In principle there is nothing wrong with arresting and trying former presidents suspected of criminal wrongdoing. Betraying a nation's trust for personal gain or gratification should be punished, for its own sake and pour encourager les autres. It is pleasing to see that Joseph Estrada's goose seems to be cooked in the Philippines, and only a timely flight from Lima to his ancestral homeland saved Alberto Fujimori from sharing his living quarters with the leaders of the Shining Path.

The ability of some eminently arrestable former presidents to elude justice is both lamentable and infuriating. A very recent American president comes to mind, of course, as well as other assorted tyrants, thieves and scoundrels who are enjoying their ill-gotten gains in St. Tropez (Baby Doc), Harare (Mengistu), or Jeddah (Idi Amin).

There is one thing worse than a bad ex-president at large, and it is a bad ex-president arrested for all the wrong reasons, to the applause of people far worse than himself. Take Slobodan Milosevic. Now here is a truly awful ex-president. Like some crazed anti-Midas, in his 13 years of chaotically autocratic rule Milosevic destroyed everything he touched. Never a patriot - let alone a "nationalist" - this recycled commie cared not a hoot for his people's interests or dignity, and turned his country into a corrupt, mafia-infested basket case. Milosevic's arrogance and low cunning were matched only by his utter inability to devise a coherent strategy of anything - including his own political survival. His blunders were worse than crimes, they were mistakes. It will take Serbia decades to recover from this awful man.

Milosevic's arrest leading to a fair trial before a de-politicized Serbian court on the charge of treason, corruption, election fraud, political murder, and possibly even crimes against humanity, would have been a good and just thing. What happened in the Belgrade suburb of Dedinje in the early hours of April 1, however, was sordid. Responding to the congressional pressure from Washington (you arrest Slobo, we give you a little money; you deliver him to the Hague - we give you some more) the Serbian government of Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic performed on Albright's cue even though Albright is long gone. It met Biden's deadline and lost its soul. In doing so it has unnecessarily strengthened the hand of those bureaucrats within the Department of State - notably Colin Powell's assistant for political affairs Marc Grossman and the U.S. ambassador in Belgrade William Montgomery - who seek to ensure the continuity of the fundamentally flawed Balkan policy of the previous administration. It has also won the nauseating approval of Slobo's old buddy Richard Holbrooke, whose gloating over his ex-partner's predicament is akin to Vito Genovese casting a stone at Al Capone.

The previous night's attempt to arrest Milosevic failed only because the Djindjic camp tried to be too clever by half, and sought to stage-manage a shootout between the army and the police. In addition to Milosevic's own security detail the grounds of Tito's residence complex in which he lived were protected by a detachment of the Yugoslav Army brigade of guards. The soldiers' brief was not to protect Milosevic the man but rather the federal compound in which he lived. The soldiers had not been warned of the pending police action, and when in the early hours of Saturday, March 31, they saw armed masked men jumping over the fence and storming the gate, they resisted. In the ensuing confusion three people were wounded, none seriously. Kostunica had not been told of the police plan either, and as disaster loomed his last-minute intervention prevented a major bloodshed. The police action was temporarily called off.

Later that afternoon, at a meeting at Kostunica's office, it was agreed that the arrest of Milosevic would go ahead the following night after all.

This could be effected primarily because the former president's supporters were unable to mibilize more than a few dozen "people's guards" to come to the compound. Even after the arrest all they could muster was a puny 2,000 loyalists who staged a rally on April 14 to demand his release from prison, one day after the ex-Yugoslav president returned to his jail cell following a hospital stay due to a heart complaint.

The agreement between the Djindjic camp and Kostunica was that Milosevic would not be delivered to The Hague. While Kostunica remains adamant that no extradition should be contemplated now or at any other time, Serbian premier Djindjic and his allies accepted this arrangement as a temporary expedient that would give them enough time to prepare the legal grounds for their goal of eventual "full cooperation" with Carla del Ponte. They want Western approval, and money. But Kostunica's enemies within the ruling DOS coalition - the Quisling bloc hailed as "pragmatic" and "moderate" by The New York Times - does not understand that their acceptance of the assumptions that The Hague seeks to impose on the Serbs will not contribute either to reconciliation in the Balkans or to Serbia's reintegration into Europe. On the contrary, a settlement that is based on a lie and on an arbitrary apportioning of war guilt can only guarantee new, even bloodier conflicts, five, ten or twenty years from now - as we have witnessed in the decades after Versailles.

