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The Independent (UK)
20 September 2002 06:28 BDST
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Being Mrs Milosevic
While she was at school, Mira Markovic fell in
love
with an ambitious young man. He - Slobodan
Milosevic - went on to become the first state
president to be tried for genocide. But what part
did she play in his alleged crimes? In an
exclusive
interview for a new book, Adam Lebor asked her
19 September 2002
Draped in Versace, her face framed by her
trademark helmet of
coal-black hair, Mira Markovic fixes me with an
unblinking stare. "So, you
are the one who has been asking questions all
over the city about me
and my husband," she says. Her voice is almost
girlish, her eyes, dark
as obsidian, glint in the soft light of a
Belgrade dusk.
We are meeting at an elegant Italian restaurant
attached to a theatre in
a converted former warehouse beside the Danube.
The waitresses and
other patrons try hard not to notice that the
wife of the man who ruled
over Serbia for more than a decade sits demurely
among them, sipping
on a milky coffee. Her bodyguard waits nearby.
I reply that, yes, I was asking lots of
questions, as I am writing a book
about her husband. Indeed, I say, I had taken the
trouble to write to Mr
Milosevic, informing him of my project. Now
incarcerated at the UN
detention centre just outside The Hague,
Milosevic is forbidden to
speak to journalists. He is accused of war crimes
and crimes against
humanity in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, and
genocide in Bosnia.
Milosevic first appeared in court in July 2001,
and his trial could stretch
into 2004. Milosevic is not personally accused of
taking part in
massacres and ethnic-cleansing. However, in all
three indictments, he
is accused of individual criminal responsibility
under article 7 (1) of the
tribunal's statutes, for having planned or
ordered such acts, and of
individual criminal responsibility for the acts
of his subordinates, under
article 7 (3) of the statutes.
I smile politely at the wife of the first state
president to be tried for
genocide. Dr Mira Markovic, I had been told by
former friends and
associates, values courtesy and good manners,
rare enough in
Yugoslavia's decade of carnage. The froideur
eases, the start of an
interview that lasts three hours. "My husband
read me the letter in his
prison cell that you sent him, when I went to
visit him. You asked him if
there was anyone he could authorise to speak for
him. That someone is
me. So ask your questions."
Mira Markovic, like Slobodan Milosevic, grew up
in the drab town of
Pozarevac in eastern Serbia, about an hour's
drive from the capital
Belgrade. One year younger than her husband, she
was born in July
1942. Both her parents were partisans, fighting
with Tito. Her mother
was a philosophy student called Vera Miletic. Her
father, Moma
Markovic, later became a senior politician in
Yugoslavia.
Vera Miletic was arrested by the Germans and
killed, but there is still
controversy over the precise circumstances of her
death. According to
Mira: "She was shot by a firing squad in
September 1944, and one
month later Belgrade was liberated. She was 24
and I was two." Others
claimed that Miletic was one of many to be
executed by the partisans
themselves, once they liberated Belgrade. Many
believe that she gave
away details of the underground party networks to
the Nazis, possibly
under torture. In post-war Yugoslavia, which
lionised its partisan
heroes, Vera Miletic was condemned as a traitor.
In later years, Mira
Markovic published a book about her mother,
praising her wartime feats
in the resistance. Mira carefully preserved a red
star that her mother had
made in prison in Belgrade. Even calling herself
Mira - a shortened
version of her full name of Mirjana - was part of
this drive, as Mira had
been her mother's partisan nom de guerre.
Whatever the truth, Mira's partisan pedigree
certainly helped to ensure
that the teenage Slobodan Milosevic noticed her
at school. "There were
the regular things, like when you see someone
during the break. The
first time that we really talked was mid-term,
and we got our marks. I
had a C in history, and I was desperate. I had
all As, and a C in history. I
was an excellent student, and an ambitious
student. My wish was not
only to be an excellent student, but to be the
best student."
