Hardline Serbian nationalist parties on Saturday described Slobodan Milosevic as a hero betrayed by sell-outs among his own people and said he should be buried in the national heroes' cemetery.

\"The Hague tribunal killed Slobodan Milosevic by not letting him go to be treated in Moscow while knowing what a serious condition he was in,\" said Radical Party official Aleksandar Vucic.

\"They demonstrated that it was considerably easier to find him dead than to have him alive and defending himself to the end of the trial and to continue to destroy their senseless indictment,\" he told Reuters Television in an interview.

That the US has been a principal organizer of this trial exposes the fraud of the entire enterprise. Washington itself accepts neither international law nor the jurisdiction of any international court over its own actions on the world arena. It has boycotted the International Criminal Court and strong-armed governments around the world into signing waivers exempting US officials and US troops from any liability for war crimes carried out against their peoples.

If, moreover, the trial of Milosevic were really about human rights and international justice, the obvious question is: Why has the UN not put George W. Bush in the dock?

There is no question that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and others in the current US administration are responsible for far greater war crimes and a far greater loss of innocent human life in waging an unprovoked and illegal war against Iraq than anything perpetrated by Milosevic.