Slobodan Milošević and Mirjana Marković Though he did not face sentencing in the Hague, history has already judged Milosevic as the greatest criminal in the region of the former Yugoslavia since the end of World War II. He is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, countless maimings, forcing millions of people to flee from their homes, many of whom will never return, for economic destruction, the devastation of the cultural and historical heritage of several non-Serbian nations, destroyed lives of the many who survived the wars he waged. Throughout his life, he pretended as though he had nothing to do with any of this, claiming that the news on crimes were nothing but enemy propaganda. And, if there were crimes, his belief was the he had nothing to do with those crimes, as Serbia did not participate in the war. And if people from Serbia participated in the wars, then he had nothing to do with it as he did not command the armies who committed those crimes. He portrayed himself as a peacemaker who hated no one and loved all those around him.

He was a man responsible for horrendous crimes, but he convinced himself that he played no role in them. Anyone who carefully followed the facts knew who he was, and that he alone pretended to live in some other world. Over the past twenty years, there have been many attempts to psychoanalyse his criminal mind. In these analyses, two fact stood out: that both his mother and father committed suicide and that from his youth he was under the unbelievable influence of his wife, Mirjana Markovic, an unseen lunatic, so much so that it is difficult to understand him without understanding their relationship.

Milosevic and Mirjana Markovic were together from their early youth. Both are from Pozarevac, a small town 90 km southeast of Belgrade. Milosevic was born on 20 August 1941 as the second son of Svetozar and Stanislava (nee Koljesnic). Svetozar Milosevic completed theological studies in Belgrade but, though deeply religious, he was become a priest but a high school teacher instead. His wife Stanislava was a dedicated communist, which caused their marriage to fail. Just after WWII, Svetozar Milosevic left his wife and sons Boro and Slobodan and left to teach Russian in Montenegro. In 1962, he committed suicide over feelings of guilt when a student of his killed himself after receiving a poor grade.

Slobodan Milosevic was a good and very reserved pupil. He was not in good relations with his mother, a teacher who was a lonely woman. After both her sons left to study in Belgrade and then found work there, completely neglecting their mother and not visiting her – she hung herself in 1974. Her brother also committed suicide.

Slobodan Milosevic was always close to Mirjana Markovic, whom he met in high school in Pozarevac. She was a true Partisan child, born in the forest. Her father was a well known communist revolutionary Moma Markovic. He was a pre-war communist, locked up twice and was a member of the Communist Party after Josip Broz Tito became General Secretary in 1937. He was one of the organizers of the Communist uprising in Serbia in 1941 and in August 1941, he organized party activities in Pozarevac and remained there until summer 1942. There he met 21 year old Vera Miletic, a communist activist, and organized the partisan uprising with her. Vera Miletic was a descendent of the duke from the 1st Serbian uprising, and many of her relatives were communists. Her cousin was Davorjanka Paunovic-Zdenka, who was Tito’s mistress in WWII. Vera Miletic soon became Momo Markovic’s mistress, got pregnant and gave birth to Mirjana in the forest on 10 July 1942. Fifteen months later, she was arrested by the special police while on an illegal mission in Belgrade. It was known that she was mistress to Markovic, so she was tortured and shot in 1943.

After the war and the partisan victory, there were rumours that Vera Miletic had not held out with the police, that she informed against her comrades and the party and she was publicly branded as a traitor at the 5th Communist Party Congress in 1948. For her daughter Mirjana Markovic, who was raised by her grandparents, this controversy remained a trauma forever. After the war, Markovic recognized his daughter, but never cared for her. He lived in Belgrade, was a great party and state official, and had no time for her. She only spent the summers with him. In the 1960s, he was forced out of political life. When he died as a lonely old man, his daughter did not attend his funeral.