When Mira became desperate, she turned to her
favourite book for
comfort. Antigone, by Sophocles, is the story of
Oedipus's daughter - by
his union with his own mother. It is a Greek
tragedy of suicide and death
and certainly a morbid choice for a schoolgirl of
16. But Mira could not
get into the school library to read Antigone,
because her library card had
run out. "I didn't have the money to prolong my
card. I met Slobodan in
the street and I asked him if he had the small
change I needed. I told
him that I only got a C in history and I was
desperate. He comforted me
because of that C. Then I told him why I wanted
to read Antigone for the
zillionth time. I saw that he did not quite
understand why."
Nonetheless, Milosevic saw his chance to make a
connection. He
sensed, too, a driving ambition in the young
woman with such powerful
family connections. Slobodan made sure to offer
his sympathy. The
conversation soon flowed naturally. "Somehow, he
tried to establish a
connection between the C in history and the
destiny of Antigone. He put
an effort into that." He succeeded.
In fact, it seems that Slobo swept Mira off her
feet. "It is even more
romantic than I am able to tell you. Everything
was romantic, but I am
restrained from telling you how romantic it was."
Slobodan and Mira
were quickly an item. They blotted out the rest
of the world, finding in
each other the emotional support missing in their
lives. At school, they
were known as "Romeo and Juliet II", after
another of Pozarevac's
inseparable teenage couples. But even then, the
couple's driving
ambition was noticed. In Pozarevac, as in other
Balkan and
Mediterranean towns, the main evening
entertainment was the corso, or
promenade. While their fellow-pupils walked on
the road, Slobodan and
Mira strolled on the pavements, with their
teachers.
Their fractured family backgrounds had much in
common. Slobodan's
father, Svetozar, had abandoned his family.
Svetozar Milosevic and his
wife Stanislava were both teachers, who had moved
to Pozarevac
before the outbreak of war. Svetozar was a
spiritual man, talented at
intoning the Serbian Orthodox liturgy. But
Stanislava was an ardent
Communist, a true believer in Tito's new world.
In 1947, unable to settle
in Pozarevac, Svetozar returned to Montenegro. In
1962, he killed
himself, and 12 years later, Stanislava Milosevic
also committed
suicide.
Mira's father, Moma Markovic, barely acknowledged
his daughter's
existence and lived with his family in Belgrade.
Although Mira said that
she had "normal" relations with her father, the
only time she saw him
was on summer holidays with the Yugoslav �lite at
Tito's favourite
holiday home on the island of Brioni (Brijuni).
Instead, Mira was brought
up by her maternal grandparents. "It was very
romantic. I grew up in an
old house dating back to the 19th century, with a
big garden, with a lot of
flowers and trees. My grandparents kept me with
them. They would not
give me away to my father and my stepmother,
which I think was correct.
There was a gentle atmosphere, and I had a lot of
attention as a child."
After graduating from high school, Slobodan and
Mira went to university
in Belgrade. Former associates of Milosevic point
knowingly to the fact
that Mira is the only girlfriend he ever had.
This is considered highly
unusual in the still deeply macho society of the
Balkans. "Milosevic
would have long telephone conversations with Mira
at the Communist
party office in the law school," recalled the
Belgrade writer and
academic Nebojsa Popov, who was at university
with Slobodan. "Or
rather, she would speak most of the time. He
would say 'yes' or 'no'."
Slobodan and Mira Markovic married in March 1965,
while she was in
her third year at university. Mira was pregnant.
A daughter, Marija, was
born the same year, and a son, Marko, nine years
later. Even now, Mira
and her "Slobo", as she calls him, appear as
devoted to each other as
when they first met. Although an EU travel ban
remains in place on the
Milosevic family, Mira is granted a special visa
and usually visits her
husband in prison once a month, for several days.
They hold hands,
kiss and caress each other like teenagers.
