Milosevic - How to Be a Dictator

Director Leslie Woodhead immediately eliminates any misunderstanding: Slobodan Milosevic is responsible for the collapse of Yugoslavia. His documentary is not concerned with the question of guilt, but with how Milosevic acquired his position of power and his popularity and managed to retain it for such a long time. Archive footage shows how Milosevic, now a prisoner of the Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague, secured a paradoxical position as a dictator in a democracy. From the first time he, still as a Communist apparatchik, broke the taboo on nationalism by saying to the Serbs No one will beat you again!, to the moment when, beaten in democratic elections, he was forced to admit his defeat on television.The emphasis lies on Milosevics popularity with Serbs at home, not on the three wars that tore Yugoslavia apart or on the politics behind the scenes. Illustrated by cartoons, the nuances of his image are revealed: charming and small-minded, omniscient and withdrawn. All this time, his wife Mira Markovic was at his side. Before Woodheads camera, she talks utterly defensively about her husbands deeds. Woodhead, known from the Srebrenica documentary A CRY FROM THE GRAVE (1999), also interviews other politicians and representatives of the media. The state television played a crucial role in giving people the feeling that the war was far away, in shifting the blame to the West and the Croat fascists, and in presenting every defeat as a victory in disguise; even though life in Serbia was by then dominated by a kitsch gangster culture, towering inflation and massive poverty.