May 31, 1999
THE POWER COUPLE
The First Lady of Serbia Often Has the Last Word
Related Articles
More on the Conflict in Kosovo
By STEVEN ERLANGER
ELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- The Yugoslav President, Slobodan
Milosevic, and four of his top associates have now been indicted for war
crimes in Kosovo. But by all accounts here, the person with the most
influence over him is his dreamy and
complicated wife, Mirjana Markovic, whose lifelong sense of persecution will intensify with this new
threat to her husband and family.
The entire point of NATO's air war
against Yugoslavia, now more than
two months old, has been to bomb
Milosevic into changing his mind
about Kosovo. If that is to succeed,
current and past friends of the couple suggest, then Ms. Markovic, who
denounced NATO before the bombing even began, will have to change
her mind too.
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SUNDAY'S DEVELOPMENTS
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COMBAT
NATO missiles slammed into a bridge crowded
with market-goers and cars in Varvarin, 110 miles
south of Belgrade. Nine people were reported killed,
and 28 wounded. NATO officials said they could not
confirm the casualties.
The attack on the bridge followed a third
consecutive night in which NATO warplanes took
advantage of good weather, flying 309 bombing runs
against tanks, mortars, antiaircraft radar and airfields,
alliance officials said.
A NATO missile hit a convoy of Western journalists,
killing a Yugoslav driver and wounding three others,
including a reporter from The Times of London, one
from the Italian Corriere della Sera, and a Frenchman,
the Serb-run Media Center said.
DIPLOMACY
A NATO spokesman, Jamie P. Shea, said
Yugoslavia was slowly moving away from its "almost
total defiance of the international community," but
was still far from accepting "without negotiation,"
NATO conditions for ending the air campaign.
REFUGEES
Some 645 Kosovar refugees were rescued at sea in
two separate operations conducted off Italy's
southeastern coast, the Italian Coast Guard said.
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Milosevic and his wife are both
inseparable and indissoluble. They
were lonely children of unhappy families who met in high school and
created their own, singular world,
which they have proceeded to defend
at any cost to ideology, to friendship
or even to their own people.
At the moment, say those who
claim to know them still, Milosevic is calm and deliberate, willing to
negotiate over Kosovo but confident
that the Serbs will resist a NATO
invasion and occupation "from behind every blade of grass," as they
resisted the Nazis.
But some of those who have known
the couple, and those who have been
dropped or discarded, believe that
Ms. Markovic will feel cornered,
judging that the indictment has
made this war intensely personal.
Some say they fear that she will
drive her husband, using what they
consider to be her malign and absolute influence over him, to take the
entire country over the cliff.
"The West should either settle on
good terms or go after him now,
hard; otherwise, this indictment is a
goad to final war," said one such
individual, who like everyone when
asked about the ruling couple here, in
wartime, asked for anonymity.
"They won't surrender," the individual continued. "They'll defend
themselves. Even in chess, the
pawns die before the king and
queen."
Others consider this picture of a
weak, beholden husband and a
scheming, malevolent wife, a Balkan
Lady Macbeth, to be an insulting
caricature that underestimates
Milosevic's own talents of fearlessness and decisiveness, which have
given him unrivaled power here.
Yet Ms. Markovic, now 57, herself
believes that she has both formed
her husband and driven him to his
current perch, even as she has bemoaned his boyhood decision to
study law. According to her biography and articles she wrote in the
Belgrade weekly Duga, she wanted
him to take on "the more beautiful
and romantic occupation" of an architect. She blames him for letting
her study sociology and become a
university professor rather than
pushing her toward literature, which
she says is her real love.
Ms. Markovic, wrote her hagiographer and friend, Ljiljana Habjanovic-Djurovic, "always openly and
boldly claimed that he would have
been quite different without her,
worse in every respect, and that everything good about him came from
her and that everything that is not
good is where her influence didn't
reach."
Their bond was forged in loneliness and family tragedy. His mother
was a teacher who, ambitious for her
son in the new Communist world,
divorced his father, a teacher who
trained to be a priest. Both parents
committed suicide when he was a
young man. His mother disliked the
young Mirjana Markovic, and when
Milosevic and a friend cut her
down after she hanged herself,
Milosevic is said to have told him:
"She never forgave me for Mira."
A Life Framed by Mother's Execution
s. Markovic's mother, a Partisan fighter in World War II, was
reviled for confessing under Gestapo
torture and giving up the names of
key Communist officials, including
an undercover agent. She was executed when her daughter was 2.