"He is an extremely handsome man, with his
humanity," says Mira. "He
is a superior man, as a whole. He has strong
feelings for other people,
for their problems and needs. He is a good
speaker, and he has inner
stability, strong and natural, genetic inner
stability." Mira is often
accompanied by her daughter-in-law Milica Gajic,
wife of Marko
Milosevic, and her grandson Marko Jr. Marko is
believed to be in hiding
somewhere in the former Soviet Union. Marija has
yet to visit her father,
although the two speak often.
After graduating from university, Milosevic went
to work at Belgrade city
hall, while Mira finished her doctorate. He then
took a job at Tehnogas,
a company producing industrial gases, before
joining Beogradska
Banka in 1978. It was not until 1984, when
Milosevic was appointed
head of the Belgrade Communist Party, that he
began his career as a
full-time politician. The early 1980s were some
of the family's happiest
years, when Yugoslavia was still seen as Eastern
Europe's success
story, a bridge between East and West.
Milosevic was well regarded both by his peers and
Western diplomats -
especially American ones - as a banker. He
travelled frequently to the
United States, and attended meetings of the IMF.
"He was a great
banker, a brilliant banker," recalled Mira.
"Although I don't know much
about banking, and I know nothing about finance,
I saw that he looked
like one of the future bankers of the world. He
thought that to work in
banking and the economic sector was to be at the
top of one's career.
Fundamentally, he has the personality of a bank
manager. He never
thought much about being involved in politics.
The structure of his
personality can be described as a manager of a
bank, although a
modern and up-to-date bank, not an old-fashioned
one, like a village
bank."
But dark shadows lay ahead. The death of Tito in
1980, and his failure
to appoint a successor, had sharpened the
contradictions in
Yugoslavia. The country was not a nation-state,
but a state of six
nations: Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia,
Macedonia and Montenegro.
As it became clear that the centre could not
hold, each of the six looked
for a protector. In 1986, Milosevic was appointed
head of the Serbian
Communist Party. The following year, he cemented
his control by
orchestrating the humiliating public defeat of
his former mentor and
best friend, Ivan Stambolic, at the Eighth
Session of the Serbian
Communist Party. The issue that Milosevic chose,
with Mira's backing,
was support for the Serbs in Kosovo. It was the
start of a wave of
nationalism that would eventually lead Yugoslavia
into four wars, in
Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo; trigger the
bloody disintegration
of a once-sophisticated multinational country;
and end with Milosevic's
arrest and deportation to The Hague in June 2001.
Mira is not wanted by the International Criminal
Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia, and there are no criminal charges
against her in
Yugoslavia. Keen to avoid his fate, she now seeks
to distance herself
from his political decisions. They did not
discuss politics at home, she
said. "Would it really be possible for a man who
dealt with disastrous
politics for 10 hours a day to speak about that,
and then plot some
things together with me for the next day? Even if
he wanted to, he had no
strength to speak about that. Maybe in the first
year I was interested to
hear what was going on, but later on, I simply
didn't care."
This is not a view commonly held in Belgrade. In
later years, Mira
became mocked as the "Red Witch". She was
portrayed as a dark
manipulator, pulling the strings of the hapless
Slobo. Her girlish voice,
black clothes and frumpy demeanour were mocked in
newspaper
cartoons and in satirical skits and plays. One
cartoon even showed Mira
zipping herself into a Milosevic bodysuit. I
asked about her influence on
her husband. "I do have an influence and he has
an influence on me.
But what does that mean, 'having influence'?
Communication between
people means having influence. If we had lunch
three times, you would
have some influence on me, and I would have some
influence on you.
This is communication. If I tell you about the
books I have been reading,
and you keep that in mind, that is an influence."
Mira Markovic is a rare creature in the Balkans:
an outspoken supporter
of women's liberation. It is most unusual for a
Serbian woman to insist
on keeping her maiden name, as she does. As a
teacher of sociology at
Belgrade university, she refused to open letters
addressed to "Mrs
Milosevic". She said: "I want women's position in
society to be changed.
I am always on the side of women. Even more, I am
against equality of
gender. I think that women should more than equal
for the next few
centuries. They should be superior. Then they can
settle the account,"
she explained.