Mirjana Markovic grew up with her grandparents outside the city, and when she started school, they moved into town into a mud house with wooden floors and a leaky roof. She was lonely and melancholic. She read and wrote a great deal. She was accepted into the Communist Party at the age of 16. The organization had nine members, five young men who voted to accept her, as she was the best student, president of the youth branch and participant in the work activities, and four girls who voted against, as they had seen her crying in the park, which they thought to be inappropriate for a party member. Her dead mother was her idol, she often used her conspiratory name Mira, and constantly showed her lasting bond to her moth using unusual symbolic gestures. Even while she was the most powerful woman in Serbia, she often wore a flower in her hair. In one interview, she explained that a photograph of her mother showed that she had worn the same flower in her hair.

As a young Communist activist in the youth organization, in 1958 she met Slobodan Milosevic when they were on the school New Year’s Eve board together. He was one year older. In January 1959, she received a C in history, the only one among her regular A grades, and she unhappily ran to the library to borrow “Antigone”, a book she often borrowed to soothe her spirits. On that cold day, he accompanied her and comforted her. And love was born. Analysts claim that due to the fact that they had both come from destroyed families, they early on sought the comfort and security of family in one another. Their peers called them “Romeo and Juliet”.

Milosevic graduated in 1960 and enrolled in law studied in Belgrade, where his older brother Boro was already studying. One year later, Mirjana Markovic enrolled in sociology studies. Milosevic was a good student, active in student organization and university party activities. He met many people there who would later go on to become prominent in Serbian politics. From his university days, his most important friendship was that with Ivan Stambolic, nephew of then most powerful man in Serbia, Petar Stambolic. For 25 years, Slobodan and Ivan were inseparable friends and political allies. Ivan Stambolic was always one step ahead of Milosevic in his career, and regularly took him with him to a new position as his assistant.

Milosevic received a professional political position at the age of 22 as secretary for ideological-political work of the University committee of the Belgrade Communist party. He graduated in 1964 and was hired in the city assembly, where he remained until 1966. Mirjana Markovic was also politically active. Considering that he received a job and regular salary early on, and was no longer dependent on his mother’s money, Milosevic was able to marry. He and Mirjana were married on 14 March 1965, when she was pregnant and in her final year of studies. After they were married, she kept her maiden name. In summer 1965, they had their first child, Marija Milosevic, named after Marija Bursac, a young girl killed in a raid in 1943 and the first woman to be proclaimed a national hero. In 1974, they had a son, Marko.

Milosevic left the university in 1966 when he was hired as an economic advisor in the Belgrade City Assembly. In September 1968, he entered military service, which he served in Zadar in the anti-air defence school. They exchanged long letters daily and sent telegraphs weekly. On Saturdays, they spoke by telephone. Once she visited him in Zadar. After returning from the barracks, she met a friend from Zadar and they walked through the city. In a window, she saw a picture of Yugoslav President Tito and said, “One day, pictures of my Slobo will hang in windows”. Obviously, she early on had great ambitions for her husband. She stimulated him to advance politically. After his studies, Milosevic became a party official, and Ivan Stambolic invited him to be his assistant in the company Tehnogas, where Stambolic was director. When Stambolic left the company, Milosevic took over the director’s post.

Milosevic’s wife was a great help to his career. After finishing her studies, she received an excellent post at the university, partly due to the influence of her father, and partly due to her powerful uncle, Draze Markovic, who in the 19070s was the most powerful man in Serbia. Thanks to him, she became a professor of sociology, and she asked her uncle to help her husband’s career. With two strong sponsors, Milosevic moved up fast: when Stambolic became president of the Serbian Communist Party in the early 1980s, he brought Milosevic with him to this most powerful political forum in Serbia. When his mandate ran out, he left the position of party leader to “ever faithful” Milosevic in 1985.

But Milosevic wanted to get out of Stambolic’s shadow and Mirjana helped him do so. Her powerful uncle had already stepped out of politics, and she created a strong new base necessary to move her husband forwards. The Belgrade University had a very strong party organization thought to be a type of ideological centre of the Serbian party at the time. Mirjana was herself influential as a member of the university committee, and was one of the main advocates against liberalism in the party. With a group of like-thinkers, she created a core within the Serbian party and at the 8th Congress on 23 September 1987, she helped Milosevic defeat his opponent and push Stambolic as well out of the political scene. Milosevic politically destroyed the man who had been his closest friend and ally, forcing him into political retirement and publicly humiliating him with various accusations. Only days later, Stambolic’s daughter was killed in a car accident. Milosevic appeared at the funeral, but Stambolic’s wife refused to accept their condolences. This was neither the first nor the last time that Milosevic had betrayed his closest friends in his climb to power.

