That is a terrible shame because one of the main purposes of the trial was to hand down a definitive and indisputable verdict on the Balkans war, which 15 years after its end, remains shrouded in nationalist propaganda and is still viewed through lenses skewed by communal suspicions.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, created in 1993, was the first experiment in international-war-crimes jurisprudence since World War II, and was intended to be the model for the creation of more tribunals. That made the trial one of the most important in recent history. But the lasting impression of the trial for many will be of the former president ranting that he was the victim of a conspiracy led by the United States and Europe to keep Serbs from realising their greatness.

Milosevic, who was extradited to The Hague in June 2001, was found lifeless in his bed early on Saturday at a UN detention centre. He had been defending himself against 66 counts of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo during the 1990s.

While he saw himself as a tragic hero in the mould of the Christian Serbian warriors defeated by Muslim armies of the Ottoman Empire in the 1300s, the truth was far different. He was a corrupt, murderous leader who repeatedly plunged Serbia into wars to serve his own political ends. This was never more evident than in Kosovo, when with the economy tottering under the weight of international sanctions and the battering the country had taken from the Croatian and Bosnian conflicts, he opened a new front in the south.

In total, his sinister nationalism unleashed four wars in a bloody decade of "ethnic cleansing" that left more than 225,000 people dead, scattered millions of refugees across Europe and recast the map of the continent.

By the time he was finally toppled by a popular uprising in 2000, Milosevic's quest for a "greater Serbia" had left a region scarred by mass graves and bombed cities and Yugoslavia a shrunken and bankrupt "gangster" state.

Milosevic obviously didn't achieve this on his own. He found willing partners in his crimes in the Croatian president Franjo Tudjman, the Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic and Kosovo's Ibrahim Rugova, who were all too willing to incite communal hatreds to build their own ethnic-based states. They triggered a wave of ethnic cleansing that saw Croats, Serbs and Muslims - many of whom had once shared neighbourhoods - all too willing to kill one another.

The single worst incident was the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica, where as many as 8,000 Muslim men and boys were rounded up and murdered by Bosnian Serb fighters whom Milosevic supported.

Encouragingly, a video broadcast in Belgrade last year that showed Serbian paramilitaries executing the Bosniak men and boys in Srebrenica provoked enough shock to suggest the country may finally be turning the corner.

A completed trial and a conviction in The Hague would have greatly accelerated that process.

By the way the Saddam Hussein trial is being conducted in Baghdad, it would appear lessons have been learned from The Hague fiasco. The Baghdad court has not allowed an ailing man to defend himself, they have narrowed the case to a single incident, and they have not isolated Saddam from other defendants facing the same charges, meaning that if the former dictator were to die the case would continue and a historical record would be set.

Coming at a cost of US$200 million (the total for The Hague proceedings to date), these have been expensive lessons. Hopefully in future we'll reach a point where dictators won't be able to sleep soundly in their beds, and then it will have been worth it.