The Cruella DeVil of Serbian Politics, Milosevic’s Wife Is His Closest Ally

For a month, as whistle-blowing demonstrators filled the streets of this capital demanding an end to his rule, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic remained largely silent on the subject.

But his wife was a different story.

Mirjana Markovic stormed back from a book tour in India, and almost immediately the regime went on the attack. She accused the generally peaceful demonstrators of wreaking “brutal” havoc on the nation; they suddenly became “fascist malcontents” and enemies of the Serbian people.

“Belgrade is in danger of living through the greatest material destruction and psychological trauma of the last 50 years,” Markovic said--evoking, apparently, memories of World War II bombings of the capital.

Markovic is the most powerful person in Serbia, next to her husband, and one of the most reviled. The Cruella DeVil of Serbian politics, seen as evil yet tragicomic by her many detractors, Markovic is the favorite target of demonstrators who spoof her girlish dress and ridicule her pretentious airs.

Throughout this crisis and others, Milosevic has held Markovic as his single trusted ally, counselor and confidante. A pro-China Marxist, she may not be the only person he consults, but she is, by most accounts, the only person whose advice he takes to heart and with whom he jointly makes decisions.

Increasingly isolated, they have come to embody a corrupt, authoritarian, anachronistic state--inviting inevitable comparisons with Romania’s Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, and his power-hungry wife, Elena, who were executed on Christmas Day 1989 after the eruption of angry protests by demonstrators fed up with his regime.

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With anti-Milosevic demonstrations having continued for more than a month and showing no signs of abating, Markovic has emerged as a lightning rod for criticism. She is de facto head of her own neo-Communist party, and her political ascendancy has sown division and rancor within the ruling leftist coalition--rivalry that ultimately poses a greater potential threat to Milosevic than the street protests.

“There is not a single woman in Serbian history who people have been so afraid of, and toward whom they have shown so much servile attention,” Milosevic biographer Slavoljub Djukic wrote of Markovic.

This week, Milosevic finally broke his silence and lashed out at the demonstrators in a speech at a carefully orchestrated pro-government rally. And standing at his side, on stage, was Markovic.

She seems to have built her persona with smoke and mirrors. Markovic is an academic who is said to have purchased her credentials; her political party claims to be leftist but is led by the country’s wealthiest and most crass entrepreneurs.

She calls herself Mira (“peace”), having adopted the nom de guerre used by her mother, a Communist resistance fighter in World War II who, shortly after her baby’s birth, was shot as a traitor for having revealed names of fellow partisans to the Gestapo.

Rejected by her father, an important party leader, Mira became fast friends with young Slobodan Milosevic, who also suffered childhood tragedy when his father committed suicide. His mother committed suicide a decade later.

Mira and Slobo married in 1965. She was pregnant with their first child, daughter Marija; son Marko would follow in 1974. Today both children run discotheques.

In 1984, Milosevic entered politics, and three years, he later staged the palace coup that placed him in the throne of power he occupies today. Markovic was instrumental in the deception and intrigue that enabled him to unseat his best friend, then-President Ivan Stambolic. The base for the maneuvering was Markovic’s university cabal of Communist activists, who still form her inner circle.

“She has always claimed she is more competent than he is,” said a Socialist Party official who was close to Milosevic until a falling-out last year. “She believes, and says quite openly, that she made her husband what he is.”

With her Communist friends and a contingent of Yugoslav army generals and intelligence officers, Markovic formed the Yugoslav United Left, whose initials in Serbian are JUL, pronounced Yule and meaning July, the month of her and her beloved son’s birth.

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Author of six books translated into more than a dozen languages, Markovic writes a regular column full of vapid musings far removed from the reality faced by most Serbs. But it is also scrutinized religiously for a glimpse into the president’s thinking or the latest political who’s up, who’s down.

Her hint last year that a certain “very powerful man” was having an affair with a certain television reporter “with short skirts” titillated all of Belgrade, capital of both Serbia and the rump Yugoslavia. She later denied that she was writing about her own marriage.

Earlier this year, she wrote about Marko, “one of the greatest professional car-racing aces,” who had the misfortune of crashing on ice. She made it sound as though it was a surprise. In fact, Marko, by his own count, has wrecked various fancy sports cars 19 times.

Markovic, who has praised China as a model for Yugoslavia, used another column to promote the building of a Chinatown in Belgrade. “All great capitals of the world have their Chinatown,” she wrote.

There is no Chinese community in Serbia.

