Milosevic: Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish

The Serbs have been and probably always will be a mystery to me, an intensely nationalistic, self flagellistic and deeply fatalistic people whose defining historic moment was a crushing military defeat 600 years ago.

Slobodon Milosevic, who died of natural causes (we hope) in his jail cell in the Hague on Saturday in the fourth year of his trial for crimes against humanity in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, was the perfect Serbian poster boy: A brutal Communist thug with intellectual pretentions and unceasing apologist for and defender of all that was wrong with Serbs and Serbia.

Richard Holbrooke, the Clinton administration U.N. ambassador and Dayton peace accord negotiator, captured my feelings:

The trial was too long, but the trial was the verdict. The Serb people came to understand the truth that he was not a nationalist, but an opportunist. A kind of rough and imperfect justice was served.