Milosevic staged the 1987 Kosovo confrontation by supplying stones to provoke police

Evidence

These people will not beat you again!” The response by Milosevic was shown throughout Serbia on all the major television networks. What the viewers were not shown was how the incident was staged. Serb nationalists, with Milosevic’s approval, had supplied the crowd with truckloads of heavy stones. At a given moment the crowd threw the stones directly into the face of police who had been standing by. The violence was instigated through crowd manipulation and exploited through media manipulation, tactics Milosevic would refine during his rise to absolute power. — Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, 197

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels manufactured provocations documented in other political rises (e.g., Reichstag fire debates, staged border incidents).