Aloof and eccentric, Markovic almost always wears black, her favorite color. Lately she has replaced a trademark plastic flower with a bow that she wears in her dyed-black hair. She rarely smiles.

In person, she seems uncomfortable. She offers a weak handshake, her fingers barely touching the other person’s hand, and she seems to look straight through the other person without making direct eye contact, says one of the few Western journalists to have met her in recent years.

In a description of her home life, Markovic told the Yugoslav author Ljiljana Habjanovic-Djurovic that she fancies elaborate mirrors, which she used as decoration throughout her villa in the posh Dedinje neighborhood. The home she describes sounds like a cocoon, from which she said she and her husband could remain impervious to street demonstrations in 1991 and 1992.

JUL, experts here say, was created largely as a vehicle for the First Couple to move further to the left and establish a parallel authority that would subvert and eventually supplant the larger Socialist Party.

JUL institutionalized Markovic’s already considerable influence and gave her a veneer of legitimacy as she used state funds to travel the world.

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Most important, Serbian analysts say, Milosevic uses JUL as a way to step away from blame for the war in the former Yugoslav federation and seize control of the most lucrative segments of the economy.

“From their youth, they are a couple with a division of labor,” said Milan Protic, director of the Institute for Balkan Studies, a Belgrade think tank, who is highly critical of Markovic. “She is responsible for ideological firmness, development and ideological stance. He is responsible for political organization and decision-making.”

Critics say that while JUL espouses workers’ rights and the value of the poor, its leadership fills itself with ideologically sterile, quasi-private businessmen, war profiteers and sanctions-busters who make obscene profits through state-protected monopolies and import privileges.

People join the party in hopes that, as in Communist times, mere membership will afford social, economic and political position.

“You cannot prosper if you are not a member of JUL,” economist Mladjan Dinkic said. “It’s a kind of blackmail in the economic sense. Sooner or later you will become a member of JUL.”

JUL’s members include the chief executives of a hotel conglomerate, the petroleum industry, wineries, mines, the electricity company in southern Serbia and the forestry monopoly.

Few in this elite, Dinkic said, have any interest in real privatization, because it would cut into their sheltered profits; despite their rhetoric, they resist the structural reform that international experts say is necessary to revive the moribund economy.

Markovic’s allies defend her as a shrewd politician who is targeted by demonstrators because of her increasingly visible importance.

“One can make a mistake understanding her as a too idealistic and too poetic person writing in a manner which is not very politically professional, you know . . . simple things,” said Ljubisa Ristic, a theater director and the titular president of JUL. “But that’s very dangerous--to underestimate her political aims, her passion to get the solution. . . . She’s a born leader.”

JUL and Markovic are increasingly resented by Milosevic’s Socialists and the third partner in the ruling coalition, New Democracy. Despite never winning more than 2% or 3% of the popular vote, JUL was awarded half of the Cabinet posts and 20 of 64 parliamentary seats won by the ruling coalition.

Those who dare criticize Markovic publicly are purged; they are usually replaced by people loyal to her. In a particularly nasty power struggle, the editor of the main state newspaper, Politika, was driven from office by Markovic, who replaced him with an electrician who had not graduated from high school. Circulation of the paper plummeted.

Borisav Jovic, a former close associate of Milosevic who was expelled late last year in a dispute over JUL, said the Socialist Party is weakening itself dangerously in lending support to JUL.

“The founding of JUL is a big political mistake,” Jovic recently told a Slovenian daily. “They do not have support, so we have to support them. This kind of ally is only a burden.”

The rivalry cost Milosevic’s coalition seats in the disastrous local elections that triggered the daily demonstrations, Socialist and New Democracy party officials say.

In some cities, the dispute between JUL and the Socialists was so bitter that they could not run together. Dobrivoje Budimirovic, the Socialist party chief in the town of Svilajnac, refused to allow Markovic to campaign in his city lest it become “infected, like a thorn in a healthy foot.”

Milosevic, critics within his party say, failed to weigh the damage caused by acrimony over his wife.

“I told him he was working against himself, against the party, that we would lose with [JUL],” a former party leader said. “He did not accept any of this. I couldn’t get anywhere with him. These elections have shown how wrong he was.”

Mihailo Markovic, another purged Socialist leader (not related to Mira), said mistake compounded mistake after the election, when Milosevic proved himself unwilling to accept even a limited defeat.

“They will have to critically analyze the basic weaknesses of the party structure if they are to succeed in next year’s [national] elections,” he said. “But the basic weakness that Milosevic can’t overcome is the relationship to his wife.”

Times special correspondent Laura Silber contributed to this report.