Mirjana Markovic was constantly by Milosevic’s side in the key events in the late 1980s when he created the nationalist movement in Serbia and organized the mass rallies to bring down the government in Vojvodina, Kosovo and Montenegro, when he was preparing for war. However, while they chanted his name at meetings and praised him in the press, in the background she approved it all, even though these were not communist methods but purely nationalistic. In an interview for the Zagreb magazine Start in November 1988, Belgrade journalist Aleksandar Tijanic, today director of Belgrade TV, asked her whether they influenced one another, she said, “If I were to say that two people who have been together since high school, who live together and who are both communists and intellectuals, did not influence one another, then that would be cheap affectation, and that is not me.” Tijanic asked, “How do you live with someone who is such a public figure?” She responded, “We try to live as we did before. We lived best when my husband worked in the bank. It’s not a matter of money, but of having more free time.” Tijanic asked, “Your husband gives the impression of being energetic and an aesthetic personality. Is he like that in private”. She responded positively.

This was her first interview. Later she would give many more and, as time passed, she was increasingly present in the public eye, first in the media, and also as one of the main organizers of the new party – Movement for Yugoslavia, which in the early 1990s wanted to form the Yugoslav National Army as a political mechanism for keeping Yugoslavia together. When her husband launched into war, she publicly supported this policy. While the YNA tanks under her husband’s command were devastating Vukovar and guns were shelling Dubrovnik, she gave war warmonger statements. In one interview, she stated that “certain characteristics of fascism are visible in Croatia and could be compared to Nazism in Hitler’s Germany”.

When Yugoslavia broke apart and Slovenia and Croatia became internationally recognized sovereign states, she became the main advocate in Serbia to the thesis that this was only temporary and that Yugoslavia would be renewed. She could not come to terms with the downfall of socialism throughout the world, and continued to claim and wrote that this was nothing but a short-term crisis and that socialism would defeat capitalism in the end. Since December 1992, she began to publish her journal in the weekly magazine Duga, full of such political naiveties, combining pseudo-socialist theory with stories from her persona life, reminiscing about summer vacations in Dubrovnik, explaining her husband’s political moves, anecdotes from the lives of her children, especially son Marko, a common good-for-nothing and criminal, whom she called “my Peter Pan”. He was unable to even finish high school.

Mirjana Markovic showed greater ambitions to be involved, so she launched a new party, the Yugoslav Left (JUL). The party was formally run by theatre director Ljubisa Ristic, but it was Markovic who ran the show. She wrote the book “Odgovor” (Response) by compiling old interviews, the book “Noc I dan” (Night and Day) from her journal excerpts. These two books, published in 1993 and 1994 were heavily promoted throughout Serbia. She travelled to Russia, Greece, China where these books were translated and sold, thanks to financing from then close friend Bogoljub Karic. Belgrade TV dedicated great airtime to these promotions, her meetings with foreign scientists, with whom she discussed “the position of the left wing in the world”, and her constantly repeated statements that “after this Yugoslav night, day will come”, while her husband continually incited wars and innocent people were killed and forced to flee.

In the race for publicity, an unpleasant debacle occurred: in 1994, she received a journalist from the American magazine Vanity Fair to whom she spoke about the return of socialism. The magazine ran a mocking article about Markovic and her husband. Bella Stumbo spoke with Milosevic for ten minutes, but the majority of the article was dedicated to the interview with his wife. The article in Vanity Fair was a humorous overview of the situation then in Serbia, speculations as to whether it was in fact Markovic at the helm of the country, a report on what the places they visited looked like and how Markovic was interested in speaking with Vanity Fair in order to promote her books in the US. It was a clash of an American journalist, coming to write a satirical report from an unusual country and a die-hard Marxist “scientist”, convinced that socialism would come back to life in the next century, which she spoke of without any scepticism or a trace of humour. “I am a left-winger for the 21st century, for communism was the only new idea in this century, and it will change the world when the new left-wing is born, and then we will change the face of the West”.

