Slobodan Milosevic is dead

Slobo, 64, was found dead in his prison cell near The Hague. His trial had dragged on for years but never came to a conclusion, so the instigator of an ugly era of Yugoslav wars and ethnic cleansing will never face the official sanction that he deserved hundreds of times over.

Slobo had a chronic heart condition for years, and was noted as severely frail several times during the last year. My hunch is that he died from natural causes, despite the suicide of Milan Babic in the same detention center just two days earlier.

Slobo's death, though, is a good thing for the Karadzic hunt. The world will re-live the Yugoslav wars for the next month and focus on its leaders. This renewed attention will bring heat on war criminals much as the 10th Srebrenica anniversary did last summer.

Moreover, Slobo's drawnout trial was a drain on the resources and mission focus of the ICTY. With the Milosevic headache effectively over, they can focus on what is most important: finding and arresting Karadzic and Mladic. And once Karadzic and Mladic are arrested, ICTY prosecutors should have learned enough lessons from Slobo to bring the trials to a quick and decisive conclusion.