U.S. officials believe Chavez uses his oil wealth to reward governments that share his anti-American views and to foment change in those that don't.

"We are working with other countries to make certain that there is a united front against some of the things that Venezuela gets involved in," said Rice, who called Venezuela a "sidekick" of Iran.

Rice leaves today on an eight-day trip to Latin America, Indonesia and Australia, including a stop in Chile for the inauguration of President-elect Michelle Bachelet. Rice said pointedly Thursday that she did not plan to see Chavez, who is expected to attend the inauguration Saturday.

As part of the administration's new view of Venezuela, U.S. defense and intelligence officials have revised their assessment of the security threat Venezuela poses to the region. They say they believe Venezuela will have growing military and diplomatic relationships with North Korea and Iran, and point with concern to its arms buildup. Of equal worry to them is Venezuela's overhaul of its military doctrine, which now emphasizes "asymmetric warfare" - a strategy of sabotage and hit-and-run attacks against a greater military power, much like that used by Iraqi insurgents.

The U.S. government's revived interest in Latin America comes at a time when Congress has been pressing the Bush administration to define its strategy amid a growing number of clashes with the Chavez government.

Last month, the United States and Venezuela engaged in a diplomatic tit-for-tat reminiscent of the Cold War, trading espionage accusations against each other's diplomats, then expelling them. The two countries have also clashed on airspace and landing rights for civilian and military aircraft, as the United States has sought to block Venezuela's bid to become a nonpermanent member of the United Nations Security Council. Venezuela has threatened to end the oil sales that provide the United States with about 12% of its imports, and begun rewriting its contracts with U.S. oil companies.

The tougher U.S. approach also reflects an administration interest in trying to head off any further leftist inroads in upcoming elections in the region. A number of governments face elections this year in Latin America, and Chavez has made known his support for opposition candidates in several of the countries, including Mexico, which will elect its president in July.

"There is some concern that if the United States doesn't play its cards right, there could be a major policy shift in the region that favors Venezuela's interests over the United States," said Daniel P. Erikson of the Inter-American Dialogue, a research organization in Washington.

Since taking office in 1999, Chavez has been trying to build a left-leaning alliance and has offered cut-rate oil and other inducements through a foreign aid program some believe to be worth billions of dollars annually. His stated aim is to push an alternative development model that eases the sting of globalism and favors the interests of the poor, who make up about 40% of the region's population.

Bernardo Alvarez, Venezuela's ambassador to the United States, defended his country's policies, saying they respond to failed economic models that have increased poverty and social exclusion. "Chavez and [Bolivian President] Evo Morales are not accidents of history," Alvarez said.

In a recent interview, Alvarez defended Venezuela's relationship with Iran, saying the two nations had forged strong ties as co-founders of OPEC in 1960. He said his government's repeated efforts to improve relations with Washington have been met with indifference.

"Any time we try to open a dialogue, there are people who act to sabotage it," Alvarez said.

Many observers are skeptical that Chavez has much appeal beyond Fidel Castro's Cuba and impoverished Bolivia, but U.S. officials are concerned that his efforts could foment violence in unstable countries and weaken Latin American support for the American program of free market economics and U.S.-style governance.

Rice said U.S. officials were trying to build international pressure to address what they see as Venezuelan abuses of democratic institutions at home. This year, she called European Union officials to draw their attention to the trial of a Venezuelan opposition group, Sumate, whose leaders face treason charges for accepting a $31,000 grant from the Washington-based National Endowment for Democracy, a private group funded by Congress.

"This kangaroo trial is a disgrace," she said. The EU, a key trading partner of Venezuela, signaled its concern by sending observers to the trial, she noted.

Chavez reacted strongly to Rice's criticism, saying it amounted to plans for an "imperialist attack" that he would resist.

Some State Department officials continue to emphasize that they do not want to be confrontational. Assistant Secretary of State Thomas A. Shannon, the top U.S. diplomat for Latin America, has said he is not looking for a quarrel with Chavez.

"We don't want to exaggerate his role or presence in the region," Shannon said in an interview. "We want to stay focused on a positive agenda for the region."

