Getting Off Easy

Slobodan Milosevic is dead. He was found dead in his cell, apparently dead of natural causes at the age of 64.

It is questionable if anything could have been done to him to make up for the severity of the crimes he committed or instigated in former Yuugoslavia. It is unlikely that any judicial proceeding based on our own high moral standards could have circumvented the man's grandstanding shenanigans in the court or handed down a sentence truly befitting someone so evil. There is a belief, in certain circles, that people who do the things that he did are simply mentally ill, that they suffer from some horrific mental imbalance that precludes their being able to recognize the evil that they are doing (and therefore stopping it). This school of thought is beatific and morally justifiable, but it ends with people like this confined to a cell for the rests of their lives as a ward of the state.

The proper response to what Milosevic did is, after a careful examination of the facts, to take him out back and shoot him in the head. Short of sending him to Abu Ghraib or the general population of a Turkish prison, this is the only sort of sentence that makes sense.

Granted, it is a little suspicious that he died of natural causes at the age of 64 in a prison cell in The Hague, under the supervision of doctors who were working hard to make sure he stayed healthy enough to serve out his sentence. (And please, let's not get into the bit where the Russians were willing to treat him in Russia; what, you can't get excellent health care in the Netherlands? Ridiculous.)

I'm going to end with a quote from Hajra Catic of the Association of Srebrenica mothers, a group that had the most reason to see him suffer: "However, it seems that God punished him already."