Milosevic's ruthless Lady Macbeth

Somewhere in Moscow, a dumpy woman with the looks and hair of a 1970s folk singer - all dyed hair, mascara, pink lipstick and red nails - is sitting distraught, contemplating a future without Slobodan Milosevic - 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 alone in a cell in the Netherlands.

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 before their 1965 marriage in Belgrade, they had hardly spent a night apart until 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 as often as she could. 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, their longest period of separation 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 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 son, Marko, best known for crashing expensive cars and chasing women in his salad days, followed his mother, 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, noisily proclaiming her devotion to her now reviled father.

It was Marija, not Mira or Marko, who went out fighting. When the police arrived to arrest the fallen dictator in 2001, Slobo did not resist. But Marija pulled out a gun, shrieking defiance and firing into the air.

Mira is not a contrite, broken figure, even now.

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, Serbian television boss Dusan Mitevic was present. "Don't call him at home," Mitevic heard Mira say, before hanging up. "It's Karadzic," she snapped at Slobo. "Don't have him phone here again."

BELGRADERS enjoyed collecting such gossip 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 voice for her husband to eliminate a political opponent.

To know Mira was to enter the spider's lair and court death, people said, reflecting on the fate of Ivan Stambolic, once Mira and Slobo's 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. She was likened to Elena Ceausescu, wife of the dictator of Romania, 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 qualities of her "wild mustang" of a son Marko.

The comparisons with Elena Ceaucescu - a greedy peasant obsessed with gold taps and other vulgar luxuries - were wide of the mark.

Mira was no peasant, she read classics and sneered at the "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.

She grew up with a strong sense of entitlement, marrying within the party and moving swiftly to the commanding heights of politics.

BIOGRAPHERS dwelt on Mira's tragic background. Her mother Vera Miletic, a famous partisan, was shot dead in mysterious circumstances in World War II and the motherless child was ignored by her glamorous Government minister father, Momir Markovic.

But for all that, she had plenty of "veze", or connections. Her guardian aunt Davorjanka Paunovic was Tito's "personal assistant", while her uncle Draza was a trusted lieutenant.

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 no veze. He was the son of an obscure schoolmistress in provincial Pozeravac who hanged herself in 1974 and his father was a theologian - a marginal, almost disgraced, profession in communist Yugoslavia.

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

From the first, outsiders were struck by the unusually close ties between these two. Other Communist bigwigs often led flamboyant lives, enjoying the obsequious reception on offer 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.

THEY took their cue from Tito himself, who indulged in lavish, imperial displays, dazzling uniforms and a general air of grandeur, moving from one ex-royal residence to another, shooting bears for fun in forests along the Romanian border, or potting other game at Karadjordjevo, the royal hunting lodge.

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 lifestyle so humdrum, straight-laced and puritanical that it might have been based on a 1950s American sitcom. They almost never went out and hardly ever had guests.

They shunned the royal mansions and restaurants that Tito had haunted, while Mira ensured their home 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 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 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 is whether she will get a last glimpse of Slobo. Mira said she wants him buried in Russia; not surprising, as she could be arrested if she flew to Belgrade for a funeral.

Marija has defied 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 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.

- INDEPENDENT