Military and intelligence officials have been more blunt.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld last month likened Chavez to Hitler, noting that both leaders were elected legally. At the same time, Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte, appearing before the Senate last week, said Chavez was spending "very extravagantly" to build alliances and seeking to strengthen ties with Iran, North Korea and Cuba.

Venezuelan Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel said this week in Caracas, the capital, that the recent tough talk by U.S. officials "represents a victory of the hawks in U.S. foreign policy," the official Cuban News Agency reported.

Whether the United States' tough talk will resonate among Latin American leaders is uncertain. Thus far, only Mexico, not an immediate neighbor of Venezuela, has persisted in criticizing Chavez. Mexican President Vicente Fox, who is in the final nine months of his presidential term and hails from a conservative party strongly committed to free trade, exchanged angry words with Chavez late last year over Mexico's U.S. ties.

In the widening spat, the Bush administration might be able to enlist countries that are heavily dependent on the U.S., or badly want the benefits of better ties with the north, one senior Latin American diplomat said.

But others, "even the ones who don't like Chavez, don't want to be out front," said the envoy, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject. "They don't want trouble."

Times staff writer Chris Kraul in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times

Although not unprecedented, Reid's prediction of an upsurge in resource conflict is significant both because of his senior rank and the vehemence of his remarks. "The blunt truth is that the lack of water and agricultural land is a significant contributory factor to the tragic conflict we see unfolding in Darfur," he declared. "We should see this as a warning sign."

Resource conflicts of this type are most likely to arise in the developing world, Reid indicated, but the more advanced and affluent countries are not likely to be spared the damaging and destabilizing effects of global climate change. With sea levels rising, water and energy becoming increasingly scarce and prime agricultural lands turning into deserts, internecine warfare over access to vital resources will become a global phenomenon.

Reid's speech, delivered at the prestigious Chatham House in London (Britain's equivalent of the Council on Foreign Relations), is but the most recent expression of a growing trend in strategic circles to view environmental and resource effects-rather than political orientation and ideology-as the most potent source of armed conflict in the decades to come. With the world population rising, global consumption rates soaring, energy supplies rapidly disappearing and climate change eradicating valuable farmland, the stage is being set for persistent and worldwide struggles over vital resources. Religious and political strife will not disappear in this scenario, but rather will be channeled into contests over valuable sources of water, food and energy.

Prior to Reid's address, the most significant expression of this outlook was a report prepared for the U.S. Department of Defense by a California-based consulting firm in October 2003. Entitled "An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security," the report warned that global climate change is more likely to result in sudden, cataclysmic environmental events than a gradual (and therefore manageable) rise in average temperatures. Such events could include a substantial increase in global sea levels, intense storms and hurricanes and continent-wide "dust bowl" effects. This would trigger pitched battles between the survivors of these effects for access to food, water, habitable land and energy supplies.

"Violence and disruption stemming from the stresses created by abrupt changes in the climate pose a different type of threat to national security than we are accustomed to today," the 2003 report noted. "Military confrontation may be triggered by a desperate need for natural resources such as energy, food and water rather than by conflicts over ideology, religion or national honor."

Until now, this mode of analysis has failed to command the attention of top American and British policymakers. For the most part, they insist that ideological and religious differences-notably, the clash between values of tolerance and democracy on one hand and extremist forms of Islam on the other-remain the main drivers of international conflict. But Reid's speech at Chatham House suggests that a major shift in strategic thinking may be under way. Environmental perils may soon dominate the world security agenda.

This shift is due in part to the growing weight of evidence pointing to a significant human role in altering the planet's basic climate systems. Recent studies showing the rapid shrinkage of the polar ice caps, the accelerated melting of North American glaciers, the increased frequency of severe hurricanes and a number of other such effects all suggest that dramatic and potentially harmful changes to the global climate have begun to occur. More importantly, they conclude that human behavior-most importantly, the burning of fossil fuels in factories, power plants, and motor vehicles-is the most likely cause of these changes. This assessment may not have yet penetrated the White House and other bastions of head-in-the-sand thinking, but it is clearly gaining ground among scientists and thoughtful analysts around the world.

