Slobodan Milosevic died as he lived, exploiting Serbian nationalism while escaping official responsibility for four Balkans wars and the calculated butchery the world knows as ethnic cleansing. In an equitable world, the man known as the "Butcher of Belgrade" would have been found guilty and severely sentenced. Instead, he slipped away in his sleep at age 64 in a cell near The Hague, where he had been on trial for crimes against humanity for four long years.

If the defendant enjoyed a presumption of innocence, it was a legalism he did not deserve. He instigated four wars in the last decade of the 20th century, all the while claiming only to have at heart the national interests of "Greater Serbia." Milosevic's strategy was to blame the strife on ancient rivalries and stoke the fires of hatred with anti-Muslim bigotry. The result: the death of more than 200,000 people in conflicts that began in 1991 in Croatia and swept through Slovenia, Bosnia and Kosovo.

During that period, the term "ethnic cleansing," used freely by Milosevic allies to describe their intentions, became a new entry into the lexicon of savage, genocidal warfare. It was punctuated by the massacre of some 7,000 Muslim men and boys at the village of Srebrenica in 1995.

The Serbian leader was party to the Dayton Accords negotiated in late 1995, but international diplomacy failed to stem the violence. Serbia finally was bombed into submission by NATO forces in 1999, and Milosevic was indicted by a U.N. war crimes tribunal. The next year, he was removed from the Yugoslav presidency as mobs rampaged through Belgrade.

Slobodan Milosevic may have cheated the demand for justice at The Hague, but he will not escape the harsh verdict of history as a despot whose thirst for power led to the deaths of tens of thousands and the destruction of his own nation.