Nikola Šainović

Nikola Šainović (Serbian Cyrillic: Никола Шаиновић, born 7 December 1948, Bor, Serbia, FPR Yugoslavia) is a Serbian politician and former Prime Minister of Serbia of Montenegrin descent. He is a member of the Socialist Party of Serbia.

In 2009, he was convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague (ICTY) for crimes against humanity and war crimes committed against ethnic Albanian civilians in 1999 in the Kosovo War.

Nikola Šainović graduated earning a master's 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 1991-93 he held the post of Deputy Prime Minister within the Government of the Republic of Serbia.

On 10 February 1993, Šainović 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.

Šainović 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. He soon made greater inner-party progress. On 28 November 1995 he was elected by the SPS party members into the Executive Council of the Socialist Party of Serbia, as well as its Steering Committee.

FRY and SPS President Slobodan Milošević entrusted Sainovic with representing him in 1998 with the Kosovo affairs, where inner-ethnic tensions escalated into a full-scale inter-state conflict. Nikola presided over the "Commission of Cooperation with the Mission for Verification of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe" in Kosovo from October 1998.

He signed the Clark-Naumann Agreement, which mandated partial removal of FRY and Serbian forces from Kosovo and limitation of introduction of additional forces and equipment, as well as the deployment of unarmed OSCE verifiers. He was also a member of the Yugoslavian and Serbian delegation under Serbian President Milan Milutinovic in the failed Rambouillet peace talks with the Kosovo Albanian leaders from 7 February to mid-March 1999.

The ICTY indicted him in May 1999 for being responsible together with Slobodan Milošević, Milan Milutinović, Dragoljub Ojdanić and Vlajko Stojiljković in a joint criminal enterprise spreading widespread terror and violence upon the ethnic Albanian population in Kosovo in the period from 1 January 1999 to 20 June 1999. After the Yugoslavian Federal Assembly passed the bill permitting extradition of its citizens to the Hague tribunal, his lawyers had contacted the authorities to discuss his surrender. Šainović surrendered and was transferred to the ICTY on 2 May 2003.

His trial began on 10 July 2006. On 26 February 2009, the ICTY sentenced Šainović to 22 years in prison, following a conviction for crimes against humanity and war crimes, including deportations and forcible transfers, murders and other persecutions. On 23 January 2014 his sentence reduced to 18 years on appeal.

Šainović was granted early release on 26 August 2015, having served (including pretrial detention and time served) two thirds of his sentence, and lives in Belgrade. He was appointed as a member of the main board of the Socialist Party of Serbia on 3 September 2015.