The journalist described Markovic in a few sentences: “A chubby woman, who could be pretty if she ever smiled, but never does, dressed in a black dress that is hard to describe, without any makeup. The only hint of vanity is that she dies her hair black. Throughout the two hour interview, she sat rigid and ice cold, answering my questions in a thin voice through an interpreter”.

When the Serbs killed 8000 people in Srebrenica as part of Milosevic’s plan to divide Bosnia, she continued to write her stupidities in Duga. The anecdote which best describes the quality of pseudo-literary work of Mirjana Markovic was published in the weekly Vreme in 1996. “Homework has always been a nightmare for elementary school pupils, overburdened with too much material and, of late, confused with the sudden changes in history and geography. As such, a 12 year old girl, a 5th grade pupil in a Belgrade elementary school, was likely not thrilled when she received the assignment from her Serbian teacher to write about a ‘Winter Dream’. The girl wrote her composition and even read it before the class. The teacher liked the piece, praised her and the happy girl was thrilled to tell her parents of the praise. Her mother then read the composition and realized that the piece on the enthralled descriptions of winter were virtually completely copied from the journal of Dr. Mira Markovic, the wife of President Slobodan Milosevic, who regularly published her stories in Duga. The teacher though nothing of it – obviously he thought the level of writing was appropriate for the grade he taught. He likely did not notice the plagiarism because he probably does not buy the newspapers, and therefore, doesn’t have the opportunity to read Dr. Markovic’s excerpts. As an education worker, he doesn’t have the money.”

Milosevic was too intelligent a man with excellent political instincts to not realize that these endless promotions of his wife could only harm him politically. He was the complete opposite of his wife’s vanity, he did not give interviews, he avoided the public, he did not like to meet with anyone and had no need to walk through Belgrade for his instinct told him that the dark operations he led should be carried out far from the public eye. But it was becoming very clear that the man who caused the whole of Serbia to shake, himself shook before one person – his wife Mirjana. He could not refuse her vanity anything, not even these ridiculous promotions throughout Serbia and the world. All that he permitted showed that this stupid and greedy pseudo-psychological wore the pants in the Milosevic family.

In the second half of the 1990s, Milosevic’s rule began to slowly cave in due to the strong resistance of democratic forces in Serbia and increasing international pressures. When in 1996, Milosevic’s Socialist Party lost in the local elections, Milosevic was willing to hand over power to the opposition in certain cities, including Belgrade, but Mirjana Markovic was vehemently opposed. This was the first time that people realized that she was much more rigid than he was in defending their power. She better understood the consequences of losing power – this would not only be leaving the government, but likely a trip to prison for him, and perhaps her and her children as well, for they had all been involved in illegal activities. Under suspicious circumstance, daughter Marija became owner of a radio station, while son Marko participated in large smuggling activities in Pozarevac. Mirjana’s radicalism was increasingly evident in her columns in Duga where she began to more fiercely criticize her husband’s opponents as well as his associates who had not been hard enough on their opponents. She began to frequently insult opposition politician Vuk Draskovic, leader of the Serbian Renewal Movement, and his wife Danica who became radical enemies of the Milosevic couple after Milosevic had them arrested in 1993 during a demonstration. They were brutally beaten by police on route to the station and then put into detention. It is possible they would have been killed had Danielle Mitterrand, wife of the French president not intervened. After insulting Danica Draskovic and her family in a column in 1997, saying that Draskovic was a mad woman, Draskovic returned the blow, precisely describing the most powerful woman in Serbia, “Her writing about me turns out ridiculous in her obvious desire to humiliate my family in order to bring me closer to her – a woman without any family – neither prominent nor unknown, a plant without roots, a woman born in the forest near the village Brezan on the other side of the Morava River, the illegitimate fruit of a wild partisan forest orgy.

