Slobodan Milosevic, the president of what remains of Yugoslavia, and Sali Berisha, the former president of Albania, have been among the more despotic leaders to emerge in eastern Europe since the demise of the communist system. Both men appear capable of anything in order to retain or regain power and both have had their part to play in the tragic events in Kosovo.
I have never met Mr Milosevic but I have seen his effigy, in prison garb, paraded through the streets of Belgrade as a vast crowd, more than 100,000 strong, attempted to march to his personal mansion in the city's most salubrious suburb.
We were not, of course, allowed to get anywhere near the hacienda of a president whose personal fortune is reputed to be vast.
The police saw to that. They also saw to it that the young puppet master who manipulated the effigy was taken in and beaten very badly.
Mr Milosevic knows well the historic resonance Kosovo has with Serbs and the nationalistic feelings engendered by events there have tended to unite the nation behind him despite the general animosity towards him on other issues. The "Kosovo card" has, therefore, been played successfully by Mr Milosevic on several occasions with little regard for the consequences it might have on the ordinary inhabitants of the region.
His astute political manoeuvring has allowed him to hold on to power. This is a remarkable achievement for a man who managed to drive half a million of his citizens on to the streets of the capital to march against him on a single night in January 1997.
Across the border in Albania proper Mr Berisha has been accused of using the current crisis to regain the presidency of his country. As president, Mr Berisha engendered the hatred among his people until, in March of last year, the entire country collapsed into armed chaos. A wave of disturbances swept Albania from north to south. Almost every military depot in the land was raided and in the space of two weeks almost every adult male in Albania was in possession of an assault rifle. It was estimated that more than one million guns had fallen into the hands of the civilian population.
Remarkably, the crisis brought a moment of its own peculiar history when bandits opened fire on German citizens who were being evacuated from Tirana. Fire was returned; the first shots fired in anger by German soldiers since the end of the second World War. Shortly afterwards I met Mr Berisha, still president, in his palace in Tirana. Men in civilian clothes and carrying Kalashnikov rifles allowed no one to walk on the footpath outside the building on the Avenue of the Heroes of the Nation. Inside I was searched thoroughly before being ushered into the presence.
A man of considerably vanity, President Berisha insisted that the interview be carried out in English and without an interpreter. The result was a torrent of words disconnected from each other, a stream of "sentences" of which only one in 10 contained a verb. But the message was clear. His political opponents were "bandits" and "trafficants" (drug traffickers), the "salvation committees" set up in opposition to his rule would be "dominated with force" and he would then roundly defeat the opposition in forthcoming elections.
More significantly he stressed on a number of occasions that the arming of the civilian population and the mayhem which ensued was nothing more sinister than the right of Swiss citizens to bear arms in the defence of their country. Mr Berisha's opponents won an overwhelming victory in the elections and, to the surprise of many, he simply left his palace and went home.
Now, Mr Berisha's associates stand accused of smuggling many of those thousands of rifles across the border into Kosovo. His main support comes from the part of Albania which borders that region.
Both Mr Milosevic and Mr Berisha stand to gain political credit at home from continued violence in Kosovo. The fact that Mr Milosevic appears to have conceded to the West is likely, if his previous behaviour is taken into account, to be a temporary move.