For the most part, public discussion of global climate change has tended to describe its effects as an environmental problem-as a threat to safe water, arable soil, temperate forests, certain species and so on. And, of course, climate change is a potent threat to the environment; in fact, the greatest threat imaginable. But viewing climate change as an environmental problem fails to do justice to the magnitude of the peril it poses. As Reid's speech and the 2003 Pentagon study make clear, the greatest danger posed by global climate change is not the degradation of ecosystems per se, but rather the disintegration of entire human societies, producing wholesale starvation, mass migrations and recurring conflict over resources.

"As famine, disease, and weather-related disasters strike due to abrupt climate change," the Pentagon report notes, "many countries' needs will exceed their carrying capacity"-that is, their ability to provide the minimum requirements for human survival. This "will create a sense of desperation, which is likely to lead to offensive aggression" against countries with a greater stock of vital resources. "Imagine eastern European countries, struggling to feed their populations with a falling supply of food, water, and energy, eyeing Russia, whose population is already in decline, for access to its grain, minerals, and energy supply."

Similar scenarios will be replicated all across the planet, as those without the means to survival invade or migrate to those with greater abundance-producing endless struggles between resource "haves" and "have-nots."

It is this prospect, more than anything, that worries John Reid. In particular, he expressed concern over the inadequate capacity of poor and unstable countries to cope with the effects of climate change, and the resulting risk of state collapse, civil war and mass migration. "More than 300 million people in Africa currently lack access to safe water," he observed, and "climate change will worsen this dire situation"-provoking more wars like Darfur. And even if these social disasters will occur primarily in the developing world, the wealthier countries will also be caught up in them, whether by participating in peacekeeping and humanitarian aid operations, by fending off unwanted migrants or by fighting for access to overseas supplies of food, oil, and minerals.

When reading of these nightmarish scenarios, it is easy to conjure up images of desperate, starving people killing one another with knives, staves and clubs-as was certainly often the case in the past, and could easily prove to be so again. But these scenarios also envision the use of more deadly weapons. "In this world of warring states," the 2003 Pentagon report predicted, "nuclear arms proliferation is inevitable." As oil and natural gas disappears, more and more countries will rely on nuclear power to meet their energy needs-and this "will accelerate nuclear proliferation as countries develop enrichment and reprocessing capabilities to ensure their national security."

Although speculative, these reports make one thing clear: when thinking about the calamitous effects of global climate change, we must emphasize its social and political consequences as much as its purely environmental effects. Drought, flooding and storms can kill us, and surely will-but so will wars among the survivors of these catastrophes over what remains of food, water and shelter. As Reid's comments indicate, no society, however affluent, will escape involvement in these forms of conflict.

We can respond to these predictions in one of two ways: by relying on fortifications and military force to provide some degree of advantage in the global struggle over resources, or by taking meaningful steps to reduce the risk of cataclysmic climate change.

No doubt there will be many politicians and pundits-especially in this country-who will tout the superiority of the military option, emphasizing America's preponderance of strength. By fortifying our borders and sea-shores to keep out unwanted migrants and by fighting around the world for needed oil supplies, it will be argued, we can maintain our privileged standard of living for longer than other countries that are less well endowed with instruments of power. Maybe so. But the grueling, inconclusive war in Iraq and the failed national response to Hurricane Katrina show just how ineffectual such instruments can be when confronted with the harsh realities of an unforgiving world. And as the 2003 Pentagon report reminds us, "constant battles over diminishing resources" will "further reduce [resources] even beyond the climatic effects."

Military superiority may provide an illusion of advantage in the coming struggles over vital resources, but it cannot protect us against the ravages of global climate change. Although we may be somewhat better off than the people in Haiti and Mexico, we, too, will suffer from storms, drought and flooding. As our overseas trading partners descend into chaos, our vital imports of food, raw materials and energy will disappear as well. True, we could establish military outposts in some of these places to ensure the continued flow of critical materials-but the ever-increasing price in blood and treasure required to pay for this will eventually exceed our means and destroy us. Ultimately, our only hope of a safe and secure future lies in substantially reducing our emissions of greenhouse gases and working with the rest of the world to slow the pace of global climate change.

Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author of Resource Wars and Blood and Oil, both available in paperback from Owl Books.

© 2006 TomPaine.com

A spokesman for the prime minister rejected on Friday as "false theories" the prosecutors' accusations.

Fabio De Pasquale, a prosecutor, said Mills, who is married and formally separated from British Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell, was accused of giving false testimony in two hearings, in 1997 and 1998.

Pasquale declined to release details, but according to news reports, Mills was accused of failing to mention a 1995 phone call with Berlusconi in which the two discussed alleged illicit payments from Berlusconi to former Socialist prime minister Bettino Craxi.

Allegations

Mills also was accused of failing to tell a court that two offshore companies involved in buying US film rights were linked to Berlusconi.

The accusations surrounding Mills' testimony stem from a separate case in which Berlusconi, Mills and 12 others were accused of tax fraud and embezzlement over the purchase of US movie rights by Mediaset, Berlusconi's media empire. All the defendants deny wrongdoing.

Prosecutors have said they had rushed to complete the investigation and to try to bring the case to trial after Parliament passed a reform, backed by Berlusconi's government, which reduced the statute of limitations on the charges.

The conservative prime minister has repeatedly accused Milan prosecutors of waging a political vendetta against him following years of investigations and prosecution against him. He says they sympathise with the left.

Historically, Wistrich explained at a lecture Wednesday night, British Jew-hatred has been less ideological, less violent and less successful in influencing government policies than in places such as Germany, Russia and Poland.

And, he stressed, "you cannot say that the British government was anti-Semitic in the 20th century," calling Prime Minister Tony Blair "one of the better or best friends Israel has in the outside world."

He attributed England's less "compulsive" anti-Semitism in part to British "self-confidence" as a prosperous empire with no need to feel threatened by a small minority, which started to change in the 20th century as the empire began to fall apart.

Yet Wistrich noted that even when that minority was so small it disappeared entirely - during the 350 or so years of medieval Jewish exile that preceded the reign of Oliver Cromwell - anti-Semitic tropes survived and found their way into high literature as well as popular culture.

Wistrich, who grew up in England, recalled that "every single author I had to read for advanced-level English literature - Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Dickens - could be described at least as contributing to the corpus of anti-Semitism, even if unintentionally." Even as a doctoral student in the 1970s, Wistrich told of anti-Zionist sentiment on campus and bans - later rescinded - on Jewish organizations.

"The main difference between then and now [is that] it was not mainstream," he said of these sentiments. He described multi-culturalism, among other developments as a "sea-change" which paradoxically seemed like it might worsen the position of Jews.

Now, according to Brenda Katten, chair of the Israel, Britain and the Commonwealth Association, the demonization of Israel at British universities is so prevalent that "our biggest problem on campus today is that students are being asked to justify Israel's right to exist."

"We're back to square one," she told the crowd packing the small hall holding Wednesday's symposium on "The New Anti-Semitism? The Case of Great Britain." She said that members of the Jewish community, who face regular anti-Semitism, were beginning to blame themselves.

An audience member challenged the panelists' depiction of widespread anti-Semitism in Britain, but Katten countered that she knows of first-hand experiences proving the opposite.

She mentioned that a group of Jewish students she spoke to recently related being taunted with anti-Semitic jeers when they congregated in Golders Green, a heavily Jewish neighborhood in London.

She said they told her: "We think it's our fault, because the girls dress a little loud and we talk a little loud."

Katten lamented that "the victim had suddenly become the perpetrator, and I couldn't help thinking if this is the problem we are facing in the academic world, where so many Jewish professors criticize Israel." She referred to several instances in which Jews and even Israelis lead protests against Israel and boycott drives.

Members of the British embassy attended Wednesday's event. Public Affairs Officer Karen Kaufman said that anti-Semitism in the UK is "obviously still a problem" and that it is "an issue that is very, very important to the British government."

The witnesses, who were inside Scotland Yard's headquarters on July 22, have told the IPCC that on the day of the shooting planning and discussion took place based on the assumption that an innocent man had been killed.