Mocking Mira, rather than her husband, fits
classic patterns of Balkan
misogyny. Across the region there are historical
myths featuring
malevolent females who encourage their husbands
to greater feats of
bloodletting. Mira argued: "The criticism against
me comes from the
residue of this medieval consciousness. These
minds see women as
someone who should stay at home. This is a
peasant way of thinking.
There is something else very much alive in every
culture. The idea that
there is a perfect male. He admits that he has
some bad sides, and
makes some mistakes. But behind them is a 'she'.
If there were not a
'she', he would have been a great person and
would not have made any
mistakes. The easiest 'she' to blame is a wife.
She cannot be defined
as a mother or daughter, because such people are
blood relations. But
a wife is an outsider. She entered his life, she
made him do such
things, to bring the nation to war, to call for
elections, or not to call for
elections. That is what she is guilty of."
One of the enduring mysteries of their
relationship is the contradiction
between Milosevic's exploitation of nationalism,
and Mira's resolute
anti-nationalist, pro-Yugoslav beliefs. The
wartime conflict between the
partisans and the Serb monarchists known as
"Chetniks" lived on in her
head. Dusan Mitevic, head of Belgrade television
until March 1991,
recalled how he was sitting at home with Slobodan
and Mira one
afternoon during the Bosnian war when the
telephone rang. Mira picked
up the receiver. Milosevic and Mitevic looked on
in amazement as she
snapped down the telephone: "Please don't call
him at home, call him
at the office." Mira turned to her husband: "It's
that Chetnik, Karadzic.
Don't have him phone here again."
Mira has always denied that her husband was a
Serb nationalist. "Slobo
is often described as a man who was for a Greater
Serbia. He was not
supporting such a thing. He wanted a big
Yugoslavia, and the place for
all Serbs in one country is Yugoslavia, because
Serbs lived in Croatia,
Bosnia, Montenegro. They were everywhere. No
other nation was as
spread all over. That is the concept of all Serbs
in one country. This is
true in 1991, he wanted Yugoslavia. They
attributed to him the easiest
sin they could, which is that he is a
nationalist. I think an educated man
cannot be a nationalist. I frequently remember a
sentence written by our
Nobel prize-winner, Ivo Andric, that the more
primitive you are, the bigger
Serb or Croat you are. Slobodan is not a
nationalist. But I must say that
Slobodan has strongly developed patriotic
feelings."
I ask what the difference is. "Patriotism means
loving you own country.
Nationalism is having a too-strong feeling for
your own nation, and the
inability to cope with other nations."
More likely is that both Milosevic and Mira were,
it seemed, in denial.
Mira refused to face the fact that, as Karadzic
and his henchmen
destroyed multinational Bosnia, they were in
constant liaison with her
husband. Milosevic was president of Serbia, and
Serbia supplied the
weapons, funds and political support for the
Bosnian Serb Republic
and its campaigns of terror and ethnic-cleansing,
just as in the
Serb-occupied areas of Croatia.
But confronted with the disastrous reality of his
actions, Milosevic simply
denied that anything wrong was taking place at
all. When, in April 1993,
Peter Maass of The Washington Post asked
Milosevic about Bosnian
Serb ethnic-cleansing, Milosevic sounded
concerned, and said: "I was
discussing that problem with [the Bosnian Serb
leadership] and they
said to me there was absolutely not any policy to
press any Muslim to
leave their cities. For example, in Banja Luka
there are a lot of Muslims
living equally, equally treated to the others."
The tens of thousands of Muslim and Croat
refugees expelled from
Banja Luka and its surrounding villages into
nearby Croatia were
comparatively lucky, escaping the horrors of
northern Bosnia's network
of concentration camps. In Banja Luka, the
Bosnian Serbs had also
committed a cultural war crime. They
systematically demolished 16
mosques, many dating back to the 16th century.
The stone blocks once
hewed by Ottoman masons were used to build a car
park, or dumped
outside the city. If Milosevic wanted to know
what was happening in
Banja Luka, he need only ask his wife.