Not surprisingly, Ms. Markovic
has fiercely defended her mother,
and when Milosevic rose in the
1980's to the top of the Communist
Party in Serbia, all documents about
the case disappeared.
Ms. Markovic, her life marked by
tragedy, is full of contradictions. She
claims to detest nationalism and
feels no responsibility for the nationalist wars that broke up Yugoslavia;
she is the founder and chief ideologist for the modern Marxist party
called the Yugoslav United Left, yet
has allowed it to become a form of
mafia that distributes favors and
concessions to rich and well-connected businessmen; her associates say
that she demands complete loyalty
even though she says she detests
flattery, and that she discards acolytes at will; she describes herself as
a dreamy romantic, yet she is universally described as ruthless.
Another person who knew her, and
who saw his own political relationship with Milosevic destroyed in
a day, likened Ms. Markovic to a
consuming fire that could burn anyone who comes too close: "She wants
maximum obedience. She's good at
provoking people, and then assesses
and judges later, in private, with
him. You can say everything to him
and he'll support it and praise it, but
already the next morning everything
is different. It will be the way he
agreed with Mira in the night."
An advocate of democracy, it was
Ms. Markovic who returned from an
Indian book tour in 1996 to put spine
into her husband after the opposition
won local elections. When she heard
Danica Draskovic, the similarly influential wife of one protest leader,
Vuk Draskovic, call for a march on
their neighborhood, Ms. Markovic
told Milosevic that the threat
was personal to them and their family, persuading him to overturn the
results and ride out the months of
street protests, according to people
familiar with events at that time.
Self Revelation, on Sale Weekly
ike her husband, Ms. Markovic
largely shuns the public eye. But she
has written extensively, including a
bizarre and closely watched diary
published throughout the 1990's in a
Belgrade weekly, Duga.
Through her writings, Ms. Markovic has opened herself to an unusual
degree of judgment and ridicule.
She says that the moon is a planet
and that it protects her, so she wears
a moonstone. She spends hours
combing her hair -- which she wears
as she did in high school, with bangs
-- and resents anyone interrupting
that activity, her writings suggest.
She used to wear a flower in her hair
-- plastic when she was poor, real
later -- but she stopped when it became a major topic of discussion.
She says she cannot live without
mirrors, and she works for a month
to plan the music for the couple's
New Year's Eve celebrations, which
she regards as a mystical moment to
start anew. She says she hates flattery but insists on complete loyalty.
Those who cross her are dropped.
Four former associates of the Milosevic family have ended up shot
dead, by assailants never identified,
in circumstances never explained.
According to her biographer, Ms.
Markovic sees herself as "paralyzed
by small fears but motivated by
great ones."
She loves her husband, who is believed never to have been with another woman. After she met him, her
biographer writes, she was "no longer afraid of the winter, nor darkness,
nor mosquitoes, nor the beginning of
the school year, nor a possible C in
math." She says that he was always
on her side, whether she was right or
wrong. "What every woman instinctively seeks through her whole life
and few have, she had," Ms. Habjanovic-Djurovic wrote.
They talk many times a day. She
praises him "as a man who does not
miss anything that is important to
her." She says he remembers to
wake her up at 2 A.M. to wish her a
happy first day of spring.
Hints of Condescension Toward Her Husband
ut her memoirs also patronize
him as limited and dull. "He was a
simple and pragmatic boy who never
showed any inclination for long coffee bar conversations and meditations aloud," so unlike her own attraction to the intellectuals of the
little town of Pozarevac, where they
met and fell in love. She devoured
Sartre novels, loved "Last Year in
Marienbad" and wore black, still her
favorite color, because it seemed to
her refined.
She formed his tastes in literature
and poetry. In quiet evenings she
would recite her favorite lines, which
he remembered. "To this day he
utters her thoughts and assessments
as his own, unaware of where she
ends and he begins," wrote Ms. Habjanovic-Djurovic in her lengthy article, published in 1994.
But her sense of herself as much-misunderstood and much-maligned,
appalled by the corruptions of power,
is matched by a powerful sense of
persecution and retribution that
stems from her remarkable history.
Mirjana Markovic was born in the
woods in July 1942, the offspring of
two Partisan fighters who were famous and later infamous in their own
right. Her father, Moma Markovic,
became an important Communist official after the war, but had little to
do, then or later, with his revolutionary love child.