The IPCC is carrying out an inquiry into the conduct of Sir Ian - its second investigation into the Stockwell events - in response to a complaint by Mr de Menezes's family, who allege that the commissioner and others in the force tried to mislead the public about the shooting. Central to the inquiry is the accuracy of Sir Ian's statements after the shooting.

The revelations come as Brazil's president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, visits Britain and after yesterday's backing for Sir Ian's shoot-to-kill policy by the Association of Chief Police Officers.

Mr de Menezes was killed on a tube train at around 10am on Friday, July 22, by officers who believed that he was a terrorist who had tried to attack London's transport system the day before. But one senior police source told the IPCC that by that afternoon, top officers were working on the assumption that "we got the wrong person ... we better plan around this being a mistake." Another source inside the Met's headquarters that day said every senior officer he spoke to believed that Mr de Menezes was not a terrorist: "I don't know how Ian could not have known."

The IPCC will now assess if the accounts from the witnesses are accurate and can be reconciled with Sir Ian's assertions and any evidence backing him.

Around midday on July 22, Sir Ian tried to block the IPCC investigation, writing to the Home Office to say that he feared an inquiry would hamper the hunt for the bombers. Just after 3.30pm that day, Sir Ian addressed a press conference and told reporters: "This operation was directly linked to the ongoing terrorist investigation ... the man was challenged and refused to obey police instructions."

The IPCC has been told that before Sir Ian's press conference fears were mounting among senior officers that the wrong man had been killed. By 4pm that Friday, key senior officers were being called into meetings to plan what to do. IPCC investigators have been told that early that evening, the Met deputy commissioner, Paul Stephenson, was at a meeting where it was said the wrong man had been shot.

Privately Sir Ian stands by his account about what he knew and when, and believes he will not be questioned by the IPCC. He has insisted that the first inkling he had that the wrong man had been killed was on the Saturday morning. He told the News of the World: "The key component was that at that time, and for the next 24 hours, I and everybody who advised me believed the person shot was a suicide bomber."

Harriet Wistrich, a solicitor for the de Menezes family, said what Sir Ian knew and when was a "key point" of the inquiry. "He made statements on the Friday afternoon and later which were misleading. Was he telling the truth, did the Met give out misleading information to make things look less bad for themselves."

No one has been able to explain how he came to die. But the police file shows that, by that time, officers had been able to establish the location in Germany where Maxwell was alleged to have killed an unarmed civilian. The shooting, which is said to have happened on 2 April 1945, was first disclosed by Maxwell's authorised biographer, Joe Haines, in 1988. Maxwell is quoted in the book describing how he tried to capture a German town by threatening the population with a mortar bombardment, a tactic that had proved successful on a nearby village hours earlier.

In a letter to his wife, published in the book, Maxwell recounts how he asked some Germans to fetch the mayor. He ordered the mayor to go back to town and tell the soldiers defending it to surrender or face destruction. One hour later the mayor returned, saying the soldiers had agreed to his demands. "But as soon as we marched off a German tank opened fire on us," Maxwell wrote. "Luckily, he missed, so I shot the mayor and withdrew."

The Met's file says: "The reported circumstances of the shooting gave rise to an allegation of War Crimes. To some extent, the reporting of the shooting incident was confirmed by Mr Maxwell in an interview he gave in 1988 to the journalist Brian Walden [30th October 1988]."

But the police could do nothing until Parliament had enacted the war crimes legislation which had been specifically designed to prosecute Nazi war criminals living in this country.

It was only when a member of the public made a complaint under the new legislation that an official investigation could begin. Two officers from the Met's historic war crimes unit began tracing members of his platoon but had been unable to find a witness to the alleged shooting of the mayor.

Maxwell is presumed to have fallen overboard from Lady Ghislane, which was cruising off the Canary Islands. The official verdict was accidental drowning, though many people, including members of his own family, believe he took his own life. It did not emerge until after his death that he had plundered the Mirror Group pensions' funds to bail out his ailing media empire.

