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http://news.independent.co.uk/people/profiles/story.jsp?story=334703 The Independent (UK) 20 September 2002 06:28 BDST Home > News > People > Profiles 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 �20 --------------------------- ANTI-NATO INFORMATION LIST ==^================================================================ This email was sent to: [email protected] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.bacIlu Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================
