Displaying of Milosevic’s Coffin a Polarizing Event for Serbians

Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic remained a divisive figure in death Thursday as controversies erupted over the display of his coffin and former political opponents hurried to organize a demonstration to counter the adulation expected at his funeral.

The opponents launched a text-message campaign urging people to come to the center of Belgrade on Saturday and let fly balloons at the same time as the rites.

The former president was found dead Saturday in the United Nations detention center at The Hague, where he was being tried on charges of genocide and war crimes before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Milosevic was alleged to have orchestrated the Balkan wars of the 1990s that raged across Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia and Kosovo province, killing more than 225,000 people and devastating the region.

Milosevic’s coffin went on display Thursday afternoon at the Museum Space 25th of May, one of several buildings that make up the Museum of Yugoslav History. The building perches between the house where Milosevic was arrested in 2001, and the grave of Josip Broz, known as Tito, who led Yugoslavia for 35 years after World War II.

The museum director, Ljiljana Cetinic, expressed anger over not being consulted about the coffin and accused the government of perverting the use of a cultural institution. Directors of museums and cultural institutions in Belgrade signed a petition joining her protest.

A leader of Milosevic’s Socialist Party said permission to use the building had come from chief figures in the current government, but in an echo of the Milosevic era, no one would admit to having signed off on placing the coffin in the museum.

“I protest this in the strongest terms,” Cetinic said, speaking on the B92 television station, adding that the incident had “dragged cultural institutions into daily politics.”

The 1970s-style building where Milosevic’s casket was displayed was built in honor of Tito. At one time it housed a collection of carved sticks that were carried in relay races through the country and presented to Tito on his birthday, May 25.

Milosevic’s coffin sat alone in a large, white-walled exhibition hall, where the museum lately has displayed avant-garde art. It rested on a table in the middle of the room, a large framed photograph of Milosevic leaning against it.

As people filed by, many crossed themselves and then kissed the photo’s frame as they would an icon in a Serbian Orthodox church. The mood was somber but resigned -- in many ways Milosevic died here in Serbia in 2001, when the deposed leader vanished from public view.

Many mourners appeared to be Socialist Party members or supporters, and at one point about 2,000 crowded the stairs in front of the building. Most were gray-haired; many were bent and wore modest clothes. There were a few highfliers, too: women in long fur coats that all but swept the slushy snow and well-groomed men with bodyguards.

The mourners seemed oblivious to the terrible destruction of the Balkan wars Milosevic helped precipitate and the furies of ethnic and sectarian hatred the conflicts unleashed. Many blamed the isolation of Serbia and its economic deprivation on the international community and painted their former leader in the most glowing terms.

“People in the world can talk badly about him, but he was a great man.... He loved all of the people, he didn’t distinguish between Serb and non-Serb,” said Veslana Bogdanov, 64, a Belgrade librarian who emerged from the exhibition space, her eyes red from weeping.

Tomislav Sterovic, 67, who, like many here, thinks Milosevic was poisoned during his imprisonment at The Hague, spoke warmly about the former leader and blamed the United States for aiding in his downfall.

“He will be recorded in history as a hero, and it’s shameful that the current government did not give him the honors of a former president,” Sterovic said, referring to the government’s decision to refuse to allow Milosevic to lie in state in parliament or be buried in the Alley of Heroes, a special section of Belgrade’s cemetery. “Wherever he is buried will be ‘the alley of heroes.’ ”