Shortly after he was buried in Jerusalem, the police passed the conclusions of their investigation to the Crown Prosecution Service. The file obtained under the Freedom of Information Act says "it was determined that the case could be progressed no further, and it was closed in March 1992". The file also shows that although a lot of work had gone into the case the police had not been able to find a reliable witness to corroborate the account in Haines's biography. They had also raised concerns about having to rely on the quotes attributed to Maxwell in the book. But Maxwell would not have known this and he may have felt that the net was closing.

Maxwell was immensely proud of his war record. He fought his way across Europe from the Normandy beaches to Berlin, winning the Military Cross in January 1945. He had a hatred for Germans that stemmed from his earlier life, most of his family in Czechoslovakia having been killed by the Nazis. Later in life, he was reported to have said that the two things he hated most were Germans and taxes.

He had been examined by doctors following his frequent complaints of fatigue or ill health that delayed his trial, but the tribunal could not immediately say when he last underwent a medical checkup. All detainees at the center in Scheveningen are checked by a guard every half hour.

The tribunal said Milosevic's family had been informed of his death, which came nearly five years after he was arrested, then extradited to The Hague.

His wife, Mirjana Markovic, who was often accused of being the power behind the scenes during her husband's autocratic rule, has been in self-imposed exile in Russia since 2003. His son, Marko, also lives in Russia, and his daughter, Marija, lives in Serb-controlled half of Bosnia.

Borislav Milosevic, who lives in Moscow, blamed the U.N tribunal for causing his brother's death by refusing him medical treatment in Russia.

"All responsibility for this lies on the shoulders of the international tribunal. He asked for treatment several months ago, they knew this," he told The Associated Press. "They drove him to this as they didn't want to let him out alive."

Milosevic asked the court in December to let him go to Moscow for treatment. But the tribunal refused, despite assurances from the Russian authorities that the former Yugoslav leader would return to the Netherlands to finish his trial.

Milosevic has been on trial since February 2002, defending himself against 66 counts of crimes, including genocide, in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. But the proceedings were repeatedly interrupted by Milosevic's poor health and chronic heart condition.

He was accused of orchestrating a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing against non-Serbs during the collapse of the Yugoslav federation in an attempt to link Serbia with Serb-dominated areas of Croatia and Bosnia to create a new Greater Serbia.

Milosevic had spent much of the time granted to him by the U.N. court for his defense dealing with allegations of atrocities in Kosovo that took up just one-third of his indictment. He also faced charges of genocide in Bosnia for allegedly overseeing the slaughter of 8,000 Muslims from the eastern enclave of Srebrenica - the worst massacre on European soil since World War II.

The trial was recessed last week to await his next defense witness. Milosevic also was waiting for a court decision on his request to subpoena former President Bill Clinton as a witness.

Steven Kay, a British attorney assigned to represent Milosevic, said Saturday that the former Serb leader would not have fled, and was not suicidal.

"He said to me: 'I haven't taken on all this work just to walk away from it and not come back. I want to see this case through,'" Kay told the British Broadcasting Corp.

Milosevic's death came less than a week after the star witness in his trial, former Croatian Serb leader Milan Babic, was found dead in the same prison. Babic, who was serving a 13-year prison sentence, committed suicide.

His testimony in 2002 described a political and military command structure headed by Milosevic in Belgrade that operated behind the scenes.

Milosevic's death will be a crushing blow to the tribunal and to those who were looking to establish an authoritative historical record of the Balkan wars.

Though the witness testimony is on public record, history will be denied the judgment of a panel of legal experts weighing the evidence of his personal guilt and the story of his regime.

"It is a pity he didn't live to the end of the trial to get the sentence he deserved," Croatian President Stipe Mesic said.

The European Union said Milosevic's death does not absolve Serbia of responsibility to hand over other war crimes suspects.

The death "does not alter in any way the need to come to terms with the legacy of the Balkan wars," Austrian Foreign Minister Ursula Plassnik, whose country holds the rotating EU president, said in Salzburg.

Milosevic was due to complete his defense at the war crimes tribunal this summer.

A figure of beguiling charm and cunning ruthlessness, Milosevic was a master tactician who turned his country's defeats into personal victories and held onto power for 13 years despite losing four wars that shattered his nation and impoverished his people.

