I HAVE ON MY wall a framed five hundred thousand million dinar banknote — worth about $5 at a time when inflation in Serbia was raging at 1 per cent per hour. It is a symbol of the ruin and bankruptcy — not only financial — that Slobodan Milosevic brought upon his country. I keep it as a memento of those times, and a reminder that he was in the end brought down not by the actions of Nato or any other outside agency, but by a great and overdue uprising of his own people against him in 2000.

It is worth reminding ourselves of the extent to which, through those dark years, he was sustained by the West. The very power of his position, and his pivotal role as the broker of the elusive deal to end the Balkan wars, led a procession of foreign ministers, European negotiators and United Nations envoys to beat a path to his door.

He will be mourned, beyond his family, by a significant but dwindling band of loyalists within Serbia, but by few outside it. The verdict of history will be overwhelmingly negative, as it should be. For here was a man who, had he chosen the path of peace, could have played a constructive part in the remaking of Tito’s legacy in Yugoslavia. The opportunity was there to be seized in 1991. Instead, he chose the path of “Greater Serbia” and war to achieve it, first in Croatia, then in Bosnia and Kosovo.

The bombardment of Dubrovnik and the destruction of Vukovar in the autumn of that year provoked the European Union’s premature recognition of Croatia, which left Bosnia in limbo, to be fought for by its constituent peoples. One calamity led to another in a straight line of march, as Lord Carrington (then the EU’s chief negotiator) had so accurately predicted. The European “statesmen” of the time must for ever bear their share of responsibility. So must President Tudjman of Croatia. But it was Milosevic more than anyone else who let slip the dogs of war — and, having done so, was unable to rein them in.

The sheer destructive futility of the strategy was apparently early on. Vukovar, a once great Austro-Hungarian river town, was like a Stalingrad on the Danube. Every building was damaged or destroyed. It was here that the Yugoslav Communist Party, to which Milosevic once owed allegiance, had been founded. Serbian paramilitaries roamed the streets. Even at the time while reporting there I reflected on the Serbian strongman’s role in this, which kept him in power at the cost of so much bloodshed and dishonour. “To the victor go the spoils — and the spoils are a heap of rubble.”

The role of the paramilitaries was crucial. To what extent they acted as Milosevic’s private army, in Croatia and Bosnia, was one of the issues before the war crimes tribunal. They could not have operated as they did without his consent and approval.

The fearsome Zeljko Raznatovic, better known as Arkan, appeared to have a free hand in attacks on frontline villages in Croatia. He was contemptuous of the fighting qualities of the regular Yugoslav Army, and had no difficulty redeploying his so-called “Tigers” into Bosnia in April 1992. Here they conducted a reign of terror, driving tens of thousands of Muslims from their homes. This was the beginning of the policy that came to be known as ethnic cleansing. Whatever his compact with Arkan, Milosevic had the power to seal the border. Instead he threw it open to the killers and cleansers.

Could the charge of genocide have been upheld against him in The Hague? In the absence of a paper trail linked to a chain of command I very much doubt it. I came to know Arkan fairly well. I never met a military commander less constrained by or aware of paperwork. But there were many other charges against the late Serbian leader that could have been proven if the indictments had not been so widely drawn. Instead, the sheer breadth of the case against Milosevic, the interminable arguments about the detail of each charge, meant that, had he lived, the proceedings before the war crimes tribunal would soon have entered their sixth year. Justice delayed that long is justice denied.

Should his victims feel cheated? Let us remember that many of them are dead — and among that number I include the 250 Croats executed in cold blood in Vukovar. A link to the 8,000 Bosnian Muslims killed in and around Srebrenica in 1995 would have been harder to prove. Of the survivors, none will mourn his passing, but many will believe that it should have happened with a guilty verdict ringing in his ears.

A more practical response would be to learn the lessons of the Milosevic case. The war crimes process should not be allowed a future like its past. Partly this is a matter of being more realistic about the timeframe in which a suspect is brought to trial and then justice. I was myself the witness in a war crimes case that dragged on so long that it wasn’t the accused, but one of the judges, who died of natural causes in the course of it.

It is also a matter of enforcing the tribunal’s authority. Milosevic has gone, and his death may well be seen as a sort of natural justice; time had delivered what the war crimes tribunal could not. But Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, the military and political leaders of the Bosnian Serb ministate and clients of Milosevic, are still at large. They have now been under indictment for ten years, yet they have been sheltered and protected by powerful friends. These two men have a compelling catalogue of charges to answer, including — in Mladic’s case especially — direct responsibility for the massacre at Srebrenica.

There have been many times when Nato and its successor forces shrank from the risky task of capturing them. But these two must now be arrested. And, having been arrested, they must face the charges against them in a trial that is not a courtroom farce like Milosevic’s, but a fair, serious and time-limited legal process.

Martin Bell reported on the war in Croatia and Bosnia for the BBC

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