Who: Socialist President of Serbia (1989 to 1997) and then President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1997 to 2000).

Yugoslavia disintegrated in the early 1990s, when Bosnia, Croatia and Slovenia seceded. Milosevic, who was instrumental in the conflicts because he believed in the Serbs' rights over all other ethnic groups', was ironically hailed as the Balkan peacemaker after the bloody wars.

Then Kosovo wanted out. In 1999, Milosevic's Serbian military razed hundreds of villages, killed thousands of people and organised rape camps in Kosovo. The massacres and ethnic cleansing only stopped when NATO intervened.

Milosevic, seen here with Chinese President Jiang Zemin, was ousted by a popular uprising and tried for war crimes in The Hague. He died just before the verdict.

How he died: Heart attack, though there are rumours that he may have died of a deliberate drug overdose.

Photograph: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images
Earlier Slide Show: Three years later, the Iraq war rages on

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