Vojislav Šešelj was born in nineteen fifty-four in Sarajevo, one of two children born to a family of modest means. Šešelj’s father, a railway worker, died when Šešelj was a child; he and his sister were raised by his mother alone in a poor suburb of Sarajevo. His family came originally from rural eastern Herzegovina, and had been economic migrants to Sarajevo. Given such humble beginnings, surely few then would have tipped Šešelj for greatness; but from an early age, he gradually began to distinguish himself, showing signs of the divisive and highly influential figure that he was to become.

His academic career was marked by excellence from the beginning. A straight-A student throughout secondary school, Šešelj obtained a place to study law at the University of Sarajevo where he distinguished himself yet further: he completed his undergraduate studies in a record two and a half years, stayed on to study for his masters degree, became the youngest recipient of a doctorate in Bosnia, and eventually obtained an assistant professorship in the Political Science department.

This academic ability, however, was tempered—even from an early age—by an arrogance and disregard for authority that frequently landed him in hot water. As a teenager, he clashed with his secondary school principal and the head of his local communist party youth league, skirting the very edge of acceptability within the regime; by his time at university, he was openly criticising prominent figures in academia and in the communist party apparatus. His feud with the influential Brano Miljuš gained him infamy and some measure of support, but also expulsion from the Communist League; a pariah to the regime, he lost his academic post and was placed under surveillance by the UDBA, the Yugoslav state security organisation.

Šešelj’s disillusionment with the communist regime can perhaps be traced to this moment. But his disillusionment was largely undirected until the early 1980s, when they took an explicitly nationalist form. While in Belgrade on national service, Šešelj met a group of hardline Serb nationalists, who crafted and shaped Šešelj’s disillusionment, channeling it towards their subversive activities; encouraged by this movement, he absorbed himself wholly in extreme nationalism. The first of many hurdles was to come in 1984, however, when he was charged with “counter-revolutionary activities” and sentenced to six years in prison.

Although the sentence was commuted in 1986, Šešelj’s political infamy was to stay. He joined a group of Serb nationalists called the “Movement of Chetniks in the Free World”; their name evoked the World War II nationalist group who collaborated with the occupying axis forces and whose ethnic cleansing programmes would be eerily repeated in the 1990s. Šešelj rose quickly through the ranks to become a Vojvoda, or “duke”: he travelled extensively through Europe, Canada, the USA and Australia, plying the Serb diaspora in search of funding for the nascent nationalist movement.

Šešelj’s rise continued further in 1990, when he formed the political party Srpska narodna obnova, “Serbian National Renewal”. In the first free elections in 1990, the party received a respectable 100,000 votes—a respectable enough tally to earn the ire of the regime, which promptly banned them. Undeterred, Šešelj and his ideological allies formed the Srpska radikalna stranka, the Serbian Radical Party, and in 1991 Šešelj was both appointed President of the party and elected to the Serbian Assembly.

He used his newfound platform to devastating effect. In the coming years he would launch impassioned speeches to rallies of thousands of adoring Serbs, speeches that only grew in their severity and vitriol as the conflicts in Croatia and Bosnia developed. His basic views were shared by most hardline Serb nationalists: that is, that Serbia qua state was far different to Serbia qua “people”, and that the only way Serbs could live was if they were united in one state.

Once it became clear that Yugoslavia was no more, the idealised manifestation of that Serb state shifted; the states of Serbia and Montenegro, the rump Yugoslavia, must grow; their borders must expand across Bosnia and Croatia until all the Serbs of the former Yugoslavia could live in one state. There was just one problem: the “Serb lands” that Šešelj and his allies sought were not quite that. Far from ethnically homogeneous, they were populated by hundreds of enclaves—many substantial—of Bosniaks and Croats. This was but a minor problem for Šešelj and his ideological allies: these lands, which were in their view intrinsically Serbian and had always been, simply needed to be “cleansed”.

In the autumn of 1991, as the conflicts of the 1990s were in their infancy and the battle for the Croatian city of Vukovar was just beginning, Šešelj visited the city. “Not one Ustaše must leave Vukovar alive!”, came Šešelj’s rallying cry; by November, after a bloody siege, Serb forces captured the city and—true to Šešelj’s words—began massacring non-Serbs they encountered by the thousands.

By 1992, Šešelj’s attentions had turned to his native Bosnia. “Dear Chetnik brothers,” Šešelj told an assembled mass in Mali Zvornik in March 1992. “We are going to clean Bosnia of pagans and show them a road which will take them to the east, where they belong!” The next month, Serb forces—including the notorious “Tigers”, controlled by the organised crime boss Arkan—took Zvornik. In the ensuing chaos its non-Serb population was routinely detained, beaten and tortured; by June, they were being massacred. Hundreds died, but Zvornik had been “cleaned”; the road for its inhabitants lead not to the east, but to a mass grave.

Throughout 1991 and 1992, Šešelj enjoyed the support of Belgrade and of the Serbian President, Slobodan Milošević. But by 1993, Belgrade too had earned his ire. The ever-calculating Milošević had decided that to continue his support for the Republika Srpska in the face of near-universal international condemnation was to commit political suicide; he duly withdrew his overt support, sending Šešelj into a rage and prompting Milošević to denounce Šešelj as “the personification of violence and primitivism”. While the staunchly ideological Šešelj was always destined to come into conflict with the pragmatic Milošević, the latter had a point: Šešelj’s policies, while ideologically pure, advocated a nationalism that was so violent and intense in its approach that the international community could never accept them. It was only through the bumbling incompetence and fractured disagreement of the international community that the Bosnian Serb forces ever made the territorial gains that they did.

Šešelj’s flirtation with extreme nationalism in the early 1980s, then, was to profoundly change Yugoslavia, coming as it did at such a formative period for the region. His clashes with and distaste for the ruling communist regime created an ideological vacuum which was filled with a vitriolic Serb nationalism; as he went on to spread this ideology of hate across the region, Šešelj stoked fires that had lain dormant throughout the postwar period. Once within the movement, he quickly attained a position of influence and dominance; he achieved high office within Serbia, and his speeches at rallies across Bosnia and Croatia inspired greatly the paramilitary forces that were to commit some of the gravest crimes against humanity in the Croatian and Bosnian wars. Unlike other figures in the Bosnian Serb movement, Šešelj was not at ground level issuing orders; with the power of his rhetoric and the prestige of his office, however, he proved just as capable of altering events as those who got their hands dirty on the ground—with devastating consequences for the non-Serb populations of Yugoslavia.