Feelings are running high in the Serbian town of Pozarevac, whose most famous son, former Yugoslav strongman Slobodan Milosevic, is coming home to rest in peace.
As preparations step up for a funeral on Saturday under the gaze of the world, 500 people from his Socialist Party gathered in the local cultural centre and roundly accused the UN war crimes court where he died of killing him.
“The criminal court in The Hague is guilty of Milosevic’s death,” said one man, Miletic Mihajlovic.
Not far away the Milosevic family owns a large property of more than 5Â 500 square metres housing five separate low-rise houses.
It is in the yard of this compound, under a 100-year-old linden tree, that the former president will be laid to rest, a family source told Serbia’s RTS television.
Milosevic’s widow Mira Markovic had expressed the wish that her husband be buried in Pozarevac, and her daughter-in-law still lives at the property with her own son.
“The family expressed wish to bury him in the yard of the family house,” a local party official, Miomir Ilic, said at the cultural centre.
“We will respect that, and every day water with our tears the grave of our unforgettable president Slobodan Milosevic.”
Out in front, two men sold biographies of Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb army chief wanted by the UN court on charges of genocide and war crimes, including some of the same crimes Milosevic was being judged for.
Milosevic died on Saturday of a heart attack in his prison cell at The Hague where he had been on trial since February 2002.
Pozarevac is a rather plain town of 60Â 000 people 70km southeast of Belgrade, located between the Danube, Morava and Mlava rivers.
It would be little more than a squiggle on the map but for its most famous son, born here on August 20, 1941.
The town is renowned locally for a food factory whose best-selling produce is baby biscuits. It has a determinedly provincial feel, with few shops, few high rises and a small pedestrian zone where everybody knows everybody.
Pozarevac was first mentioned in history in 1476, but it is arguably most famous for the 1718 Treaty of Passarowitz (its German name) between the rival Ottoman and Habsburg empires.
It flourished in the 19th century, from when its best architecture dates, and in 1842 hosted the Balkans premiere of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
It was while growing up in Pozarevac that Milosevic met Mira Markovic, who went to the same school.
They became inseparable as they rose the political ladder, and when he won the highest office in the land she was a major power behind his throne.
They maintained their home in Pozarevac where residents — as well as having a president next door — also saw the couple’s son Marko Milosevic found a business empire that included an amusement park called Bambiland, the Madonna disco, a bakery, computer shop and internet services.
Some of those properties were ransacked during the unrest in October 2000 that led to his father’s fall from power. – AFP