Slobodan Milosevic rose to power on the shoulders of Serbian nationalism after he realized its strength on a visit to Kosovo 14 years ago. And it will be Kosovo that buries the political life of the former Serbian president.

Milosevic “got his start and came to his end because of Kosovo,” according to Louis Sell, a professor of international relations and Russian history at the University of Maine at Farmington.

Sell, 54, has closely tracked the trajectory of Milosevic’s bloodstained rise and fall. Until 1998, Sell was a career diplomat in the U.S. Foreign Service, an expert on the former Yugoslavia who is fluent in Serbo-Croatian.

He has just completed a biography of Milosevic, titled “Milosevic and the Destruction of Yugoslavia,” which is scheduled to be published early next year by Duke University Press.

It was a swift rise and steep tumble from the pinnacle of Serbian political power to being delivered by his fellow Serbs to the enemies who defeated the Milosevic regime in the 1999 war in Kosovo. Late last month, Milosevic, 59, was handed over to the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague to face charges of crimes against humanity.

While Milosevic used Serbian nationalism, he is in fact motivated by one thing, and that is power, Sell told the Bangor Daily News in a lengthy interview in early July.

“I don’t think he really believes in anything,” Sell said. “Everything he’s done is to keep himself in power.”

He is “a chameleon,” portraying himself as a nationalist, an orthodox communist, and a peacemaker, among other disguises, when it suits his purposes, Sell said.

“Through his own miscalculations … he achieved his aims, which always boomeranged,” Sell said.

He notes a day that repeatedly stands out in Milosevic’s ascent and descent: June 28, the Serbian national holiday, which memorializes a crushing Serbian defeat by the Turks in 1389 in Kosovo.

It was in Kosovo in 1987 that Milosevic discovered the power of Serbian nationalism, Sell said.

Kosovo is a province within Serbia, the major partner in what remains of the shrunken Yugoslav federation.

Milosevic was on a visit to the province during which he was confronted by an angry crowd of Serbs who feared they were being abandoned by the central Yugoslav government to the majority Albanians in Kosovo.

After being told of Serbian crowds being attacked by police, Milosevic declared, “No one will beat these people again,” according to Sell.

The statement was later telecast, and Milosevic had made his name in Serbia, Sell said. Until that day, he had been “a pretty obscure apparatchik.”

Two years later, on the 600th anniversary of the battle of Kosovo, when he was supreme leader of Serbia, he used the holiday to celebrate his suppression of Kosovar autonomy within the Yugoslav Republic.

In the same speech to a million people, he first threatened war against Yugoslavia, Sell said.

And it was on the same day last month that the man accused of igniting four ethnic wars in the former Yugoslav republics – all of which the Serbs lost – was delivered to the war crimes tribunal in the Netherlands, pointed out Sell.

A native of Virginia, Sell grew up there and in Kentucky. He attended Franklin & Marshall College, where he studied Russian and Soviet history. He earned a graduate degree from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and entered the Foreign Service in 1971 as a Soviet specialist. But in 1973 the State Department had him learn Serbo-Croation and assigned him to Zagreb, Croatia.

Milosevic was trained as a lawyer but started out as a banker, having joined the Communist Party at age 18, said Sell.

He rose to head the largest bank in Serbia in the 1970s and early 1980s.

At the time, Yugoslavia was a confederation of republics ruled by Marshal Josip Broz Tito, who died in 1980.

During Tito’s reign, Yugoslavia was the most open and prosperous of Eastern Bloc nations. However, Tito both suppressed nationalism and would not let democracy sprout. So, as communism withered in the 1980s, nationalism rose to replace it.

In the 1980s, Milosevic entered politics, becoming the head of the Communist Party in Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia and Serbia. In 1986, he became head of the Serbian Communist Party, and a year later was de facto head of Serbia.

In January 1990, Milosevic attempted to take over the Yugoslav Communist Party but failed.

Thwarted, he tried to wrest control of the whole country, a move that split the Communist Party, a precursor to the breakup of Yugoslavia 18 months later, according to Sell.

He exploited a slogan, “All Serbs in One Country.”

Serbia is “messy,” like other Balkan countries, Sell said. “Political borders don’t match ethnic borders.”

Milosevic embarked on creating a greater Serbia, “knowing full well” war would result, Sell said. When Yugoslavia disintegrated in 1991, the country “was murdered. It did not suffer a natural death.”

Milosevic was the killers’ “ringleader,” he said. Then the demagogue “launched his people on a nationalist campaign that was disastrous.”

At first, the Serbs did well because they had inherited most of Yugoslavia’s military, Sell said. But over time the tide turned against the Serbs.

Then, “when he was stupid enough to pick a fight with NATO,” Sell said, he led the Serbs into a calamitous defeat in Kosovo.

The ethnic wars drove Serbia from being one of the richest countries in Eastern Europe to one of the poorest, he said. As unrest grew on the home front, Milosevic resorted to increasing repression against his fellow Serbs.

He was able to maintain power because he is a good manipulator who kept control of the Serbian media, Sell said. Also, his opposition was weak and divided, and he used the police to beat down opponents or make them disappear when necessary, Sell said.

In 1995, at the Dayton peace talks, which Sell attended as the political deputy to one of the chief negotiators, Milosevic reinvented himself as a peacemaker, Sell said.

But having Western diplomats negotiating with Milosevic to solve the problems he created was like “enlisting the arsonist to put out the fire he started,” Sell said.

Still, because he was willing to sign the peace accord, Milosevic profited politically from the forthcoming support from the West, Sell said.

But his misguided wars and the international punishment they provoked had caused the Serbian economic base to narrow sharply, leading to increasing political unrest.

Eventually, on October 2000, Serbs took to the streets in a revolution that brought Milosevic down.

Sell describes it as “an arrested revolution” because Milosevic was allowed to place himself, in “self-imposed house arrest,” as an adviser to the new Serbian president described it at the time.

Uncertain about the loyalty of the army and police, the Serbian government did not move against him, Sell said.

With tens of millions of dollars in international aid dangling in front of them and the chance to be no longer an outcast from the international community, the government eventually acted.

On March 31, a deadline set by the U.S. Congress demanding that Serbia show good-faith efforts toward meeting its international obligations, Milosevic was arrested. And then on June 28, on the eve of an international aid donors’ meeting, Milosevic was hauled to The Hague.

“It’s a painful decision to send a former president, no matter how reviled, to a foreign country for trial,” said Sell, who just spent two weeks in Serbia. However, “the Serbian people are tired of Milosevic.”

It does not mean the vexing and endemic troubles of the region will evaporate just because Milosevic is to stand trial.

“These kinds of problems are bigger than one man,” Sell said.

Within the former Yugoslav republics, “every ethnic group has its own list of war criminals,” Sell said. “Every village has a list of its own war criminals, of who did the killing, the raping, the expulsions. These are not anonymous people, these were their neighbors.”