Mirjana Markovic, the ‘Lady Macbeth’ of War-Torn Serbia, Dies at 76

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/15/obituaries/mira-markovic-dead.html

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Mirjana Markovic, who as the wife of Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian leader accused of war crimes, was so politically powerful that she was branded “the Lady Macbeth” of the Balkans, died on Sunday in Russia, to which she had fled in 2003 to avoid prosecution. She was 76.

Her death, attributed to complications of pneumonia, was announced by Serbian State Radio and confirmed by her husband’s Socialist Party. She had been treated in a hospital in Sochi, a beach resort city on the Black Sea.

Mira and Sloba, the diminutives of the couple’s given names, loosely translate as “peace” and “freedom” — a benevolence belied by the havoc they wreaked when they ruled as Serbia’s power couple from 1989 to 2000.

After leading their country into catastrophic wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo that left 200,000 dead, Mr. Milosevic was the first head of state charged by an international court for crimes against humanity committed while he was in office. He died in 2006 while awaiting trial in The Hague.

Mirjana Markovic (pronounced meer-YAH-nah MAHR-koh-vich), a sociology professor at Belgrade University and leader of a neo-Communist party, was suspected of complicity in 1999 in the assassination of Slavko Curuvija, a Belgrade newspaper editor, and the disappearance in 2000 of Ivan Stambolic, Mr. Milosevic’s onetime mentor.

Facing corruption charges in Serbia in 2003, she escaped to Moscow with her son, Marko, and was granted political asylum.

“Throughout Serbian history,” Slavoljub Djukic wrote in his book “Milosevic and Markovic: A Lust for Power” (2001), “no woman has had so much influence on state affairs.” He added, “The Serbian president is hostage to his wife.”

Though Ms. Markovic denied being a shadow president, there was little dispute that the couple exerted power jointly through a coalition of her Yugoslav Left party and his Socialist Party of Serbia. Her critics frequently used the epithet “Lady Macbeth” to describe her.

She and Mr. Milosevic were so inseparable, Mihailo Crnobrnja, a diplomat and political science professor, wrote in the Djukic book’s foreword, that “it might not be an exaggeration to say that his enormous and unwavering love for her, together with her lust for power, was the unfortunate combination that triggered the tragic events in former Yugoslavia.”

As president, Mr. Milosevic stoked ancient ethnic grievances that erupted in violence when, beginning in 1991, Yugoslavia fragmented into Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia. Bloody ethnic cleansing ensued, a phase of which officially ended when Mr. Milosevic, apparently with his wife’s prodding, signed an accord reached in Dayton, Ohio, in 1995 on behalf of the Bosnian Serbs.

In 1998, though, vicious conflict resumed when Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians demanded independence, leading to the war-crime charges against Mr. Milosevic, who by then was president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

After Mr. Milosevic lost an election in 2000, the new regime delivered him to the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, where he was charged with genocide in the systematic murder of Croats and Muslims in Bosnia and Albanians in Kosovo.

He denied the charges, blaming bombings by NATO forces for many of the deaths — airstrikes that had brought the war home to his villa in Belgrade, Serbia’s capital. The conflict ultimately ended with the intervention of United Nations peacekeepers.

Ms. Markovic stoutly defended her husband. “He was fighting against terrorism,” she said in an interview with The New York Times Magazine in 2002. “It was his duty. Even if he didn’t want to, he had to do it.”

Mirjana Markovic was born on July 10, 1942, in the midst of World War II, in Pozarevac, a Serbian city occupied at the time by the Germans. Her parents, Moma Markovic and Vera Miletic, were Yugoslav partisans in the Communist resistance.

Her mother, who was known as Mira, was said to have been captured by the Gestapo in 1943 and tortured until she confessed to being a partisan. She was later executed — some accounts say by the Germans, another on the orders of her own father after the war on the grounds that she had betrayed the partisan cause by giving up valuable information to the Germans.

For many years, evoking a hallmark of her mother’s, Ms. Markovic would wear a signature silk flower in her dyed jet-black hair.

As a girl, Mirjana was close to an aunt who, during World War II, had been the mistress of Josip Broz Tito, the Communist revolutionary and later the Yugoslav dictator.

Mirjana was 17 and president of a youth committee at school when she fell in love with Slobodan Milosevic, a fellow member of the committee. His childhood, too, had been scarred, by the suicides of his parents and an uncle. The couple, both in their early 20s, he a year younger than Ms. Markovic, married in 1965.

Ms. Markovic held a doctorate in sociology from Belgrade University and was the author of a number of books. She also wrote flowery diaries for Serbian newspapers that were dissected for hints of the Milosevic regime’s latest political favorites and its next victims.

In 2003, Ms. Markovic was accused of abuse of office, including arranging to secure a government apartment for a grandson’s nanny. She was tried in absentia and sentenced to a year in prison. An appeals court annulled the sentence last month and ordered a retrial.

Her survivors include her children, Marko, and her daughter, Marija, who fled to Montenegro. All three had been sought on charges ranging from corruption to illegal weapons possession. (Marija, who was general manager of a television station, was accused of shooting her boyfriend’s dog; Marko, who ran an amusement park, was indicted on charges of threatening to dismember an opposition leader with a rotary saw.)

Among the Serbian politicians who tepidly expressed condolences this week was Ivica Dacic, the foreign minister and Socialist Party leader. “We may not have had the same opinions at all times,” he said, “but I always respected her, as Slobodan Milosevic’s wife.”

Ms. Markovic apparently followed the Machiavellian formula of preferring to be feared rather than loved, a strategy she had employed in plotting to oust Mr. Stambolic as the Communist Party leader in 1987 and install her husband in the post — a maneuver that was prompted not only by political ambition but also by personal pique.

“At a family lunch, Stambolic told her not to interfere when men are talking,” a former friend of hers recalled. “That infuriated her.”

Still, Ms. Markovic insisted that she had not shared the near-absolute power that her husband wielded. Their nightly pillow talk, she said, was largely personal, not political.

“I didn’t notice we were different from other couples,” she said. “Ninety-eight percent of the time we talked about family matters.”

Before she fled the country, as prosecutors were closing in, Ms. Markovic was asked whether she had any regrets about the way she had conducted her life. She paused for a long time before revealing only one: “I should have been more cautious in choosing my friends.”