The New York Times
Monday, May 31, 1999
The First Lady of Serbia Often Has the Last Word
Critics Say She May Spurn Surrender to NATO
By STEVEN ERLANGER
BELGRADE, 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.
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
Ms. 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
Like 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 TOWARDS HER HUSBAND
But 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
But 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 discoth que 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?"'
