Milosevic was responsible for war crimes, but charge of genocide was not proven, writes Chris Stephen.
Was he guilty? This is the question that stands out amid the swirling controversy and turmoil following the sudden death of the world's most famous jailbird, Slobodan Milosevic.
Officially, the world will never get an answer, because he died before the end of his trial, closed this week in a brief meeting of his three red-robed judges in a thundering anti-climax.
Yet the evidence was in, or almost all of it. A trial that lasted 466 days had just 10 days to go when it was cut short. Unless Milosevic was saving some extraordinary rabbit to pull out of the hat, everything needed to make a judgment is already in. And online. Every minute of the trial is faithfully recorded on The Hague tribunal's website.
For this reason alone we can expect dozens of research papers, projects and books in the coming years weighing up this whale of a case.
And the first thing they will say is that, for most of the charges, guilt is not in doubt.
Most atrocities he was accused of were not hard to prove. I witnessed some of them.
Like the time, outside the tiny Kosovo village of Meja in 1999, when I found a human leg, still in its pin-striped trouser cloth, with a foot and a shoe attached, lying in a field.
Farther in were the bodies of men, shot and dumped upside down in a stream. And farther still, the yellow outlines on the grass showing where men had been forced to kneel, then shot and allowed to fall sideways. The bodies had been removed but splinters of bone and teeth remained.
It was not hard to prove this crime, nor to trace the unit involved, a special-forces outfit stationed on Kosovo's border with Albania during the ethnic cleansing of the province's ethnic Albanians. Nor was it hard to prove Milosevic was the boss. He had designated himself supreme commander.
No document showing him ordering war crimes was ever produced, amid 463,000 pages of material. Nor was a witness found who remembered him ordering war crimes. But that does not matter. For a war crimes conviction, you need prove only that atrocities were committed, that Milosevic was the commander, and that he let them happen.
This concept, called command responsibility, is the most powerful weapon in a war crimes prosecutor's arsenal because it gets around the most obvious problem of this business - the fog of war. Exactly who does what to whom on a battlefield is always conjecture. Soldiers committing war crimes can usually hide in anonymity, but their commanders are public figures.
But war crimes in Kosovo were only a third of his indictment. He was also charged with crimes in the Croatia war of 1991 and the Bosnia war that started the year after that. And that is where things get difficult.
Technically, Milosevic was not in control of Serb forces in either Croatia or Bosnia because they were separate countries - he was president of Serbia and later Yugoslavia.
Proving he had "command responsibility" for the horrors of concentration camps, the siege of Sarajevo, the "ethnic cleansing" and the massacre at Srebrenica was much harder. It was also the reason why the case fell out of the news for four long years. "Oh, yes, Milosevic," people would say when I told them I was writing a book about the trial. "What's happened with that?"
What happened was that prosecutors had to do the same job as with Kosovo - prove that Milosevic sat at the end of a long command chain. Only now that chain was longer, stretching over borders.
And once again I think they succeeded. Tapes of phone calls between him and Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic show their servant-master relationship. In-depth research of Yugoslavia's finances show that Milosevic, a former central banker, had absolute control of Serb cash flow. Prosecutors also found former commandos from Milosevic's own Red Berets who were sent into Bosnia for special missions.
Watching the process unfold over those four years, I felt a grim admiration for the prosecutors, and especially for the witnesses, forced to come to court and relive, in front of all those strangers, such terrible experiences.
Where the trial went badly wrong was with the most serious charge of all: genocide. Simply put, he did not do it.
Genocide means not just a crime of annihilation, but also that the accused person intended to commit the crime. This strikes me as absurd; it's a bit like "hate crime" - surely any crime involves hate.
Nevertheless, that is the definition, and though genocide was proved, in the massacre at Srebrenica, where several Serbs were convicted, there is no proof that Milosevic wanted it.
Perhaps he did. He certainly sent the weapons, petrol, money and even special forces to the Bosnian Serbs to carry it out.
But there is no proof that he intended genocide, and without that proof, under the definition of the law, he is innocent.
Why prosecutors did not see this problem, and why they blundered through weeks of hearings searching for such evidence, has yet to be explained.
Exactly how many of the 66 charges against Milosevic would have been proved remains unclear. But my bet is that when the verdict was read, probably by the late autumn or winter, Milosevic would have been found guilty of most.
A verdict of not guilty of genocide would have given succour to him, and his nationalist supporters.
But for the bulk of the other charges, for the massacre at Meja, mass rapes at Foca, mass graves outside Vukovar, the bombardment of Dubrovnik, and for horror, trauma and loss inflicted on nearly four million refugees in three separate wars, Milosevic would have been found guilty and probably got a life sentence.
Justice, for what it is worth, for what comfort it could bring to survivors, and for what warning it may have given to future warlords in future wars, would have been done. But fate decreed otherwise. As a result, The Hague tribunal's work, however bold, is likely to go down in history as incomplete.
Chris Stephen is author of Judgement Day: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic (Atlantic Books 2004)