Her mother, Vera Miletic, used the
nom de guerre "Mira," short for
Mirjana, which is how Ms. Markovic
still signs her name. But Ms. Miletic
spent only one day with her daughter
before returning to the fight against
the Nazis, and she was arrested nine
months later. It is believed she never
saw the little girl again. She was
executed in September 1944, just a
few weeks before the victorious Partisans marched into Belgrade.
But Ms. Markovic still keeps what
her mother knitted for her in prison,
including the needlework red star of
the Communist faith, woolen booties
and a heart with her own name inscribed, according to her biographer.
Ms. Markovic's earliest memories
are of being hidden in a storage
cabinet used for firewood, unable to
utter a word, while anti-Communist
Chetniks, fierce Serbian nationalists,
searched for the daughter of the famous Partisan fighter.
It is these searing memories, combined with a sense of defensiveness
and historical injustice, that formed
Ms. Markovic. After she went to live
with her grandparents in Pozarevac,
her favorite story was that of Antigone, the young woman in Greek tragedy who tried to vindicate the memory and restore the reputation of the
beloved brother who defied the tyrant Creon.
And it was in the library, as she
sought solace once again in Antigone's story after getting a C in history,
that she first met Slobodan Milosevic. She was 16; he was 17. "Her
sorrow attracted her to him," Ms.
Habjanovic-Djurovic wrote. "He felt
the need to relieve her pain, to protect and cherish her."
But these fierce family tragedies
also help explain Ms. Markovic's devotion to her children, Marija, now
33, and especially to her 25-year-old
son, Marko.
She was pregnant with Marija
when she married Milosevic in
1965, and hoped her daughter would
be the writer she never was, naming
her after the Partisan heroine Marija Bursac.
But Ms. Markovic, according to
the biography, describes her daughter in harsh terms, calling her "less
ambitious, less disciplined and less
sensitive" than herself, "and not romantic at all." Her daughter married young and went to live in Japan
in 1984, the year Milosevic left
banking and entered Communist
politics in a serious and fateful way.
Although she returned and currently runs a popular station, Radio
and Television Kosava, Marija is
rarely pictured with her parents.
Limitless Pride For Her Son
ut Ms. Markovic is besotted by
her son, who flunked out of high
school and became a race-car driver,
famous for the prices of the vehicles
he crashed. Marko still lives in Pozarevac, where he is described by
locals as behaving like a "little lord,"
abusing people and running a discothèque called "Madonna."
In a strange article in November
1996, Ms. Markovic, with her ideological bent, tried to reconcile Serbia's
traditional values with her own. She
described "three images of time"
that hang on her wall, three heroes
who personify the Serbian spirit. Her
choices were St. Nikola, the patron
saint of her mother's family; her
mother, as an 18-year-old high-school
senior from a rich family who chose
instead to join the Communist youth
organization, and her son, Marko, at
the wheel of his BMW.
Each personified the age, she said:
Byzantine, Partisan and the modern
era of computers. "In my value system," she wrote, "these three images are eminently compatible."
Even today, she reacts fiercely if
her son is criticized, seeing it as an
attack on the nation. In one of the
odder documents of this war, she
published an angry response to the
British Foreign Secretary, Robin
Cook, who said that she and her
children were not in Yugoslavia under the bombs.
"You wanted to send a message to
the world public that my children
and I are dishonest and fearful," she
wrote. "To your regret and to our
fortune, you will not succeed in your
intentions -- not when my country
nor my family is concerned."
All remain in the country, she said.
"My children have highly developed
patriotic sentiments, they are indeed
courageous, rather smart and extremely beautiful."
Marko, she said, "is in uniform
and cares about his small new family," and indeed, he has been shown
on television wandering through Pozarevac in a military-like uniform,
carrying a Kalashnikov, although he
is not believed to be in the army.
Clearly furious, Ms. Markovic ended her letter, "very disrespectfully
yours." And there was a P.S. "I just
remembered -- you said we had five
villas abroad. We do not have any, of
course." Partly for financial reasons, she said. "But why should we,
even if we could? Our country is so
beautiful."
With her husband under indictment as a war criminal, he is liable
to be arrested if he goes abroad, so
her fierce pride in Yugoslavia's
beauty is fortunate.
Yet in the musings that Ms. Habjanovic-Djurovic recorded, Ms. Markovic imagined a different future.
When she turns 60 in 2002, she wants
Milosevic to be through with
politics and on vacation with her
abroad, at a Swiss resort.
"She sees the two of them in Lugano eating ice cream. She wears a
white dress and a flower in her hair,
and from that distant, cold, windy
Pozarevac street, a melancholy girl
asks her with seriousness, 'How
much can a human being really decide about one's life?"'