On May 24 1993, Mira Markovic wrote in Duga
magazine: "The mosques
in Banja Luka have been torn down. Banja Luka
falls within the territory
of the [Bosnian] Serbian Republic... In the
middle of the 1980s, cases of
vandalism and desecration of Serbian cemeteries,
monuments and
monasteries in Kosovo perpetrated by ethnic
Albanian extremists from
Kosovo shocked Yugoslavia... And now it is very
hard for me to
understand how, just a few years later, a segment
of that selfsame
Serbian nation is doing to another nation the
selfsame things that were
considered dishonourable and barbaric when
happening to them."
Yet even now, Mira still calls herself an
internationalist: "That is what I
told Lord Owen, 'You can be sure that my husband
is not a nationalist,
because if he was, I could not live with him. I
am the main guarantee to
you that Slobo is not a nationalist. I am a
leftist, and I could not live with
a monarchist. We have the same political
opinions. We cannot have
different political opinions and live together."
As the European envoy of the International
Conference on Former
Yugoslavia, Owen was an influential figure in
Balkan diplomacy, who
seemed to spend vast amounts of time sitting on
Milosevic's sofa
nodding sagely. Mira certainly found him
agreeable company: "He left
an impression of a civilised and very cultured
person, close to me in
many things regarding the wars in Yugoslavia
itself, and in general
questions of civilisation. It was an easy
conversation. He was absolutely
close to my stance. I was astonished to see what
he wrote [in his book
Balkan Odyssey], that I, in our conversation, had
been against the
market economy, when I was not. Secondly, we did
not speak about
that. He is a doctor and he does not know the
first thing about
economics."
The stream of international envoys who flocked to
Belgrade during the
Milosevic era no longer seek his counsel. Neither
Lord Owen, nor the
US envoy Richard Holbrooke have been to visit
their former negotiating
partner in his cell at the International Criminal
Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague, bearing maps of
Bosnia and pens with
which to divide it. No sign, either, of Lord
Hurd, who, in the summer of
1996, met with Milosevic as a representative of
NatWest Markets, to
discuss privatisation of Serbian state utilities,
in particular Serb
Telecom, although Milosevic could certainly now
well use his own
private telephone network.
Critics charge that the ICTY tribunal is
"victors' justice". If so, it is tardy.
Between 1991 and 1999, Milosevic was treated by
the West - and
Russia - as a respected international statesman.
A considerable
amount of the evidence on which the prosecution
has constructed its
case against Milosevic has been supplied,
eventually, by Western
governments. If this is available now, it was
certainly known in the early
and mid-1990s. Yet, in October 1995, after the
war in Bosnia ended,
Milosevic was flown to Dayton airbase where his
name was spelt out in
flashing lights. War criminal or acclaimed
peacemaker? The difference,
it seems, lies not in deeds, but the fluctuating
demands of Western
realpolitik.
"Now, the Hague prosecution is saying that he did
this in 1991 and
1992, and so on," said Mira. "Would they take
such a man to Dayton?
The West treated him as their ally, and as a
factor of stability and peace
in the Balkans. He was in Dayton because he knew
that he could bring
the Serbs on the other side of the river Drina
[in Bosnia] to their senses.
He was one of the people they relied on. They
should be grateful to my
husband for the Dayton peace accords and they
well know that."
Yet, Milosevic does not feel betrayed, she said.
"The only person that
can really betray him is me. But people have
short memories and you
have to remind everyone of everything. In the
early 1990s, my husband
was accused by many circles, in Yugoslavia and
abroad, of wanting to
keep Yugoslavia alive, even though it was falling
apart and the Croats
and the Slovenes wanted to leave. That was his
big sin. Crazy Serbs
and crazy Slobo, they want Yugoslavia. Now, in
The Hague, they say he
broke up Yugoslavia. Let them make their minds
up."
'Milosevic: A Biography' is published by
Bloomsbury on 7 October, price
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