Yes, I saw that Independent obit, DB, but equally it's worth taking on board Tim Judah's fairly measured assessment for the BBC: Milosevic's legacy of discord. He said there: "Milosevic was not, contrary to what many believe, a nationalist. He was a political opportunist."

Your wider comments about the Serbs reveals an inclination to regard a whole nation of people as bad guys, and may explain your determination to find fault in only one quarter. I can never accept such generalisations about any nation of people.

Why after WW1 would Serbians need "apologists"? They had just fought with distinction in a war that brought four rotten empires down and a fifth (the British) to its knees - sustaining, along the way, proportionately greater losses than the UK's. It was the "Yugoslav Committee," overwhelmingly Croatian, that pushed for creating the country that became Yugoslavia - mostly because they saw strength in numbers as the best way to keep Italy at bay. Take off those blinkers and you will see that many complex factors were at play in the Balkans. Between the wars Croatian ministers were murdered in parliament, a Royal dictatorship was imposed and the king assassinated. Tito worked a miracle in keeping a lid on the simmering tensions for 30 years (unheard of stability for a region that had endured centuries of war), but sometimes by recourse to cruelly harsh measures.

It was almost inevitable that once that strong hand on the tiller was gone, the region would self-destruct. With the IMF imposing austerity measures, the richest republic, Slovenia, bailed out undermining the economy further. Germany (and the Vatican) pushed for Croatian secession, and encouraged Bosnia - a hopeless basket-case quite incapable of holding together - to go the same way. Each splintering off upset the balance in a whole chain of interlocked nationalities, states and religions - each defined within different boundaries.

You, DB, rail against the Left and perhaps embrace me in that, but I have no trouble recognising that the last envoy to the region to realise the disastrous consequences of Germany's policy was the Tory Lord Carrington.

I have pointed out that the earliest atrocities came not from Serbs but from Croatians. Yet you persist in the simplistic idea that all the trouble was started by one wicked Serb. I suspect you may have been influenced towards that conclusion by the generally anti-Serb perspective revealed in your last post.