Guest, if you know enough about Milosevic to regret that he died in his bed, how come you didn't know that well known fact about his parents? And what exactly do you mean when you talk about the ethics/morals.beliefs of joe public?

The US and UK governmental positions are easy enough to explain. They threw the might of NATO at Milosevic, after all. They are stuck with their agreed line. But I am always surprised at how readily people flock along behind them, spouting the same nonsense in sheer ignorance.

According to western perceptions Milosevic was an arch nationalist and therefore a villain. (Of course, when Americans kow-tow to their flag and proclaim their nationalist loyalties, that is to be welcomed.) But in fact Milosevic came to power by defeating the nationalist party in Serbia - at the same time as the openly nationalistic Izetbegovic and Tudjman were coming to power in Bosnia and Croatia.

Izetbegovic was a Muslim zealot, committed to Islam as the one world religion under a single worldwide caliphate. But he was loved in the west, probably because he wore a suit. And Tudjman never lost US backing even when he revived the insignia and currency etc of the catholic-fascist ustashe movement. The ustashe had slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Serbs during WW2 in a genocidal onslaught that predated the Holocaust.

It is forgotten now that Milosevic was initially welcomed by the west as a banker who seemed likely to sort out the Yugoslav economy. One of his measures was to revoke a veto that had been given to the overwhelmingly Albanian-Muslim region of Kosovo. (That veto was established by Tito, incidentally, and as recently as 1974.) Revoking the veto was seen by the IMF as a positive step towards decisive governance. Very few governments could be effective if they allowed vetos to individual regions within their territories.

Milosevic had plenty of faults, but history might well decide that the biggest responsibility for the disintegration of Yugoslavia rests with the German leadership. Germany it was that bounced the EU into recognising Bosnia-Herzegovina as a sovereign state, notwithstanding its inherent instability (predominently Muslim, with Serbian and Croatian minorities of 31 and 17 per cent respectively).

The whole principle of prosecuting unstatisfactory heads of state needs to be rethought. Mandela managed without any such recourse in South Africa, notwithstanding the monstrous crimes committed there by the leaders of that country who preceded him. And at a time when the US incarcerates and tortures innocent people beyond the reach of any law, one is entitled to ask "who polices the police?"