Milosevic led Serbia, the dominant Yugoslav republic, into four Balkan wars during the 1990s. The secret of his survival was his uncanny ability to exploit what less adroit figures would consider a fatal blow.

He once described himself as the "Ayatollah Khomeini of Serbia," assuring his prime minister, Milan Panic, that "the Serbs will follow me no matter what." For years, they did - through wars which dismembered Yugoslavia and plunged what was left of the country into social, political, moral and economic ruin.

But in the end, his people abandoned him: first in October 2000, when he was unable to convince the majority of Yugoslavs that he had staved off electoral defeat by his successor, Vojislav Kostunica, and again on April 1, 2001, when he surrendered after a 26-hour standoff to face criminal charges stemming from his ruinous rule.

Milosevic was born Aug. 20, 1941, in Pozarevac, a drab factory town in central Serbia best known as the home of one of the country's most notorious prisons.

His father was a defrocked Orthodox priest and sometime teacher of Russian. His mother was also a teacher. Both parents eventually committed suicide.

In high school, he met his future wife, the daughter of a wartime communist partisan hero. Markovic also was the niece of Davorjanka Paunovic, private secretary and mistress of Josip Broz Tito, the communist guerrilla leader who seized power in Yugoslavia at the end of World War II.

Milosevic became president of Serbia in 1989 elections widely considered rigged. His rise alarmed the other peoples of former Yugoslavia - Slovenes, Croats, Macedonians, Albanians and others - who feared that the hard-line nationalist would allow Serbs to dominate the country.

In 1991, Croatia and Slovenia declared their independence from Yugoslavia. Milosevic sent tanks to Slovenian borders, triggering a brief war that ended in Slovenia's secession.

Serbs in Croatia, encouraged by Milosevic, took up arms. Milosevic responded by sending the Serb-led Yugoslav army to intervene, triggering a conflict that left at least 10,000 people dead and hundreds of Croatian villages and towns devastated before a U.N.-patrolled cease-fire was arranged in January 1992.

Three months later, Bosnia-Herzegovina declared its independence, too. Milosevic bankrolled the Bosnian Serb rebellion, triggering an even bigger war that killed an estimated 200,000 people before a U.S.-brokered peace agreement was reached at Dayton, Ohio, in 1995.

During those conflicts, Yugoslavia was ostracized worldwide and the United States called Milosevic "The Butcher of the Balkans." Strict international sanctions and government mismanagement devastated the economy and left its people impoverished.

Realizing that the conflicts could not continue, Milosevic agreed to the Dayton talks, accepting a deal that abandoned Croatia's rebel Serbs, who were driven from their homes when the Croatian army recaptured almost all the land the Serbs had seized there in 1991.

The Dayton agreement also meant giving up the nationalist goal of a Serb state in Bosnia. Nevertheless, it bought Milosevic time and transformed his image from Balkan villain to benign peacemaker.

Milosevic's term as Serbian president ended in 1997 and the constitution prevented him from running again. However, he exploited legal loopholes in the constitution to have parliament name him president of Yugoslavia, which by then included only the republics of Serbia and Montenegro.

It was the thorny problem of Kosovo, the majority Albanian province that had served as his springboard to power, which finally set the stage for his downfall. In February 1998, Milosevic sent troops to crush an ethnic Albanian uprising there.

The United States and its allies responded by imposing some of the sanctions that were lifted after the Bosnian war. In 1999, after Milosevic refused to sign a Western-dictated peace agreement at Rambouillet, France, NATO launched 78 days of punishing air strikes against Yugoslavia.

Milosevic refused to back down and instead ordered his troops to crack down on Kosovo Albanians even harder. More than 800,000 Albanians fled into neighboring Albania, Montenegro and Macedonia before Milosevic finally accepted a peace plan and handed over the province to the United Nations and NATO in June 1999.

Before the conflict ended, the U.N. tribunal indicted Milosevic and four of his top aides for war crimes and crimes against humanity allegedly committed in Kosovo. Milosevic became the first sitting head of state ever to be indicted for such crimes. Later, they broadened the charges against him to include genocide.