The daughter of one of the world’s most reviled men looks you straight in the eye when she speaks and you cannot help but remember the fuzzy TV pictures of her, wide-eyed and brandishing a gun.
Marija Milosevic was shown pulling out her pistol and firing wildly when police officers and politicians came to arrest her father in March last year.
Much of the world knows him as an indicted war criminal — the alleged Butcher of the Balkans and mastermind of ethnic cleansing — but to his daughter, Slobodan Milosevic is a beloved and caring parent.
In her first interview with a Western newspaper she described what went through her head that night when they came to take her father away. She also revealed that she was starting a new life in Montenegro.
Marija drove through the mountains for our interview at Igalo, a resort near the Croatian border. She looks 10 years younger than her 37 years, but seems to carry a cloud of tragedy around with her. She smiles little and smokes much, usually Gauloises Lights.
Slobodan Milosevic was deposed as president of Yugoslavia by the popular uprising on October 5 2000. Washington, pressing the new regime in Belgrade to hand him over to the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague, threatened to withhold economic aid unless he was arrested by April 1. As the deadline nearly expired, the authorities acted.
”For two days, the water and electricity had been cut off, but with all that was going on we barely noticed,” Marija said. Then in the early hours of March 31 militiamen attacked.
”There was a lot of noise from the street and then men in balaclava helmets started shooting and storming over the wall. A bullet passed very close to my head and ricocheted against the door entrance behind me. My first reaction was to fire back. It was self-defence, an instinctive reaction.”
Marija denied what was widely reported at the time: that she tried to persuade her father to commit suicide rather than surrender. ”I knew it was a kidnapping and that it was only a matter of time before they sent him to The Hague. I didn’t go out of the house after that. I was so upset that I stayed in bed for five days.”
Marija, who has been charged with endangering life, fired five shots, some of which are alleged to have hit a security car. But every time she has been to court, prosecution witnesses have failed to appear.
Where had she got the weapon? ”It was given to me by the police, as protection, 15 years earlier,” she said. ”I had never even used it until that moment.”
Slobodan Milosevic was sent to The Hague on June 28 last year, the anniversary of the 14th-century Battle of Kosovo and one of the most emotionally charged dates in the Serbian calendar. Marija has not seen her father since.
Slobodan Milosevic’s trial for war crimes began in February. Last month, just before the tribunal adjourned for recess, he was diagnosed with high blood pressure and a high risk of heart attack.
He refuses to recognise the tribunal and has refused legal representation. ”The prosecution have teams and teams of lawyers but my father has to read all the tens of thousands of papers and witness statements himself,” Marija said.
His wife, Mira Markovic, sees him about once a month, often accompanied by her daughter-in-law and the Milosevics’ only grandchild.
Marija refuses to visit him in prison but they talk daily on the telephone. Her brother Marko, nine years her junior, is in exile, reportedly in a former Soviet republic.
”We can’t talk long — a maximum of 15 minutes and more usually five minutes. We talk about the usual things between a father and daughter: he asks me whether I am eating properly, how my two dogs are and to be careful when I am driving in Montenegro. I ask him what he had for lunch and I tell him to look after himself. I have emotional reason why I do not go to The Hague. My father understands this and understands me.”
At 16 Marija fell in love with a Serbian diplomat, went to Japan with him, was married at 18, but divorced by 20. ”As soon as I came back from Japan I was divorced and lived an independent life as a journalist for Politika [the state newspaper]. But I was never involved in politics. Later I started my own TV station in Belgrade, TV Kosovo, but I was never interested in politics. At my station, we showed American and British films and videos of Western music.”
Marija feels that Serbia has betrayed her father and herself. She is taking Montenegrin citizenship and building a house on land once owned by her paternal grandfather, a former Orthodox priest who killed himself in the 1950s.
Immediately after the Nato bombardment in 1999 street protests demanding Slobodan Milosevic’s resignation began. ”I was sure things were going wrong. I told my father there was no petrol, that I could not get equipment for my TV station … but the advisers closest to him were telling him everything would be all right. I wish now that I had been more persistent.”
She added: ”My father doesn’t think he was betrayed by the SPS [his party] but I think he was. I had urged him for about a year before to let them carry on without him, but he wouldn’t listen.”
Mira Markovic, in many ways a far more committed communist than her husband, had become a bitterly disappointed person, Marija said.
”She is a socialist Utopianist — the sun should shine on everyone, there should be no need for money. I am more of a realist. In such a cruel world, you cannot live as she does.” — (c) Guardian Newspapers 2002