Slobodan Milosevic will be buried in Belgrade, his lawyer announced on Tuesday night, ending days of speculation about what would happen to the remains of the former Serbian president.
The dictator’s body will be flown from Amsterdam airport to the Serbian capital at about lunchtime on Wednesday, allowing what supporters called a ”dignified” funeral to take place.
Zdenko Tomanovic, Milosevic’s lawyer, said on Tuesday night: ”The son of Mr Milosevic has just informed [the] Hague tribunal that the funeral of his father will be in Belgrade.”
Marko Milosevic, the dictator’s son, said his father should be buried in his homeland. ”He should be buried in the place where he belongs, in the capital of our country, there is no discussion about that,” he told Reuters.
That ended days of uncertainty after the Milosevic family threatened to fly the body to Moscow if the Serb authorities refused to grant freedom of travel to the dictator’s widow. Mirjana Markovic lives in exile in Russia after fleeing to Moscow in 2003 to avoid abuse-of-power charges.
A Serb court went some way on Tuesday to clearing the way for her to attend the funeral when it suspended an arrest warrant. Branco Rakic, one of the family’s legal advisers, indicated that Ms Markovic planned to attend the funeral even though the Belgrade court ordered her passport to be seized. But her son indicated the family was far from happy. ”Unfortunately there are so many obstacles. The priority right now is the safety and life of my mother.”
Belgrade rejected the family’s claims that it was complicating the funeral arrangements. Vojislav Kostunica, the Serbian Prime Minister, said that the funeral could take place in Belgrade after the suspension of the arrest warrant: ”A funeral is a civilised act that should be respected.” The prime minister’s intervention might have persuaded Marko Milosevic to change his mind after he flew to The Hague from Russia early on Tuesday to pick up the remains of his father. He spent two-and-a-half hours at an institute in the Dutch capital where forensic experts concluded that Milosevic died of a heart attack in his prison cell on Saturday.
A few hours after Marko Milosevic left the forensic centre, a hearse carrying the body of the only former head of state to be indicted on war crimes charges left for Amsterdam airport. The Dutch authorities refused to allow four Russian pathologists, who had flown in from Moscow with Milosevic’s son, to carry out a second autopsy on Dutch soil.
The pathologists and family were wary of the initial autopsy because they say doctors from the international war crimes tribunal behaved negligently, contributing to Milosevic’s death. Marko Milosevic said: ”He got killed. He didn’t die. He got killed. There’s a murder.”
Leo Bokeria, head of Moscow’s Bakulev clinic, who led the team of Russian pathologists, said Milosevic would still be alive if he had been allowed to travel to Russia for medical treatment.
”It’s a great regret that they did not heed our numerous appeals for an examination,” he told AP television. ”The point is that a man who had suffered from a complex of illnesses of the heart and vascular system was not examined adequately, and thus naturally he could not be cured.”
The war crimes tribunal, which formally terminated the trial of Milosevic on Tuesday after his ”untimely death”, rejected the family’s claims. Officials told the Associated Press that Milosevic may have been responsible for his own death after he took unprescribed drugs in the detention centre near The Hague.
Doctors at the centre concluded that Milosevic took the drugs to undermine treatment for an acute heart condition, to strengthen his request to fly to Russia for medical treatment. – Guardian Unlimited Â