“According to the written history of her party, she was born by a woman killed for betraying her party comrades and she was recognized as a daughter by a partisan, despite suspicions of his fatherhood, on orders, which is likely why she never spoke to him nor went to his funeral. She was raised in the blood of the three hundred victims killed by her mother’s betrayal and in the sea of blood of other innocent victims of communist, from which she fed for the 53 years of her life: she, who together with her husband, destroyed an entire country, killing hundreds of thousands of people, women, children and the elderly with their bombs fired on orders from their bloody marriage bed; she, who destroyed and burned hundreds of villages and cities with her army, tanks and weapons sent from Belgrade to kill; she, who made hundreds of thousands of poor people homeless, who are still wandering throughout the world and through Serbia looking for bread to eat and a roof over their heads, she is mentally well but I am mentally damaged for I openly wished that there were no longer any more like her, and because I wondered why none of the damaged, homeless and impoverished had not raised their hands against those who had concocted, ordered and executed so much evil.

“And perhaps the comrade from Pozarevac was right, perhaps I am mentally damaged for in 1993, after receiving a beating from her and her husband, I did not go to her home and rip the wig off her head to show her bald spot, to beat her back, arms and legs as she did mine – because it was my civil duty. I am certainly not normal because I did not do those things, nor did any one of the citizens of Serbia and Yugoslavia who have suffered in any way, and who remain silent and bear it and wait either for God to punish them or for them to be removed from power.”

This was the time when Mirjana Markovic was beginning to panic and through her husband, she requested that the secret police increase actions against their opponents. This was the time when a number of political murders and assassinations too place in Serbia: two unsuccessful assassinations against Draskovic, murder of police generals and ministers, murder of well known journalist Slavko Curuvija on the street, kidnapping of political retiree Ivan Stambolic, who was later found to be executed and buried at Fruska gora.

Despite this repression, the Milosevic government slowly began to cave in around them, particularly after NATO carried out air attacks against Serbian in 1999 over Milosevic’s crimes in Kosovo. In the midst of the bombings, Mirjana Markovic gave an interview to famous US television reporter Dan Rather on 6 May 1999. She responded to the majority of Rather’s questions, and became particularly agitated over Rather’s question on Serbian crimes over Kosovo Albanians. “That is not true! The Serbs have not conducted any crimes against the Albanians, I’m sure of it. That’s like you saying today is Wednesday, but I know it’s Saturday.” In claiming that there were no crimes, she said, “I did not come here to lie before the world.” She angrily yelled upon any question of a crime, “It’s not true that Serbian soldiers are raping Albanian women. That’s not true. They say it’s true, but it’s not.” At one time, she emphatically stated, “Killing Albanians? That’s a lie. Why don’t you believe me? I love my people, all peoples. For me, the best country in the world was the former Yugoslavia, where all the peoples lived in harmony. It was the best country in the world and I loved it. All the textbooks in the world say that Serbs are not vengeful people. We spent five hundred years under Turkish occupation, which set Serbia back, but we still don’t hate the Turks.”

Though she said she did not like to talk about herself, when asked whether it was true that she had a strong influence over her husband, she said that they are “a very close family’. She spoke of her children, a young generation turned towards the West. She stated that the strongest country in the world was using the newest accomplishments of chemistry, physics and mathematics, and even astronomy in the war against Serbia, and that NATO wanted to create a new world order using the most brutal of means: they wanted to tie the people in iron chains and not with silk threads. “I hate the new world order,” she said “the last person to use that phrase was Nazi leader Hitler and he tried it out with gas chambers and the destruction of the Jews, just as now they are trying to destroy a small nation, Serbia.” Here Rather interrupted her and asked whether she knew that many Americans considered her husband to be a modern-day Hitler. She furiously responded, “That’s a lie. That’s like you saying it’s January and snowing, while today is May 1 and it’s spring outside. In order to someone to be a new Hitler, he would have to carry within him hatred against a people, to threaten that nation and other nations. My husband does not hate any people or nation, and had not exerted violence against them. He does not hate other peoples and has not threatened the regional ambient, he is not a threat to world peace and civilization, like Hitler was. He is just the moral force which is protecting a nation. To accuse him of being a new Hitler sounds like the worst cynicism. Your American films often show a character portrayed to be the bad guy at the beginning, but throughout the film he proves to be the good guy. This will happen here. My husband is not a threat to anyone, nor has he ever been.”

