Milosevic’s Family Torn Apart Like the Nation He Ruled

They were a team: childhood sweethearts who fought their way through life together, conquered the peak of national power and then brought their country and their private world crashing down around them.

Now they’re not allowed to be alone together for even a moment. The guards at Belgrade’s Central Prison, where former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is being held on corruption charges, won’t allow it.

His wife and soul mate, Mirjana Markovic--”Mira” to her friends, “Lady Macbeth” to her enemies--pays daily visits to her imprisoned husband, yet spends less time with him than many had thought she would. The 58-year-old with the helmet of jet-black hair cuts a lonely figure here in the Yugoslav and Serbian capital she once dominated.

“She was feeding the evil in Milosevic,” political analyst Bratislav Grubacic said. “She is visiting him every day in prison, and the problem is, she’s having a really bad influence on him. She’s driving him crazy in a way.”

And even as the two have been torn asunder, their family is falling apart. Son Marko Milosevic, 26, is on the run, probably somewhere in the former Soviet Union. Daughter Marija Milosevic, 35, faces criminal charges for reportedly firing a gun as her father was being arrested April 1.

Markovic herself could soon face charges of ordering political assassinations, said Zoran Djindjic, the prime minister of Serbia, the main Yugoslav republic, shortly after the former president’s arrest.

Markovic has been contemptuous of such threats.

“I’m waiting to be indicted for causing war in Chechnya, floods in India, the kidnapping of Aldo Moro and low temperatures in Siberia,” she told the weekly newsmagazine Vreme last month. She was responding to questions about allegations that she ordered the 1999 killing of journalist Slavko Curuvija and an assassination attempt that same year against opposition leader Vuk Draskovic that left four of his aides dead.

Throughout Milosevic’s 13-year rule, Markovic was his most trusted advisor.

“In the history of Serbia, there has never been another woman who had such a big influence on state affairs,” Slavoljub Djukic, a prominent biographer of Milosevic and his family, commented last week in Nin, a leading newsmagazine. “She was slashing away obstacles in the path of Slobodan’s career. To a large extent, she also destroyed his career, like a praying mantis that after mating devours the male.”

The arrest drama at the Milosevic residence, with a long standoff between armed supporters of the former president and police who had surrounded the compound, seemed to some observers fully in keeping with the “Lady Macbeth” nickname.

“One should understand it was like a Shakespearean tragedy, with all these elements of chaos,” Grubacic said. “I talked to this young guy who was there. They were totally insane. Milosevic was all the time pointing his gun at his head, saying: ‘I’ll commit suicide. I’ll kill Mira and Marija,’ waving with the gun. This is very Macbeth kind of stuff.”

Wife and daughter, for their part, “were trying to convince Milosevic not to go to prison, as I understood from those who were there,” Grubacic added. “So when he went to the car to leave the compound, [Marija] came out screaming. She was yelling to her father, basically, ‘You cannot go to prison, better kill yourself,’ this kind of stuff. It was completely insane, and then she shot” her gun--without hitting anyone.

“Anyway, Mira was known as not so fantastically stable a person, and [as for] Marija, it is known that after Oct. 5 [when Milosevic was ousted from power] she had a nervous breakdown and she was taken to a military hospital and then basically she spent three days being tied to the bed.”

‘Coward, Why Didn’t You Kill Yourself?’

The weekly magazine Nedeljni Telegraf reported that Marija had bitterly opposed even her father’s willingness to talk with government negotiators about the terms under which he would give himself up.

The magazine summarized the final scene at the residence this way: “The climax of her dissatisfaction was when Slobodan Milosevic made the decision to surrender to investigative bodies. Marija had simply gone mad from fury, and started shouting to her father: ‘Coward, why didn’t you kill yourself? Kill yourself now!’ ”

Before he gave himself up, Milosevic was promised that his family could continue to use the government-owned residence for now and that he wouldn’t be sent directly to face war crimes charges at the U.N. tribunal at The Hague but rather would be put in Central Prison, authorities said after his arrest.

