He was elected president of the Socialist Republic of Serbia in and led the anti-bureaucratic revolution , reforming Serbia 's constitution and transitioning the state into a multi-party system , reducing the power of autonomous provinces.
He led the Socialist Party of Serbia from its foundation in until his death. He died of a heart attack in his cell in The Hague in before the trial could conclude. He had an older brother Borislav who would later become a diplomat. As a solution, he called for political change to reduce the autonomy, protect minority Serb rights, and initiate a strong crackdown on separatism in Kosovo.
In a interview with TIME , he defended himself from these accusations by claiming he stood for every nationality in Yugoslavia: "All my speeches up to '89 were published in my book. You can see that there was no nationalism in those speeches.
We were explaining why we think it is good to preserve Yugoslavia for all Serbs , all Croats , all Muslims and all Slovenians as our joint country. Nothing else. The New York Times reported that "a crowd of 15, Serbs and Montenegrins hurled stones at the police after they used truncheons to push people away from the entrance to the cultural center of Kosovo Polje.
The Federal Secretariat of the SFRY Interior Ministry , however, condemned the police's use of rubber truncheons as not in keeping within the provisions of Articles and of the rules of procedure for "conducting the work of law enforcement", they had found that "the total conduct of the citizenry in the mass rally before the cultural hall in Kosovo Polje cannot be assessed as negative or extremist. There was no significant violation of law and order.