Her husband’s regime was brought down on 5 October 2000. She demanded that her he order the military to break up the demonstrations, but he no longer had the strength. After being overthrown, he was taken into house arrest. Mirjana was allowed to move freely, she had a passport and made several trips to Moscow where Milosevic’s brother Boro lived, who had there formed concrete ties with the Russian leadership as Yugoslav Ambassador to Russia. It was obvious that she was preparing a getaway for herself and her family, wanting them all to flee to Moscow.

Her son left Yugoslavia for good and settled down in Russia. In early 2001, the German weekly Der Spiegel released the sensational news from Belgrade in which the correspondent reconstructed the real background of murders that had occurred in Yugoslavia in the final years of Milosevic’s rule and which had never been resolved. He claimed that overambitious Mirjana Markovic was behind it all. The German weekly claimed that she had ordered the murders and they were executed by the secret service. Der Spiegel claimed that she ordered murdered every time it appeared that vital interests of her family were threatened. When a direct danger for her family appeared, Mirjana Markovic would telephone the head of the secret service, recently arrested Rade Markovic and said, “I think this case needs to be definitively resolved”. The word ‘definitive’ meant the person causing trouble for the Milosevic’s needed to be taken out of the picture. According to Der Spiegel, there were three such motives for a ‘definitive’ solution: threatening the family income, personal insult or a threat to her husband’s political rule. People were removed, those who knew too much about the import of weapons from Africa, Palestine and Iraq, those who knew about the secret accounts and money transfers abroad, or those who could testify about the ‘Belgrade despot’ and his war plans and orders for massacres.

Der Spiegel also claimed that former head of the Serbian party and Serbian President Ivan Stambolic was killed because he knew all about the financial manipulations of Slobodan Milosevic who became his predecessor as Serbian president. Milosevic and Markovic feared that he could politically threaten their power and she insisted he be executed. The magazine also accused her of being responsible for the execution of Macedonian president Kir Gligorov.

Der Spiegel claimed that in autumn 1998, one of Milosevic’s most loyal associates was fired, head of the secret service Jovica Stanisic, for he had begun to complain that the president’s wife was ordering executions more and more frequently. He was then replaced by the more obedient Rade Markovic. Mirjana Markovic quickly responded to the accusations by the German newspaper in Vreme. She gave an interview to Svetlana Vasovic and Igor Mekina on the accusations, claiming that this was ‘ordinary stupidities’. She said that her husband considered the accusations to be ridiculous and was sure that the ‘people would understand’ and therefore saw no need to publicly refute the accusations. Markovic said “As far as I know, the SDB is an independent institution and, it would appear, oftentimes insufficiently informed. As for owner of Dnevni telegraf Slavko Curuvija he moved to Montenegro a long time ago and I don’t think his death had anything to do with politics. And with respect to myself and my role in the assassinations on the Serbian Police Minister and President of Macedonia, did this not concern the death of one man and serious injury to another, these accusations would be an inspirational theme for a paper on how hatred and evil and degrade reason and intelligence. I’m waiting for them to accuse me of the war in Chechnya, the floods in India, the kidnapping of Alda Mora, the low temperatures in Siberia. This is too much – even from political opponents and personal evil-wishers. But, above all, it’s ridiculous.” She added a few words about the disappearance of Ivan Stambolic. “Stambolic was a friend to my husband, but we did not have exceptionally developed friendly relations. Ivan Stambolic left politics and, upon his request, my husband made it possible for him to be director of Jubmes Bank. After that, they had no further personal contacts or political, as Stambolic left politics. My family has nothing in particular against the family of Ivan Stambolic, and we never even mentioned him. New and stormy times appeared, and Ivan Stambolic became a thing of the past. When my husband was informed about the disappearance of Stambolic a few months ago, he ordered the Police Minister to do all in his power to find him or to at least find out what had happened to him. While he was President, he did not receive any information.”

