Although he had sworn that he would never be taken alive, when the time came Slobodan Milosevic went quietly with the Serbian commandos tasked with his extradition from Belgrade in June 2001. Death came to him yesterday, however, alone in his cell at the Hague.

Many will feel that, by dying before final judgment could be passed at his war crimes trial, Milosevic has somehow “cheated the hangman”. Some will be relieved, perhaps including the current Serbian leadership.

The Americans, who did more than any other country to frustrate Milosevic but whose relationship to the concept of international justice is increasingly fraught, will have mixed feelings. Others still will welcome the end of an expensive spectacle that served to remind the international community of its failures during the 1990s.

Yet the unfinished trial has achieved much. The evidence it threw up established clearly that Milosevic was the inspiration for the “joint criminal enterprise” to carve an ethnically pure “Greater Serbia” out of the ruins of Bosnia and Croatia.

Over time, the prosecution case has also had a therapeutic effect on Serbian politics. There were many who sympathised with their former leader. But the recovery of refrigerated lorries with Albanian corpses and the harrowing footage of paramilitaries from Serbia engaged in atrocities at Srebrenica turned the majority against him.

Just how deep that transformation has been will now be put to the test, if and when Milosevic’s body is returned to Serbia for burial. All eyes will be on the popular response. Only then will we know if the beast that Milosevic rode to such terrible effect in the 1990s has been tamed.

HE was born in the Serbian town of Pozarevac on August 20, 1941, into a world of violence. The Germans were on the verge of unleashing a counter-insurgency campaign that left hundreds of thousands of Serbs and virtually the entire Jewish population dead.

Milosevic’s parents, both teachers, were depressives who eventually committed suicide. Their son will be remembered as the man who bears the greatest individual responsibility for the collapse of the former Yugoslavia and the massacres that resulted. Most of these were not spontaneous popular combustions, but a carefully planned assault sponsored by Belgrade.

We have long known from his co-conspirators, from intercept evidence, and from many other sources that Milosevic was the directing spirit behind the early and decisive stages of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia during the spring and summer of 1992, when hundreds of thousands of Muslims and Croats were driven from their homes by Serbian paramilitaries.

More recently, evidence has surfaced to link him, or at least his security apparatus, to the Srebrenica massacre of 1995 in which about 8,000 Muslim men and boys were slaughtered. Milosevic’s responsibility for the expulsion of more than 1m Kosovar Albanians in 1999 is indisputable.

Yet he was a paradoxical figure. He does not seem to have been a xenophobic nationalist in any meaningful sense. There was no trace of racism in his personal dealings.

In the 1980s he tried hard to match his wayward daughter to a dynamic young socialist of Turkish Muslim extraction. One of his closest cronies, Mihaly Kertes, was an ethnic Hungarian. His eccentric wife Mira Markovic, often seen as a Lady Macbeth figure, was a critic of Serbian nationalism.

Milosevic’s fateful championship of Serbian nationalism was primarily motivated by political opportunism. As the legitimacy of the Yugoslav communist party waned after the death of Tito, the former dictator, in 1980, Milosevic reinvented himself as the avatar of Serbian nationalism.

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