-Caveat Lector-
>From Irish Times
Saturday, April 24, 1999
Serbia's Lady Macbeth wields quiet power
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President Milosevic is supported by a marriage, seemingly invincible, writes
Chris Stephen
YUGOSLAVIA: The mystery about Mira, wife of Yugoslav president Slobodan
Milosevic, begins with her surname, which she refused to change from
Markovic when she married.
It seems to indicate a strong streak of independence. Yet in truth this is a
couple more closely bound than most. Slobodan has been her only man, and she
his only woman, since the two met in their teens in the country town of
Pozarevac, near Belgrade.
Slobodan was an awkward, bossy, teenager, unable to make friends, fond of
giving orders. She was a shy introvert. But together they were dynamite.
"People who knew him said he was very stilted, going around in starched
white shirts. They could imagine him as growing up to be a very punctilious
station master," said Tim Judah, author of the book The Serbs. "But then he
met her. She is ruthlessly ambitious. She may be the reason Milosevic did
not become that station master."
Both had unhappy childhoods. Both Slobodan's parents committed suicide. Mira
had her own tragedy - her mother, a communist partisan, was captured,
tortured and executed by the Nazis in the second World War. Once together,
the two were inseparable. They had no outside friends, or lovers, and
married a few years later. While Slobodan moved inexorably up the communist
ladder, Mira became a lecturer at Belgrade University in Marxism and
Leninism. She always wore a flower in her thick dark hair.
They were, in fact, the perfect "party couple" by the late 1980s, when the
Communist Party found itself in trouble, challenged by the competing
national movements of a disintegrating Yugoslavia.
Milosevic was sent in 1987 to Kosovo to calm the Serbs, agitating against
the Albanian majority. Instead, he made a key speech, shouting the famous
phrase "No one should dare to beat you".
Mira went with him. Suddenly her husband was head of Serbia - overnight
switching to becoming a nationalist, but still at the head of the
Socialists, the renamed Communist Party. It is a change of ideology Mira did
not seem to like. She formed her own political party, the Yugoslav United
Left, firstly to keep alive communist ideals.
But she, and her party, changed through the 1990s. The small grass-roots
support died away, and instead it has become a virtual club. Businessmen and
ambitious party hacks joined YUL as their badge of acceptance into the
system Milosevic has built for himself. YUL has no seats in parliament, yet
includes almost all the most influential figures in Belgrade society. It
also has members sitting in the Yugoslav cabinet - naturally voting for
Mira's husband. It has in fact ended up being a centre for Yugoslavia's
business elite.
But getting too close to the Milosevics is difficult. One man who thought he
had connections was Slavko Curivja, the former editor of the opposition
newspaper Dnevni , who was shot dead last month in Belgrade. His funeral saw
an outpouring of grief from opposition figures. Last year he had ruminated:
"Nobody who is not a close friend, or not a bodyguard, has important
positions" within the Milosevic-Markovic sphere. Yet he himself was one of a
tiny number of courtiers who enjoyed their favour in the early part of the
decade before falling out with Mira.
Mira has used her position to carve out a niche as a newspaper columnist.
For several years her weekly diatribe has appeared in the magazine Duga.
Embassies and journalists studied these intensely, amid speculation that
they provided a rare window into the soul of her husband. Last year her
communist hackles rose when she accused Duga of being too nationalist. She
has since moved her column to another magazine, Bazaar.
Commentators insist she is the real power behind the throne - as they do
about Hillary Clinton, and have about the wives of powerful leaders since
Lady Macbeth. The truth is that few are close enough to tell.
In recent years the Milosevics have become semi-recluses in their chain of
official residences, one of which was this week bombed by NATO. Their one
indulgence is their children. Marko, in his mid-thirties, has taken a leaf
out of mum's book, embracing capitalism by taking over what remains of
Yugoslavia's duty-free trade, along with a large slice of the cigarette
importation business. In previous years he would order the Air Force to
close air bases near Belgrade so he could race sports cars. He has an
open-air disco, Madonna, in his home town, and was, when NATO airstrikes
froze most economic activity, building Yugoslavia's answer to Disneyland,
called Bambiland.
Mira has let it be known that she is worried that her son is married to a
golddigger. She has no such worries with her daughter, Marija, in her
forties. After a string of affairs and one failed marriage, Marija has
settled down with the head of Politica, the main statecontrolled press
empire, which included, until NATO struck its antennas, TV and radio
stations. Also off the air was Marija's own radio station, Kosava - no
connection to Kosovo.
Mira went public this week, blasting Britain's foreign secretary, Robin
Cook, for suggesting that her two children were now enjoying the good life
in Greece, where their father once had powerful connections, and where he is
rumoured to have salted away state funds. Her children, she assured Cook (in
an open letter that made jeering reference to his family difficulties)
remain by her side in Belgrade. Mira and Slobodan, without a single known
row or extra-marital fling, are a chilling example for ambitious young
couples.
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