Everybody knows he’s died. Yet, with the exception of the true believers, and folks pointing out Russia playing its usual domestic-politics shenanigans vis-a-vis the old “Slavic Brotherhood with Serbia” chestnut, you can almost literally feel the pause before the blogosphere explodes.

Everybody’s waiting for the toxicology reports.

Was the former Serbian dictator murdered? Did the War Crimes Tribunal err by allowing healthy skepticism to undermine basic healthcare? As this excellent summary by the IHT demonstrates, part of the problem is that, like most international institutions of its sort, the Tribunal doesn’t particularly feel any need to be transparent with the public that it supposedly serves. This lack of transparency is at least two-thirds of the fuel for speculation on the issue.

Let’s be quite clear. It is entirely possible that Babic’s suicide was faked, and that Milosevic’ was poisoned, or allowed to die for lack of medical care. If I were one of the Serbian survivors of the Ustache’s genocide of WWII*, or one of the families who were ethnically-cleansed out of the Krajina during the Balkan War, I might be predisposed to find such an explanation entirely convincing — after all, these are the people whose legitimate historical grievances were used as fuel for the Milosevic’ machine in its attempt to consolidate power in post-Tito Yugoslavia, and, when that failed, to distract attention from the regime by brutally preying on its neighbors.

If, on the other hand, I formerly worked for the Tribunal, my primary reaction might be to publicly lament the lack of justice served, and the general ineffectiveness of the Court itself in having any significant effect whatsoever.

Of course, if I were one of, or related to, one of Milosevic’s many, many victims, Serb, Croat, Bosnian, and Albanian alike, one might quite readily forgive me for simply saying “good, I’m glad the bastard’s dead,” and leaving it at that.

Milosevic’ was going to die in jail one way or another. The ICC is not the U.S., where large sections of the public have no qualms about execution as a punishment for much less heinous crimes. The fundamental question is… was this process helped along, or was Milosevic’s fate simply the flowing tide of Inevitability?

If it turns out that Milosevic’ *was* murdered, then, given Babic’s fate, there will be hell to pay. If the former dictator’s medical care was short-shrifted in spite of numerous requests to the contrary, then the War Crimes Tribunal’s standing will still have something terrible to answer for.

Everybody’s waiting on the toxicology report.

*My keyboard will not form the correct characters for Serbian or Croatian. Thus I have rendered the spelling with the English alphabet.