Serbian Statesman. He was President of the Serbian Republic of Krajina. Born in Kukar, Croatia, he was the leader of the Republic of Serbian Krajina from 1991 to 1995, a break-away region with largely Serbian population that separated from Croatia after its declaration of independence from Yugoslavia in 1991. A former dentist, by February 1990 he had become an influential political personality in the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS) in Croatia. Held top positions on the Municipal Committee of the SDS in Knin. In February 1991, he began to extol the creation of an independent Serb state in the "Autonomous Serbian Region of Krajina". During that summer he became Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces in the self proclaimed autonomous region. In December 1991, he was elected President of the "Serbian Republic of Krajina." Between August 1991 and February 1992 Serbian Forces attacked the towns, villages and localities within the Autonomous Serb Entity of Krajina and gained overall control. The Serb Forces installed a system of persecutions to force the Croatian civilian population and other non-Serb civilian populations from these areas. As a result, he was indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. He had fled with his family and 250,000 other refugees to Belgrade in 1995 on the eve of a Croatian army offensive which retook Krajina. There he stayed with a cousin on his farm in a Belgrade suburb where he grew mushrooms. In 2004 he became the first ever indictee to voluntarily surrender and to admit guilt and enter into a plea bargain with the prosecution. He pled guilty to a single charge of inflaming an ethnic cleansing campaign that killed hundreds of Croats and expelled tens of thousands from the self-proclaimed Republic of Serbian Krajina and was sentenced to 13 years in prison in an unnamed country. Shortly before his death he was returned to International Criminal Tribunal at The Hague, Netherlands, to testify in the case against Slobodan Milosevic, former President of Serbia. Cause of death: suicide, in the United Nations detention center in The Hague, Netherlands.