Milosevic gets the last laugh in death

We have seen quite a remarkable feat today in The Hague. Slobodan Milosevic, a man stripped of everything: freedom, dignity, and most importantly, power, has yet again managed to give a metaphorical finger to his enemies in the West.

Make no mistake about it, I am not a Milosevic supporter, but I am hardly a supporter of the Hague Tribunal, either. What jurisdiction, or business, does a court in the Netherlands have trying the former ruler of Serbia? What does the Netherlands have to do with Serbia, other than an upcoming clash in the World Cup? Even the Nazi war criminals were put on trial in their own country. If there was any hope of the outcome of this trial meaning anything to the people of Serbia, it should have taken place in Serbia.

Of course, Milosevic understood this, and played the trial masterfully. He succeeded in making the drawn-out trial more of a liability to the West than an asset. He also understood that the outcome was a foregone conclusion and that he would spend the rest of his life in prison, regardless of how well he defended himself.

So what was Milosevic's goal? To die fighting. As Orwell stated in 1984, it is the goal of every government to avoid, at all costs, creating martyrs out of its enemies. The whole purpose of the trial was to humiliate Milosevic in front of the world's, and more importantly, his supporters' eyes. I personally believe Milosevic has been planning this from the very beginning. First off, he took on an immense workload in insisting that he defend himself at the trial. Second, he was deliberately careless with his health . With his death under the current circumstances, a number of things can be observed:

- years of work by the prosecutors goes down the drain , as the trial is not complete and thus a "true" verdict impossible
- given his relatively good performance at the trial, conspiracy theories surrounding his death were sure to pop up, thus playing well to his nationalist supporters back in Serbia
- Milosevic dies fighting what he considered an illegitimate trial, rather than as a disgraced former leader rotting in a prison cell in the Hague

It is hard to imagine how much better an outcome Milosevic could have hoped for, given that the alternative was a lifetime rotting away in a cell, with his name forgotten and tarnished.

Carla Del Ponte is surely not pleased today.

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	Milosevic's Death Abruptly Ends Tribunal	Associated Press	Sat Mar 11	33
	Milosevic dies in jail as trial neared end	Reuters	Sat Mar 11	1
	Obituary: Slobodan Milosevic	BBC News	Sat Mar 11	0
	UN to launch an inquiry into Milosevic's death	CNN	Sat Mar 11	0
	Slobodan Milosevic Found Dead in His Cell	Associated Press	Sat Mar 11	2