Nikola Šainović

Who is Nikola Šainović?

Nikola Šainović is a former Prime Minister of Serbia of Montenegrin descent. He is a member of the Socialist Party of Serbia and in 2009 was convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague for crimes against humanity and war crimes committed against ethnic Albanian civilians in 1999 in the Kosovo War.

He graduated earning a Masters degree from the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia in 1977 as a Chemical Engineer. Soon afterwards he entered politics by becoming a member of the Serbian branch of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, which was in 1991 transformed into a real political party, the Socialist Party of Serbia. From 1991 to 1993 he held the post of Deputy Prime Minister within the Government of the Republic of Serbia.

On 10 February 1993 he became President of a minority Government of the Republic of Serbia after the SPS won the largest number of votes in the 20 December 1992 parliamentary election, with support from the Serbian Radical Party. On 18 March 1994 he resigned from office to be appointed Deputy Prime Minister of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia on 22 February 1994. He was reappointed FRY Deputy Prime Minister in 1996 under Radoje Kontić of the Democratic Party of Socialists of Montenegro after the 3 November 1996 parliamentary election on which SPS won the largest number of votes for the Serbian seats in the Council of Citizens of the FRY Federal Assembly. He was reappointed on new sessions in 1997, and finally on 20 May 1998 under Momir Bulatović of the Socialist People's Party of Montenegro. He stayed on that post until the Bulldozer Revolution in October 2000 when the regime was deposed.