Markovic continued to use the residence in the days after Milosevic surrendered, and she was also reported to have used the family home in Pozarevac, about 40 miles southeast of Belgrade. But on Friday, she and Marija returned to Belgrade under police escort after angry protesters gathered outside the Pozarevac home and demanded they leave, authorities told the Associated Press.

But even after all that has happened, the clan still has some supporters.

About 3,000 of them turned out in front of the main Serbian government building in downtown Belgrade over the weekend to scream “Treason, treason!” and “We won’t give Slobo away!”

Earlier, a woman pensioner interviewed near one of this city’s bleak communist-era housing complexes described Markovic as “a woman of the people.”

“She’s not guilty for anything,” said the woman, who refused to give her name. “I don’t think they were bad people--Slobo and his wife.”

Supporters as well as critics generally agree that Markovic had great influence on her husband.

“It’s like in every family--the woman is the neck and the man is the head, and the head turns the way the neck dictates,” said a young woman, a university student and supporter of Milosevic, who also declined to give her name.

“I think he was one of the best presidents” and that Markovic “probably had enormous influence on him,” she added. “But it’s impossible that she made all the decisions.”

In others, however, Markovic triggers a visceral hatred.

Miodrag Stanic, 35, a train conductor, said he views her “as an antichrist, a witch. There is something coming out of her, something satanic.”

Some of the criticism of Markovic is openly sexist.

“I view her as far worse than him,” said Vladimir Trifunovic, 26, a university student in economics. Criticizing the Yugoslav Left, a party that Markovic created and still leads, he added: “She founded a party that actually ruined the Socialist Party. Whenever women get involved in something, it doesn’t end well. She interfered too much.”

As for the son, Marko, he “was known for crashing cars and causing trouble on the road, and shooting guns,” Trifunovic said. “He was always above the law. Why was he the only one [in the family] to run away? He’s not a man. He’s a monster.”

Marko Milosevic had to flee the country because “after the toppling of Milosevic, he couldn’t survive,” analyst Grubacic said. “Physically he would be exterminated, not by the authorities but by his mafia partners.”

Grubacic explained the activities of the Milosevic children this way: Marko “became a main gangster here in Belgrade. He got involved in cigarette smuggling, he was racketeering everybody, he had a bunch of his bodyguards, and they were doing all the nasty things.

“Marija opened her nightclub here in Belgrade. She opened a TV station for which she basically got money from state companies. It was really stolen, in a way. Whatever they wanted to do, they did it. Marko ran the disco club Madonna in Pozarevac. The guy was really rich.”

Son Believed to Have Control of $300 Million

Marko Milosevic is believed to have control of $300 million or more, Grubacic said. There is fear in Belgrade, he added, that “Marko probably will try to organize some mafia killers to avenge what’s going on with his father and mother.”

“With $300 million, he can do a lot of things,” Grubacic said. “The guy has a lot of options. The problem is, there are lots of indications he is on cocaine. Sniffing coke, who knows what kind of decision-making process is going on in his mind? Probably he will become vengeful and still feel powerful because of the money.”

The daily newspaper Politika reported last week that “it remains to be seen whether legal procedures against Marko Milosevic will be started, and if so, for what.”

In her interview last month with Vreme, Markovic defended her son, expressing regret only that she had failed to persuade him “that every good that he would do would be met with evil.”

She also expressed contempt for the U.N. tribunal at The Hague, which has indicted her husband. “I have said 1,000 times that this has been the Gestapo of our time,” she said, “and its prison has been a concentration camp for the Serbs.”

Markovic added that she cares not at all about winning, but only about struggling for what is right. She wants to be remembered “only as a fighter, regardless of what victory may bring, if it ever comes,” she said.

“Struggle is my world--in victory I’m lost,” she declared. “After one battle is finished, I move to the place where a new one is being waged. Traveling that way, I lost many friends. Most of them, after the battle had been won, stayed to split the booty, to rejoice in victory and to demobilize. I have been a burden for them, and they were strangers to me.”