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Then, in May this year, Zivadin Djordjevic, a Serb diver, revealed one of the best-kept secrets in Serbia. In April 1999, he was one of a team who salvaged a refrigerator lorry from the Danube At first they thought it had crashed. But when they opened it, they found the bodies of more than 80 Albanians.The truth began to come out. A Serbian police investigation discovered that, at a secret meeting in March 1999, Mr Milosevic ordered his Interior Minister, Vlajko Stojiljkovic, to get rid of any bodies that could be used as evidence at The Hague.As the Nato bombs rained down, body-snatchers roamed Kosovo. Mete Krasniqi saw them in action, after Serb forces machine-gunned the inhabitants of his village, including his son The villagers buried them.

A month later, hiding in the woods, they saw men in orange overalls dig up the bodies and load them into two lorries. A Yugoslav army reservist identified only as “Nikola” told the Serbian magazine Vreme that he made a dozen trips between a military camp near Pristina and the remote Serbian mining town of Bor during the air strikes, driving a refrigerator lorry full of bodies. With two friends, he opened the lorry and took gruesome photographs of the evidence. The journalist who interviewed “Nikola” claims he is already in The Hague, waiting to testify against Mr Milosevic.Some of the bodies the Hague tribunal was so desperate to find had been hidden just outside the Serbian capital, in the 13th of May military compound at Batojnica More graves are being excavated around Serbia. It is possible that in one of them lie Vjollca Berisha’s children.. As Slobodan Milosevic scuttled out of the Yugoslav capital under armed guard to The Hague last night, Belgrade was calm

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He can hide no longer. Milosevic is handed over to face justiceThe missing bodies of women and children that came back to haunt himEU in last-ditch effort to avert Macedonian warThe war crimes indictmentMr Milosevic and four of his top aides, Milan Milutinovic, Nikola Sainovic, Dragoljub Ojdanic, and Vlajko Stojiljkovic, are charged with crimes against humanity and violations of the laws or customs of war.

The indictment says forces under their command committed atrocities against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.The charges include deporting 740,000 ethnic Albanians from Kosovo and murdering 340 Albanians. The indictment says Mr Milosevic waged “a campaign of terror and violence directed at Kosovo Albanian civilians”. Mr Milosevic is charged with crimes against humanity and violation of the laws or customs of war. Prosecutors say he may be charged over war crimes in Bosnia and Croatia.As Slobodan Milosevic scuttled out of the Yugoslav capital under armed guard to The Hague last night, Belgrade was calm.Although a crowd of about 2,000 protesters gathered on the streets, most of the citizens who had treated Slobodan Milosevic like a deity a few years ago turned their backs ­ relieved, it seemed, at the departure of the man who had tarnished the Serb nation with crimes of almost unspeakable awfulness.As a fall from grace, it bears comparison with the disgrace of Benito Mussolini ­ one year addressing millions from a balcony, another hanging upside down from a tree.Mr Milosevic will not suffer that fate, but he may spend the rest of his life in a small prison cell, excoriated by the world for crimes that are still coming to the surface, forgotten by the nation he once led and cherished only by a diehard core of ultra-nationalists who even now cannot bring themselves to acknowledge what he did in Serbia’s name.Mr Milosevic’s wife, Mira Markovic, is their cheerleader. Hours before her husband was sent to The Hague, she was still protesting that he had done nothing wrong, that he was the victim of a media lynch mob, that he had devoted his life to the defence of Yugoslavia.It has been a dizzying descent.

On 26 June 1989, I stood among the million people who had streamed down to Kosovo in a vast convoy of coaches ­ all decorated with giant portraits of Mr Milosevic ­ to watch the man they called their saviour speak on the future of Yugoslavia. It was the 600th anniversary of the most famous battle in Serbia’s history ­ the Battle of Kosovo, in which the the Serbian Prince Lazar had gone down before the invading forces of the Muslim Turks ­ and there we were on the hot, grassy plain of Gazimestan where Serbia, so the poets said, had been crucified.But the Serbs at Gazimestan in 1989 did not see Mr Milosevic as a new Lazar. They saw him as a winner, who was going to reverse the historic legacy of the 14th-century battle by dealing Yugoslavia’s troublesome Muslims a blow they would never forget. As he spoke on the platform, Mr Milosevic said Yugoslavia had previously solved its internal problems by peaceful means. But now, he added ominously, other methods might be called for It was not just the Muslims who blanched at the threat. On the podium, I saw Yugoslavia’s President, Janez Drnovsek, a Slovene, turn distinctly pale.In hindsight, Mr Milosevic’s Gazimestan speech marked his apotheosis On that day, the Serbs were his, and they were as one. Only a few pathetic voices cried in the wilderness that he was leading Serbia into a whirlwind, and they were despised and hated for doing so.

The 99 per cent of the rest were mesmerised and drunk on his rhetoric ­ and Mr Milosevic was, in turn, imprisoned by their vast expectations and thirst for glory.The result, within less than two years, was war, first very briefly with the Slovenes and then longer with the Croats in 1991 and then even bloodier with the Bosnians the next year. As the tanks thundered down the Belgrade highway towards the Croatian capital, Zagreb, Serbs lined the sides of the motorway ­ ironically named the “Highway of Brotherhood and Unity” ­ and threw flowers. In the caf?of Belgrade, everyone was confident of speedy victory. “The Croats will do everything to gain their independence ­ except fight for it,” was the joke that did the rounds.But then everything unraveled. The tanks did not rumble into Zagreb, but got bogged down in the mud of eastern Croatia, where the Serbs found themselves hunkering down for a long and ugly war The body bags came home This was not expected. The word spread, quietly but insistently, that this was no reincarnation of the great Serb emperors of the Middle Ages but a man with feet of clay.Mr Milosevic himself began a physical metamorphosis. He looked strained and strangely bloated, the result, it was said, of the regime of pills he needed to keep his diabetes under control.