Mira Markovic: Slobodan Milosevic's Lady Macbeth

Slobodan Milosevic was married to Mira Markovic for 40 years and they had a unique relationship. She was his Lady Macbeth and her lust for power was to prove his downfall. Marcus Tanner reports

Somewhere in Moscow, a dumpy woman with the looks and hairdo of a Seventies folk singer - all dyed hair, mascara, pink lipstick and red nails - is sitting distraught, contemplating a future without the man who was her constant companion for more than 40 years.

Her name is Mirjana "Mira" Markovic and in her time she was as ubiquitous and feared a figure in Serbia as her jowly husband, who died on Saturday, all alone, in a prison cell in the Scheveningen jail.

It terribly grieved the man, so cold when it came to dispensing with the lives of others, this business of being apart from his beloved Mira. Inseparable since long before their marriage in Belgrade in 1965, they had hardly spent a night apart since, even after his humiliating extradition from Serbia to The Hague war Crimes Tribunal in 2001.

Even then, the great alliance endured, for Mira visited her jailed husband in The Hague as often as she could and it was only in 2003, when facing corruption charges in Serbia, that she sought sanctuary far away in Moscow.

Since then, these two strange love birds, Slobo and Mira - as umbilically linked as Victoria and Albert - have been apart, the longest period of separation they have endured since they met as teenagers in school in the 1950s.

Some observers say it explains why Milosevic became so insistent in recent months that he needed to go to Moscow for medical treatment for his heart and blood pressure problems. "One of the reasons he wanted to go to Moscow was because of her," the Balkans expert Tim Judah, author of The Serbs, said. "They [the tribunal at The Hague] thought he'd never come back, which is why they said no." He added: "You have to remember he never did anything without her. She was always the force behind the throne."

Mira was not alone in Muscovite exile. The Milosevic clan have remained as close in adversity as they did when papa ruled Serbia like a particularly brutal tsar. Their tearaway son, Marko, best known for crashing expensive cars and chasing women in his salad days, followed his mother to Russia, along with his young wife and child. Slobo's brother, Borislav, was there already. Only their tempestuous daughter, Marija, with whom Mira was less close, remained stubbornly behind in the wreck of what was left of Yugoslavia, noisily proclaiming her devotion to her now reviled father. It was Marija, not Mira or Marko, who went out fighting. When the Serbian police arrived to arrest the fallen dictator, after angry crowds had driven him out of office in October 2000, Slobo made no attempt to resist. But Marija pulled out a gun, shrieking defiance and firing a shot wildly into the air.

Mira is not a contrite, broken figure, even now. From Moscow she is demanding a state funeral for her husband and posing a dilemma for the Serbian authorities over how to dispose of the body of their ex-president without creating a rumpus, or a potential nationalist shrine.

But she is much diminished compared to the days when her "Slobo" was in power, from 1987 to 2000. Adam LeBor, Milosevic's biographer, recalled the peremptory way in which she would berate her husband in front of Serbian officials.

Once, he recalled, the Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, made the mistake of telephoning the Milosevic family home, when the boss of Serbian television, Dusan Mitevic, was present. "Don't call him at home," Mitevic heard Mira say, firmly replacing the receiver - and not putting him through. "It's Karadzic," she snapped at Slobo. "Don't have him phone here again."

Belgraders enjoyed collecting such gossipy anecdotes about their secretive ruling family - of Mira, in her squeaky girly voice, interrupting Slobo's war counsels to summon him home to dinner, or Mira, with her copious mascara running, pleading in the same squeaky voice for her husband to eliminate some political opponent.

To get to know Mira was to enter the spider's lair and court death, people said, pondering the fate of Ivan Stambolic, Mira and Slobo's former best friend, and best man at their wedding. Murdered in 2000, his death fed the popular suspicion that those who had too much inside information about the secretive first family paid a high price.

Belgraders invented numerous nicknames for the first lady. She was Lady Macbeth, or the Red Witch, for her oft-proclaimed love of socialism, or was likened to Elena Ceausescu, wife of the hated dictator of Romania, who was shot alongside her husband in 1989.

