Obsession and Isolation in a Dictator’s Last Days

Barely 12 hours before he died, former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic sat in his small prison office amid stacks of court papers that smelled of cigarette smoke and coffee.

Milosevic looked weak as he worked with a former ally to prepare his defense against war crimes charges. His ears were ringing, and for the last three days he had felt particularly ill. He told his legal advisor, Zdenko Tomanovic, that he suspected he was being poisoned, a claim contradicted Friday by a preliminary toxicology report.

Milosevic hand-wrote a letter to the Russian Foreign Ministry outlining his allegation, and finished for the day soon afterward. That evening, he relaxed by playing remi, a favorite Serbian card game, with another war crimes suspect, Tomanovic said in an interview.

It was a typical moment in the U.N. detention center in the Netherlands, an incongruously peaceful, comfortable facility on the outskirts of The Hague where Croat, Muslim and Serb detainees, who fought to the death in the former Yugoslavia, formed a brotherhood of the accused.

As they played, Milosevic felt a stabbing pain in his chest. He asked his fellow inmate, whom Tomanovic declined to identify, whether he had a head of garlic, which is regarded in Serbian folk medicine as a natural healer. Then he asked for a glass of milk.

The inmate brought both, and at 8 p.m., Milosevic called his wife, Mirjana Markovic, in Moscow. He always called her when he rose in the morning and before his cell was locked at 8:30 at night, she said in an account published in a Belgrade newspaper.

“Sleep well, my darling,” he told her. “I’ll call you when I wake up tomorrow.”

Between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m. Saturday, Milosevic died in his bed, Tomanovic said. His body was discovered at 10:05 a.m.

Hard-line Serbian nationalists have said they believe Milosevic’s claim that he was being poisoned. But the preliminary toxicology report released Friday by the Hague tribunal concluded that he was not. The tests found no trace of an antibiotic detected in tests done Jan. 12.

That drug, doctors said, could have undermined medicine Milosevic was taking for a heart condition.

Prosecutors had suggested that Milosevic took the drug clandestinely to worsen his health and bolster his case to be sent to Russia for treatment.

The death of the Serbian strongman was peaceful compared with those of many of the estimated 225,000 people who perished in the 1990s Balkan wars he helped orchestrate.

But lawyers, doctors and others who spent time with Milosevic during his last months portrayed him as a man who was hardly at peace. He knew he was not well. He sorely missed his wife, who was his closest friend and political confidant. He was racing to make his case in court -- and above all to Serbs back home.

When he died, Milosevic had just 40 hours of court time left to make his defense against 66 charges. But he had primarily dealt with just five, all of them involving Kosovo Albanians, a subject he knew played well at home. Many Serbs were ambivalent about the 1992-95 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, but they were much more attached to Kosovo, a province of Serbia with deep historical significance that has a large ethnic Albanian majority.

Serbian police and military action there in 1998 and 1999 killed about 10,000 ethnic Albanians, forced some 800,000 to flee to neighboring Albania and Macedonia, and led to a bombing campaign by the United States and allies against Serbia. Kosovo is now a U.N. protectorate, and its ethnic Albanian leadership is seeking independence.

Milosevic was determined to be exonerated or to prove that the court was irrevocably biased against Serbs.

“The story he continued to tell was that Serbia was the front line in the war on terror, and the reason that the West did not see it the same way is that the West had territorial designs on Serbia,” said Allen Weiner, a professor of international law at Stanford University who worked closely with the court as legal advisor to the U.S. Embassy in The Hague.

During a courtroom appearance March 1, Milosevic was in typically combative form. He guided the testimony of a loyalist former Cabinet minister who addressed him as “Mr. President,” and he spoke scornfully of European and American leaders as dishonest Serb haters. As he had throughout the trial, Milosevic jousted with the judges, who demanded to know the relevance of his diatribes against the Kosovo Liberation Army.

“It’s not only a terrorist organization,” he told an exasperated Judge Patrick Robinson. “It’s also an organization through which most of the drugs going to Europe go. This is an organization that is involved in white slave trading too. This is a monster organization that became an ally of -- “

“Mr. Milosevic, that’s your last question,” Robinson declared.

And it was his last day in court. The trial went into recess to give Milosevic time to prepare for his next witness.

He worked for the next 10 days in the prison, a comfortable facility in a country known for a penal system with a lenient approach to incarceration.

Set up in a wing of a brick-walled former Dutch prison in Scheveningen, a coastal resort on the outskirts of The Hague, the facility houses about 50 inmates on four floors of 12 cells each. The cells are about 17 feet by 10 feet and have radios and private bathrooms.

Milosevic also had an office, lined with file cabinets and equipped with a private telephone and computer. He made his own coffee.

The detainees spend most of their days wandering freely and have access to television, board games and newspapers in recreation rooms on each floor. There is daily time outdoors and a sports and exercise facility overseen by a physical education instructor. Classes in English as well as arts and crafts are available.

Many inmates, used to the hard-drinking, chain-smoking life common in the Balkans, saw their health improve, said Stanford’s Weiner.

“They were sober, they had decent meals,” he said. “A lot of guys, their health improved dramatically.”

Milosevic had a taste for alcohol, which was forbidden. He asked Patrick Barriot, a former French military doctor, to bring him a bottle of French wine, but guards intercepted it.

A Serbian doctor said it wasn’t the only time associates were caught trying to smuggle alcohol in to Milosevic. But some apparently got through.

The U.N. tribunal received reports from the prison warden saying that contraband alcohol had been found in Milosevic’s cell, according to news reports.

During his final months, Milosevic worked obsessively despite his clearly declining health, Barriot and others visitors said.

“He was always working,” said Barriot, who served in the Balkans during the 1990s, became intensely pro-Serbian and was ultimately expelled from the French army for his supportive writings on Milosevic. He testified for the defense at Milosevic’s trial in January 2005. “His obsession was that the trial would write history. And he wanted to refute the court’s version of history.”

“Psychologically, he was still very combative, not at all suicidal,” Barriot said. “Physically, he was exhausted. At the end of his rope. He wanted to reach the end of the trial, and he feared that he would not make it.”

Vukasin Andric, a Serbian ear doctor who examined Milosevic on Nov. 4, had a similar impression. Also a defense witness, he described a man who was completely consumed by preparing his defense.

“He didn’t have time even to take a walk, even the compulsory daily walk, he would skip ... which worsened his health situation,” Andric said.

“I understood that he was ill by listening to his voice. I heard his voice tremble for the first time in my life when the court told him he could not go to Moscow [earlier in March] ... and that’s when I think Milosevic felt the beginning of the end, and started to be scared for his destiny and his life,” Andric said.

Compounding his sense of isolation, Barriot said, was his “profound sadness” over being separated from his wife, who was his high school sweetheart. She could no longer visit him because of a pending arrest warrant issued by Belgrade.

On the day of his death, she was the one who first realized that something was wrong. When he did not call her on time in the morning, she called Tomanovic, who called the prison. Soon after, the lawyer was standing in the doorway of Milosevic’s cell.

The former president lay on the bed, the covers pulled over him, his mouth open and an arm flung to one side. Some papers were next to the bed, Tomanovic said. “And around the walls were pieces of paper that just had his son’s name written on it: ‘Marko.’ ”