Quotes of the Day

The guard at the U.N. detention unit at Scheveningen, a seaside suburb of The Hague, was making his usual morning rounds last Saturday when, at around 9 a.m., he came to the cell occupied by Slobodan Milosevic, the former President of Yugoslavia whose policies precipitated the Balkan wars of the 1990s, in which some 200,000 people died. Milosevic, who had long suffered from high blood pressure, was dead, lying on his bed inside his chamber. He had died a few hours before; the body was handed to the Dutch coroner's office for an autopsy.

It was a downbeat exit for a man who had been championed by his supporters as a nationalist hero, but was condemned elsewhere as a ruthless butcher. In his native Serbia, President Boris Tadic issued official condolences, but there were no family members to receive them, so they were delivered to Milosevic's old political party headquarters instead.

Milosevic's death reminded the world of a dark period in recent history, and of how difficult it has proved to use international courts to bring to account those responsible for great crimes. The Serb leader was the star suspect in the longest running and perhaps the most important war-crimes prosecution since the Nuremberg trials held after World War II. Lawyers at the U.N.'s International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia had labored for four years to win his conviction on three separate indictments and 66 charges of genocide and other crimes against humanity, and a total of 132 charges, including those against staff under his command. His death, just a few months before a judgment was expected, comes as a serious blow not only to the individual prosecutors, but to the idea that criminal prosecutions can become a valuable tool of international justice. Natasa Kandic, a leading human-rights investigator in Belgrade who collected evidence against Milosevic, says the trial will be remembered as "the most important unresolved case in the history of international law."

The court has never been uncontroversial. Though supported by human-rights campaigners as an important innovation, it has long been rejected by many Serbs as a tool of victors' justice. Resentment at the way that suspects have been handled has made it difficult to bring the region's most famous fugitives, Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, into custody. They are still at large, believed to be sheltering somewhere in Serbia or the Bosnian Serb Republic. In Belgrade, Milosevic's allies dropped hints that he might have been poisoned, though his medical record — he had suffered from hyper tension for years — suggested that he died of natural causes. There were also rumors of suicide, fanned by knowledge that his family has a history of depression — both his parents killed themselves — and by the fact that another prisoner at the Hague, Milan Babic, who had been a leader of the Serbs in Croatia, died by his own hand last week. But Steven Kay, one of Milosevic's court-appointed attorneys, said his client had shown no signs of depression and was determined to finish the trial, although he knew that he was weak. "Milosevic wasn't the suicidal type," said Judge Richard Goldstone, the tribunal's first chief prosecutor. "He had a huge ego."

Whatever the precise cause of his death at 64, Milosevic will be remembered for being at the heart of a bloody chapter in the history of modern Europe. Trained as a lawyer, he rose to prominence after the death of Yugoslavia's leader Josip Broz Tito in 1980, and became President of Serbia in 1989. After the fall of communism in Eastern Europe precipitated the break-up of Yugoslavia, Milosevic saw an opportunity to refashion the state as a Greater Serbia. Slovenia was allowed to slip out of the federation after a short war in the summer of 1991, but attempts by Croatia and Bosnia — both territories with substantial Serb minorities — to declare independence were met by force. The Bosnian war, which alone cost more than 100,000 lives, was ended when nato bombers finally intervened against the Serbs in the summer of 1995. But unrest soon quickly spread to the Serb province of Kosovo, overwhelmingly inhabited by ethnic Albanians. In the short Kosovo war of 1999, nato air power again hammered Milosevic's forces. When the war ended after 11 weeks, Serbia was compelled to grant Kosovo substantial autonomy — though it remains, formally, a part of the rump state of Serbia and Montenegro, all that is now left of Yugoslavia. Milosevic hung on in Belgrade, but was finally ousted from power in 2000. In 2001, the Yugoslav authorities surrendered him to the court at the Hague.

The Balkans are a long way from recovering from Milosevic. Talks on the possible independence of Kosovo started recently, but the province remains deeply scarred and impoverished by the war. Bosnia is a quasi-state, fractured into a Serb republic and a Bosnian-Croat federation, dependent on foreign aid. Serbia and Montenegro is riddled with corruption. The tensions between different ethnic groups that Milosevic aggravated persist; he burned bridges between peoples that had taken centuries to build. A successful conviction at the Hague would not have healed all the wounds of the Balkans, but it would have offered some recompense to those scarred by the misery of the 1990s. "It's an act of closure," remarked Paddy Ashdown, the former United Nations High Representative to Bosnia. "It just isn't the act of closure most people wanted to see."

Still, the tribunal has done some good. Grisly video footage shown last year of Serb soldiers shooting Bosnian Muslim prisoners outside Srebrenica — an atrocity in which 8,000 died — was a ghastly memorial of the cruelty of the times. Proceedings have finished against more than half of the 161 persons indicted; 40 have been convicted. "The court system has worked well," says former prosecutor Goldstone. And there are other reasons, too, to be hopeful that the ethnic cleansing of the 1990s need not be the Balkan region's enduring legacy. The prospect of E.U. membership has spurred significant reforms in Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia, and could even lead to the handover of Mladic or Karadzic within the month — despite the weekend's news. "Provided the E.U. maintains the magnetic pull, the region is now so clearly on the way to reform that no one can stop it," Ashdown told Time.

Milosevic's supporters may be hoping that his sudden demise in the Hague will revive his reputation, but the truth is that while his death is attracting attention, his ability to influence events is long past. Edging into the light after their dark decade of the 1990s, the people of the Balkans now know that there is little hope for them or their children in the brutal politics of ethnic identity with which Milosevic will always be associated. If only so many had not died so needlessly for that lesson to be learned.

• ANDREW PURVIS
• Former Serb President Slobodan Milosevic dies in the Hague before his war-crimes trial concludes