Mira communicated her musings to Serbia through columns in the magazine Duga, in which she dilated in an innocent, philosophical, tone about the horrors of war, socialism, her love of the Croatian resort of Dubrovnik (which her husband's army bombed), the masculine qualities of her "wild mustang" of a son Marko, and the apparently slightly less admirable high-spiritedness of Marija.

The comparisons drawn with Elena Ceausescu - a greedy peasant obsessed with gold taps and other vulgar symbols of luxury - were wide of the mark. Mira was no peasant, she read classics and sneered at what she called kitsch. She was always a daughter of the privileged inner circle, the party elite that grew up around President Tito after the Communist takeover in 1945.

Like all children of Tito's red barons, she grew up with a strong sense of entitlement, marrying within the party and moving straight from university to the commanding heights of politics and the economy.

Biographers dwelt on Mira's tragic background, for her mother, a famous partisan, Vera Miletic, was shot dead in mysterious circumstances in the Second World War and the motherless child was ignored by her glamorous father, Momir Markovic, a government minister. But for all that, she had plenty of veze, which loosely translates to "connections" - not surprisingly, as her guardian aunt, Davorjanka Paunovic, was Tito's "personal assistant", while her uncle Draza was one of his most trusted lieutenants.

It was her veze - not Slobo's - that propelled her ambitious bumpkin of a husband up the ladder after they married in 1965, moving seamlessly from the state bank Beobanka to the upper reaches of the party hierarchy.

Slobo had absolutely nothing to commend himself in the veze department. He was the son of an obscure schoolmistress in provincial Pozeravac who hanged herself in 1974 and his father was an Montenegrin clergyman, a member of a marginal, almost disgraced, profession in communist Yugoslavia.

After he killed himself in 1962, Slobo never visited the grave. No doubt he wanted to forget his embarrassing parents and concentrate on Mira's set. As Adam LeBor recalled, "For Milosevic, Mira's partisan pedigree offered an entrée to Yugoslavia's elite."

From the first, outsiders were struck by the unusually close ties between these two, who became a symmetrical four once Marija and Marko came along.

Other Communist bigwigs, especially in Serbia, often led quite flamboyant lives, enjoying the obsequious reception that was theirs for the taking on the Belgrade restaurant scene, the company of pretty women, the steaming platters of roast goose and pork, the raucous oompah of Gypsy bands, and the endless toasts with slivovitz plum brandy.

They took their cue from Tito himself who indulged the Serbs' monarchical tastes (as well as his own) with lavish, imperial displays, dazzling uniforms and a general air of grandeur, moving from one ex-royal residence to another, shooting bears for relaxation in forests along the Romanian border, or potting other game at Karadjordjevo, the royal hunting lodge that he purloined in northern Serbia. And Tito's glamorous wife, Jovanka, knew the rules - including that Tito's roving eye meant there would be other women.

Not Slobo and Mira. They led a very different lifestyle, so humdrum, straight-laced and puritanical that it might have been based on a 1950s American sitcom. For a start, they almost never went out; for another, hardly anyone ever came back to their home.

They shunned the royal residences that Tito had haunted, the Belgrade restaurants, the theatre and the cinema, while Mira ensured their residence in the suburb of Dedinje was guarded like a Kremlin fortress. There was no question of Slobo donning Tito's hunting outfits to go out and shoot bears. His biggest indulgence was an odd glass of whisky or a cigar - at home, of course.

The Milosevic family's set-up raised eyebrows in a macho Balkan society such as Serbia, where extramarital affairs were practically a badge of honour. "Every time Slobo came back from a trip abroad, he'd have a present for Mira," one of Milosevic colleagues at Beobanka told Tim Judah. "He never fooled around."

Indeed, there was never a breath of a rumour that Slobo, let alone Mira, indulged in affairs. How could they, when they so rarely spent more than a few hours of each day apart?

The question now is whether she will get a last glimpse of her husband. Mira has said she wants him buried in Russia; not surprising, as she might be arrested if she flew to Belgrade for a funeral. And Marija has joined the argument on the other side, defying her mother to insist on her father's burial in the Milosevic family plot, in remote Montenegro, where she now lives. She, too, risks arrest if she shows up in Belgrade, for her stunt in 2001 with the gun. So, if the obsequies do take place in Serbia, they could be without Marko, Mira or Marija - a strange affair for a man who never went anywhere, if he could possibly help it, without his family at his side.