Milosevic was arrested just as the March 31 deadline supposedly stipulated by Serbia Democratization Act 2000 was expiring. By this date, according to the legislation, the Administration had to certify to Congress that the Belgrade regime was sufficiently in compliance with Washington's demands that it merited $50 million in aid. But as George Szamuely, among others, pointed out in his antiwar.com column, this in fact is yet another lie: The Serbia Democratization Act does not condition the release of $50 million on Yugoslavia cooperating with the Hague Tribunal:

"It is only the continued imposition of sanctions, particularly membership in the international financial institutions, that depended on how Belgrade comported itself towards Carla del Ponte. Moreover, the March 31 deadline was completely arbitrary. The legislation made no mention of this date.

Yet, as usual by dint of repetition, the story of the looming March 31 deadline became the stuff of high drama. Even so, Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic showed his usual shamelessness by denying that the timing of Milosevic's arrest had anything to do with the deadline. "Conditioning of that kind is unacceptable for a sovereign country," he declared. Of course it is. No doubt when Djindjic was in Washington a few days before the arrest US officials must have reassured him that they would not seek to get their money's worth from the bought and paid for Belgrade politicians."

Yet only two days after the arrest Djindjic was positively salivating at the prospect of millions of dollars pouring into Yugoslavia. "We do cooperate with The Hague," Djindjic boasted to Reuters. "Our government has met all the criteria stipulated by the US Congress law." Indeed, the timing of the arrest of Milosevic has shown that Djindjic and his allies - notably justice minister Vladan Batic and police minister Mihailovic - do not care about the consequences of burdening Serbia with the stigma of "genocide" that would stem from Milosevic's conviction. As we have stated before, and can only reiterate with renewed conviction after a recent visit to Belgrade, among the key players in Belgrade only President Kostunica understands that the political consequences of resisting Carla Del Ponte's demands are far more bearable than the loss of sovereignty and dignity that "full cooperation" (i.e. compliance) would entail. He knows that in the short term Serbia may face a certain amount of unpleasantness, mixed with attempts at bribery. On the other hand extradition of Milosevic would guarantee an open-ended extension of the Serbian agony. Milosevic would be duly found guilty of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other mortal sins, not because he is guilty of them - which he may well be - but because the ICTY verdicts are already written and sealed, and a comprehensive assessment of the context of events is out of the question. That sentence would inevitably lead to the demand for Serbia's "denazification" through collective confessions of guilt and the obligatory, internationally mediated payments of reparations to the supposed victims, payments that will many times exceed the supposed dollar value of the suggested sale of principles.

All this is common sense, amply confirmed by the aftermath of the shambolic Lockerbie trial in Holland. Unlike Kostunica's rivals within DOS, oly 11 percent of Serbs think Milosevic should be surrendered to tribunal, according to the latest poll (April 13). Fifty-nine percent believe he should be put on trial at home, while nearly 20 percent of the 896 people queried between April 5 and 9 thought he should not be in prison at all. Apparently the people of Serbia are far better aware than their leaders that their country's status in Europe will not be measured through the prism of compliance but only through its own ability to embark on sustained economic, political and social recovery. The Hague is the wrong issue altogether: it exists only in so far as it enjoys the support of political decision-makers in the western world, primarily the United States.

Attempts by the "Janissary" element in Washington notwithstanding, the new administration is rightly uneasy about the International Criminal Court. It may yet see merit in the argument that a public trial of Milosevic in the Serbian capital, and before a Serbian court, is the only way for both Serbia and the world to learn the truth about the tragic decade behind us. It is also the only way to do justice, and to see it done.