When asked about their massive fortune during Milosevic’s rule, Markovic answered, “In early October, the media claimed that after 6 October, my husband sent three planes full of gold abroad, that he had accounts in foreign banks, that he is a rich man. Now, no one mentions these planes, while he never had a bank account in any foreign or domestic bank – all he had was his checking account where he received his salary. As of 1 October, though he is entitled to receive his salary for six more months, he has not received anything. The worst of all is that the media continues to write that Slobodan took financial advantage of his many years as President. Any director of a company has access to more materials goods than he did, not to mention the ministers. Let the new government check the foreign bank accounts, the housing, the money spent on education abroad, the public will certainly be surprised with the results. Where someone in the new government allowed to do that or wanted to, they themselves and many journalists would have to apologize to Milosevic. If there is one man who took nothing from his country, and received nothing, then that is him. If there is a man who this state owes something to, then that is him.”

For fifteen years, Slobodan and Mirjana Milosevic lived in an autistic world, ordering crimes and then proving their innocence. He pulled all the strings, gave orders to his loyal followers in informal face-to-face meetings for he never had the courage to take responsibility for his acts in open meetings. He and his wife believed that this unofficial decision-making would allow them to escape all responsibility for their crimes. In the last interview she gave Vreme, Mirjana Markovic asked in wonder, “What does my husband have to do with the destruction of Vukovar, that was the Yugoslav army and he is the President of Serbia.”

And that’s how Milosevic had nothing to do with the bombing of Sarajevo, the massacre in Srebrenica, with the hundreds of thousands of refugees forced from Kosovo, nor with the crimes in Serbia, the murder of journalist Slavko Curuvija, the attempted assassination against Vuk Draskovic, the kidnapping and murder of his political mentor Ivan Stambolic, numerous crimes against innocent people throughout the former Yugoslavia. He was convinced that even after losing power, he would be able to prove that he had nothing to do with any of it, and that he was officially innocent because his signature was nowhere to be found. He tried cowardly to get away with it, thinking that those beneath him would take the heat. But he did not succeed. In dramatic circumstances on 1 April 2001, after his daughter Marija shot the mediator in his surrender Cedo Jovanovic, he was arrested and transferred to the Belgrade central prison. Though he found it difficult to get accustomed to prison life, he learned prison discipline and order. It was most difficult for him to be without a belt, tie and shoelaces and that he had to wearing a jogging suit all day long. He realized that it was most important to take advantage of time for walks and to distribute his time in his cell. He was very satisfied with the prison food and he could also eat the food his wife brought in packages from home.

He was in the Belgrade central prison until 28 June 2001, when Premier Zoran Djindjic extradited him to the Hague Tribunal. Mirjana Markovic made several visits to him in the ICTY. In February 2003, she flew out of Belgrade, but did not return, instead heading to Moscow where her son Marko already lived, hiding from the Belgrade authorities for his illegal real estate activities. Mirjana was also under investigation as of early 2003. The authorities called for her return so that she could be questioned, and when she did not, an international arrest warrant was issued. This was a very difficult thing for both her and Milosevic. The Russian authorities paid little attention to the warrant, but this made it impossible for her to visit her husband in the Hague. Her son was also unable to visit. His daughter became a religious fanatic and moved to Montenegro to follow a local unrecognized sect of the Montenegrin Orthodox Church and also never visited her father. During his prison days, Milosevic was hardest hit by the fact that his family was not visiting him. He began to miss them more and more, particularly his wife, with whom he had been inseparable since high school and who played such an important role in his life. In his final months, he applied more and more pressure on her to see her. He thought he could do so by requesting he be transferred to Moscow to medical treatment, which the court rejected. Several days later, he died. In her first statement after learning of his death, Mirjana accused the Hague Tribunal of killing her husband with that decision.