THE NETHERLANDS: Milan Babic, the former Serb warlord who committed suicide in his Hague prison cell, was proud of telling people that he got his politics not from books, but from a mulberry tree.
The man who would lead the first Serb rebellion in a decade of war in the Balkans liked to show visitors the tree, in the garden of his family's house in a village in the western province of Krajina.
Gnarled and old, it had a gash still visible halfway up, which, Babic announced, was made by Croat neighbours during the second World War.
They had come to kill his father, then 12, and the rest of the family, but had taken out their fury on the mulberry tree.
He declared that the scar, visible 50 years later, was a symbol of the hate he felt Croats still felt for Serbs, and in 1991 he took his revenge.
A former dentist, he declared himself president of the self-proclaimed Krajina Serb Republic, and unleashed a campaign of ethnic cleansing, murder, torture and eviction of Croats across Croatia to the gates of Dubrovnik.
When the tables turned in 1995 and Croatian forces recaptured the territory from the Serbs, Babic fled to Serbia proper, only to surrender himself a few years later to war crimes prosecutors, pleading guilty in a Hague trial.
In court he surprised many Serbs by agreeing to testify against his former patron, Slobodan Milosevic.
Some say Babic gave evidence to cut a deal in his own trial, which ended in 2004 with a 13-year jail sentence.
Others say he turned evidence out of revenge after Milosevic replaced him as leader with Milan Martic. This claim was reinforced this month when he returned from jail abroad to The Hague to testify against Martic. And some say he gave evidence out of remorse.
The war he helped start ended in disaster, with a quarter of a million Serbs evicted, and few allowed back. That mulberry tree, and Babic's village, are lost forever to the Serbs who once lived there.
On being jailed, he talked not of hate but sorrow. "I allowed myself to participate in persecution of the worst kind against people only because they were Croats, not Serbs . . . I ask my brother Croats to forgive us, their brother Serbs."