Milan Panic, Yugoslav PM Who Challenged Milosevic Dies at 97
Milan Panic, the Serbian American businessman who served as Yugoslavia's prime minister and ran against Slobodan Milosevic for president in 1992, has died in Pasadena at 97.
Milan Panic, a Serbian American businessman who took office as prime minister of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia during the country’s breakup in 1992 and that same year ran against Slobodan Milosevic for president as an independent candidate, died on September 24 in Pasadena, California, at 97. His family announced his death on September 26 on a memorial page dedicated to Panic.
He was born on December 20, 1929, in Belgrade. As a teenager he joined the Partisan movement during World War II, and after the war he competed in cycling at the highest level, both in Yugoslavia and internationally. In the mid 1950s he left communist Yugoslavia for the United States. In California in 1959 he founded the pharmaceutical company ICN Pharmaceuticals, which decades later became Valeant Pharmaceuticals and later Bausch Health.
Prime minister under sanctions
Panic returned to Serbian political life after spending several decades in the United States. When the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was formed in April 1992, then President Dobrica Cosic offered him the post of prime minister, which Panic accepted that July. He became the new country’s first federal prime minister, taking office at a time when Yugoslavia, because of the wars raging across the former SFRY, was already under United Nations sanctions and facing an economic crisis.
Panic warned lawmakers in the Federal Assembly at the time, speaking English with a pronounced American accent since he did not have a strong command of Serbian: “The question facing this assembly is more peace or more war.”
A clash with Milosevic at the polls
Despite being federal prime minister, Panic ran against Milosevic in Serbia’s December 1992 presidential election as an independent candidate with informal backing from the opposition coalition DEPOS. According to N1 and B92, he won 32 percent of the vote, while the BBC’s Serbian service, as cited by Danas, put his result at 34 percent. Milosevic, according to the same source, won the election with 57 percent.
“This is not a battle between two men, it is a struggle between two systems, the old and the new,” Panic said at a campaign rally in Krusevac.
The rift between the two politicians had already sharpened in August 1992 at the London peace conference, where Panic publicly challenged Milosevic’s right to speak on Yugoslavia’s behalf. Three days later the Federal Assembly scheduled a no confidence vote against his government, which Panic survived thanks to votes from Montenegrin representatives in the federal parliament. Just before the December election, Belgrade Television, later renamed Radio Television of Serbia (RTS), ran a campaign against him portraying him as an agent of American intelligence.
Ivan Protic, an editor at the Beta news agency who covered Panic’s rallies and activities in the early 1990s, said the 1992 election result remains historically significant.
But keep in mind that, with almost no campaign, one that lasted just three weeks, he collected more than a million votes. That is the best result up until Vojislav Kostunica and October 5,
when the Milosevic regime was overthrown, Protic added.
A few months after the election, Panic resigned as prime minister and largely withdrew from Serbian political life, although in the years that followed he remained known in the West as one of Milosevic’s fiercest critics.
The Galenika dispute
The Panic-Milosevic relationship also had a business dimension. Under a 1990 agreement, ICN acquired a stake in Galenika, then the largest pharmaceutical manufacturer in Yugoslavia. The Serbian government later cut ICN’s stake in the plant from 75 to 35 percent and took over management, after which Panic’s company sued Yugoslavia in a Washington court in February 1999, claiming its assets had been unjustly seized. The dispute was settled by an international arbitration tribunal in Paris, which ruled that Serbia pay ICN 50 million dollars, a debt that became known domestically as the Panic debt.
In his later years, Panic devoted himself to humanitarian work through his own foundation and advocated for peace and democracy in the Balkans. According to the family’s announcement, he is survived by his wife Aleksandra, children Don, Viki, Spenser, Tim and Aleksa, as well as grandchildren and great grandchildren.
