The 13 year regime of Slobodan Milosevic ended after...

The 13 year regime of Slobodan Milosevic ended after elections were followed by an uprising by more than half a million people who took to the streets of Belgrade, seized the parliament, and burned down the state television station. Vojislav Kostunica replaced Milosevice as the new democratically elected president of Yugoslavia. He said he had no intention of handing Milosevic over to the UN war crimes tribunal. But, on June 23, 2001: the Yugoslav cabinet approved a decree that paves the way for the extradition of former President Slobodan Milosevic to the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. The vote was 8-1, with seven cabinet members refusing to attend the session. The Socialist People's Party of Montenegro (SNP), a junior partner in the ruling coalition, and Yugoslav Prime Minister Zoran Zizic boycotted the session. The cabinet was forced to resort to adopt the decree after failing to persuade their junior coalition partners to back a bill in the federal parliament which would have regulated co-operation with the tribunal. The United States has made it clear it will only attend the donors' conference in Brussels on June 29 if it has seen signs of progress in Belgrade's co-operation with the tribunal. On June 29, Milosevic arrived at The Hague. The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia - unlike its constituent republic, Serbia - has abolished the death penalty. Serbia maintains the death penalty for murder and terrorism. Kosovo society is so torn that establishing neutral judicial bodies has been very difficult. In December 1999, the head of the UN civilian mission in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, issued a decree proclaiming that the laws in force in Kosovo before 1989, the year the province was stripped off its autonomy, will be in force there in conjunction with all the previous UNMIK decrees, which also provide for the abolition of the death penalty. In 1999, 102 people were executed in Yugoslavia.