S. journalists and government officials referred to the Butcher of the Balkans as “Mr. Milosevic.” Emily Yoffe answered the question, “Was Slobodan Milosevic Ever Democratically Elected?” In 2005, Julian Davis Mortenson filed dispatches from a week at Milosevic’s trial in The Hague; Mortenson also took a tour of the U.N. Detention Unit in the Dutch seaside town of Scheveningen, where Milosevic was spied eating birthday cake with a Bosnian Muslim—and where he died.