Limits irk Belgrade's 'Lady Macbeth'

BELGRADE - Slobodan Milosevic's wife flew back to Belgrade yesterday after visiting the ousted Yugoslav leader detained by The Hague tribunal investigating war crimes in former Yugoslavia.

Mira Markovic, aged 59, has spent the past three days with her husband at the United Nations' detention centre where he is awaiting trial, although they have been separated by a glass partition and able to talk only by telephone.

Markovic, nicknamed Serbia's Lady Macbeth for her influence on the ex-President, arrived in the Netherlands last week to see her husband for the first time since he was spirited out of his homeland on June 28.



She made no comment to the media during her trip.

Milosevic is accused of responsibility for mass killings and expulsions of Kosovo Albanians in 1999.

Lawyer Dragoslav Ognjanovic, who accompanied Markovic to Holland and has been speaking on her behalf, said she was pleased to see her husband but unhappy with the visiting conditions.

"She's very happy that she can see him and spend time with him, but she's not satisfied because they are not allowed any personal contact.

"Their conversations are through glass by phone all the time in the presence of a United Nations guard," he said.

Spouses visiting the detention centre can usually expect to be provided with rooms for conjugal visits, dubbed "intimacy rooms."

Ognjanovic said that Markovic was not providing her husband with any legal advice.

Milosevic, who has branded the tribunal an "illegal" instrument of his Nato enemies, has refused legal counsel, although he has received advice from visiting lawyers.

- REUTERS

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