I think any appraisal of the personality of "Slobo", as he was called at home, and his role in the Balkans tragedy in the 1990s is a separate subject, and discussing it now would hardly be proper and possible under the circumstances. To make such an appraisal, a certain length of time should have elapsed and an independent, unpoliticized, objective and unbiased analysis should have been made.
But then it is possible to state already today that the labels of the type of "the Balkan butcher" made up by Western propaganda are very far from the truth, to say the least. Milosevic was the son of his epoch and his people whom he tried to serve as he saw right and proper. Certainly he made mistakes, and, as we can see today, one of the worst mistakes was that, at a certain moment, he came to trust the West, and first of all the leadership of the US, too much.
It is no secret that US politicians and generals first nudged Milosevic to "resolutely put in order" the Yugoslav Federation that was beginning to break up. Then they accused Milosevic of "genocide", made him a political pariah, forced him to retreat by bombarding Serbian towns, and finally used the "velvety revolutionaries" to hand him over to the notorious Hague criminal tribunal.
That weird body, officially called the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, spent hundreds of millions of dollars during more than 8 years of its existence, but failed to win any laurels and to become a paragon of judicial justice and impartiality. The Tribunal immediately assumed a clear-cut anti-Serbian accusatory bias, prosecuting Serbian nationals suspected of war crimes, allegedly committed during the Balkan wars, with special severity and doggedness.
For objectivity's sake it should be noted that sometimes Bosnian Croats, Muslims and – in recent years – even Kosovo Albanians got detained too. But the unchanging line of the Tribunal's activity was always its anti-Serbian orientation, which became all-dominant after the 2001 hand-over of S. Milosevic by the new Belgrade authorities.
The late "Slobo" was, from the viewpoint of head prosecutor Carla Del Ponte and her colleagues, "a star figure", with all the trial proceedings and the Tribunal's advertising – and in particular that of Del Ponte personally - centering on him. To sentence Milosevic and to arrest and put on trial former leaders of Bosnian Serbs, Karadjic and Mladic, was proclaimed practically the Tribunal's principal and only political task.
Most of the charges brought against Milosevic had no real probative value and simply fell to pieces. Those charges were actually brought against the Serbian people, and the sentencing of Milosevic was conceived by the Tribunal prosecutors and judges and their offstage puppeteers as an all-round condemnation of Serbs as "a criminal nation".
However, the trial of the Yugoslav ex-president met, for a number of reasons, with many difficulties from the very start. First, the prosecution evidently overdid things, having brought against Milosevic as many as the total of 66 charges. Second, the accused, himself a lawyer by profession, with a superb command of the English language to boot, conducted his own defense skillfully and aggressively, often making his accusers sweat and get confused and driving them into a corner. On the eve of his death the ex-president demanded that former US president Bill Clinton and a number of other top US officials be summoned to give testimony before the Tribunal.
In this light, there is every reason to believe that the Tribunal's having turned down the request of Milosevic, who suffered from a serious heart disease, to let him temporarily go for medical treatment to Russia under warranty of the Russian government, as well as failure of prison doctors to provide proper medical aid to him, were just instances of mean revenge, attempts to break him physically and morally. It is also not to be ruled out that certain circles in the West might have resorted to assassinating "Slobo", as the court trial came to a dead-end and became meaningless to its organizers.
Be that as it may, after Milosevic's death the Hague Tribunal has definitively lost face and moral prestige in the world. Moreover, the Tribunal has itself come to be in a position of the accused. Not surprisingly, Milosevic has become already the fourth Serbian inmate to lose his life in the Tribunal's prison under suspicious circumstances. Before him, former leaders of Croat Serbs Milan Babic and Slavko Dokmanovic had allegedly committed suicide (according to official sources), and former mayor of the city of Priedor Milan Kovachevic had died "as a result of a rupture of the aorta".
The Tribunal that pretended to be the world's fairest and most humane dispenser of justice, with its "sterile" super-secure prison where everything is allegedly under weariless vigil, has in fact turned out to be a cynical political slaughter-house where all verdicts, including death sentence, seem to have been passed beforehand. This is confirmed by the near-unanimous "positively calm" reaction in the Western capitals to Slobodan Milosevic's death (you can imagine what kind of reaction it would be if something of the sort happened in a Russian prison to, say, M. Khodorkovski).
Moreover, the Tribunal's activities are actually guided by the same circles in the West that are themselves largely responsible for the deliberate dismemberment of Yugoslavia, the blood, woes and humiliation of its peoples. It is by their efforts that the Balkan region has again become "balkanized" today and turned into a heap of unviable - without external aid, partly occupied by US and NATO troops mini-states where foci of ethnic and religious conflicts continue to smoulder.
