Maybe Boris Tadic, Serbia's current president, has it right when he says his country 'stands to choose between the past and the future', writes Daniel McLaughlin, in Belgrade.
It was a day when Serbia showed its open wounds to the world.
Former president Slobodan Milosevic had died in his bed 24 hours earlier at The Hague, and former prime minister Zoran Djindjic had been shot dead exactly three years before, at a side entrance to the government building in the middle of Belgrade.
Mr Djindjic was a young reformer, well-liked by the West for extraditing Mr Milosevic to the UN war crimes tribunal in 2000, an act that provoked mafia supporters of Mr Milosevic to seek such public and final revenge on the anti-corruption campaigner.
He was hit by two bullets from a sniper as he hobbled slowly from his car, nursing a football injury. He was almost dead by the time he was carried away to hospital past the blackened shell of the old defence ministry, which Nato's bombers pulverised when it was persuading Mr Milosevic to pull out of Kosovo in 1999.
Yesterday, through the same drab Belgrade streets lashed by the same incessant rain, Serbs of very different stripes mourned two very different leaders. Bosko Djokovic, a Belgrade teacher, said he saw "poetic justice" in Mr Milosevic dying on the eve of his adversary's anniversary.
"He was responsible for Djindjic's death, and he ultimately paid for that," he said.
Someone always pays, and usually very dearly, for the decisions of Serbia's politicians. And justice here - as mourners of the dead dictator and the murdered reformer could have told you - is always in the eye of the beholder.
Now Mr Milosevic's allies claim he was poisoned by Western conspirators in The Hague, and the victims of his wars across former Yugoslavia feel that he has cheated them, escaping without the conviction and life sentence that they had wished him. The cycle of perceived injustice, and the rage for revenge turns again.
Three years after Mr Djindjic had Mr Milosevic's nationalists on the rack, they are propping up Vojislav Kostunica's government and the Radical Party are leading in opinion polls, with their anti-Western rhetoric and yearning for a Greater Serbia. They are now playing a familiar lament - of Serbia connived against and victimised by the West - on the drum of Milosevic the martyr, as they played it right through the Balkan wars in the 1990s, all of which their leader lost at enormous cost.
Serbs are not inherently extremist, of course, and the radicals and nationalists would probably not fair as well in an election as their current poll ratings predict.
But where once Mr Djindjic offered huge charisma as well as progressive ideas and Western backing, now only Mr Kostunica stands in the centre ground, with a demeanour as dull as his moderate nationalism and ponderous plans for Serbia's future. His extremist rivals are now trying to mobilise a relatively small but vocal segment of deeply disaffected Serb society to force the government into a corner.
They are demanding a state funeral for Mr Milosevic, knowing that if Mr Kostunica allows it he will look bad in the West, and if he doesn't his enemies can paint him as an unpatriotic lackey to Brussels and Washington.
And patriotism has even more purchase than usual here now.
The EU has set an April 5th deadline for Belgrade to hand over Gen Ratko Mladic - another war crimes suspect who is widely regarded as a national hero - or face the suspension of talks on closer ties.
Under huge Western pressure, Kosovo's push for independence of some sort looks likely to succeed this year, and Mr Kostunica will struggle to justify that to compatriots who regard the region as their historical and spiritual homeland. And Montenegro, the junior partner in a loose alliance with Serbia, is to hold a referendum on independence in May.
The large Serb minority there wants to stay with Belgrade and if - as Mr Milosevic's daughter hopes - the former president is buried in his family's Montenegrin hometown, tension between the communities there could spiral.
Radical Party leader Tomislav Nikolic has already thrown down the war-crimes gauntlet to Mr Kostunica. "Who will now dare extradite any Serb to The Hague?" he proclaimed. "Except for some crazy politicians, who will dare co-operate with The Hague now?" A Belgrade law professor who asked not to be named said extremist forces would now use Mr Milosevic's demise to turn Serbia's predicament into a rallying cry.
"This will give wings to the Radicals and other extremist movements," she said. "They can rid themselves of everything bad that went with the Milosevic name and play on the story of victimised Serbia, which has the whole world against it."
For their strategy to succeed, Serbia must not hand over Gen Mladic, thereby scuttling talks with the EU and plunging the country back into the kind of isolation that allows them to perpetuate the "nation-as-victim" mentality on which their popularity thrives.
The other path - by which Belgrade hands over Gen Mladic, resolves the Kosovo problem amicably and abides by what is likely to be a tight result in Montenegro - should see it move towards EU integration, attract aid, loans and investment from an eager Brussels and Washington, and see the radicals neutralised as standards of living improve.
The death of Mr Milosevic - a month after the death of veteran Kosovo independence leader Ibrahim Rugova - could see a page turned in Balkan history. But it is soon to tell whether it will be a brighter page than the last.
"When I think about Milosevic, I see images of destroyed towns, piles of bodies, thousands of people arrested because they rebelled against him," says Cedomir Jovanovic, a former top aide to Mr Djindjic.
"With Djindjic's death, Serbia started sinking back to where it was during Milosevic's reign," he added. "We now live in a country without future and vision." That is perhaps too bleak an outlook, considering how many more people in Belgrade yesterday mourned for Mr Djindjic than publicly lamented for Mr Milosevic. Maybe Boris Tadic, Serbia's current president, has it right when he says his country "stands to choose between the past and the future". But that is not a choice that Serbia has always made wisely.