It was not the grandiloquent send-off he might have hoped for. Instead of a triumphal state funeral, Slobodan Milosevic — the ”Butcher of the Balkans”, and the man who brought war and slaughter to former Yugoslavia — was ignominiously buried on Saturday in his back garden, next to his favourite lime tree.
A week after his death in a prison cell in the Hague, Milosevic’s body was taken to Pozarevac, the small provincial town 80km from Belgrade where he grew up. It was, by any standards, a bizarre final journey, more suited to a beloved family pet than a former head of state. There were even moments of comedy.
The garden where he was buried on Saturday is supposed to be the place where Milosevic first kissed his teenage future wife Mira — a woman known in Serbia as ”Lady Macbeth” for her murderous intentions towards her husband’s enemies. On Saturday however, it became clear that Mira had failed to turn up to Milosevic’s funeral. His son Marko did not make it either. Milosevic had stayed in self-imposed exile in Moscow, officials from Milosevic’s Socialist party said, rather than return to Serbia, where she faces corruption charges.
In the absence of the ex-president’s family, it was left to thousands of elderly Milosevic supporters to pay their last respects. The West may regard him as a monster, but to Serbia’s nationalist minority he is still a hero. ”I feel as if my son has been murdered,” Sevala Zdavkovic (58) said, standing outside Belgrade’s Parliament, where Milosevic’s coffin was displayed. ”He was a man who gave everything to Serbia. He even gave his life. They poisoned him, you know,” she said, voicing the widespread conspiracy theory among Milosevic fans that doctors in the Hague, where he had spent the past four years on trial for war crimes, had killed him.
”I run a business. Today things are catastrophic,” said Milodrag Antic (54) mourning Serbia’s economic decline. ”Things were much better under Tito and under Milosevic. We used to go on holiday and go skiing. Now we are broke.”
Milosevic’s body was flown back to Belgrade last Wednesday. Serbia’s weak pro-Western government refused him a state funeral but allowed the Socialist Party of Serbia, which holds the balance of power, to display his coffin in Belgrade’s shabby museum. Over the past three days lines of elderly supporters queued for up to seven hours to say goodbye. Women in fur coats carried roses or lilies. Several sobbed, genuflecting before his photograph.
Then at 10.30am on Saturday the coffin set off on its strange last trip. It stopped outside Serbia’s Parliament building, where thousands of supporters gathered, chanting ”Slobo”, before it was whisked down a drab dual carriageway. After two hours’ drive, past muddy fields and pine-covered hills, it arrived in Pozarevac.
Here — as elsewhere in Serbia — Milosevic is a figure of division. In the central square, hundreds of pensioners gathered beneath a large portrait of the late president. Mourners clapped and threw flowers when his silver hearse arrived.
In a first-floor flat overlooking them, however, Slavicia Galena opened a giant bottle of Serbian slivovitz . ”We are celebrating,” she said, handing The Observer a large shot. ”My husband was a member of the resistance. Milosevic’s son Marko had him beaten up and dragged off to his private prison underground.”
After more speeches, the coffin was transported to Mira’s suburban villa where bouquets and candles had been left outside the green front gate. A second plot has already been dug for Mira next to her husband, neighbours said.
”Nobody cares much for Milosevic,” cafe owner Sala Njegic (43) said. ”He’s the past. He’s history. I’m not interested in his funeral, to be honest. His big problem was his wife.”
Last week the town’s municipal assembly voted to allow Milosevic to be buried in his garden, an unusual arrangement requiring special permission. ”He’s not a war criminal but a national hero,” spokesperson Branislav Popovic said. ”He should have been buried in Belgrade.”
Others, however, cursed Milosevic, whose depressive family history saw both his mother and father commit suicide. ”He stole 10 years of my life,” said Gordon Bojkovich, a member of the opposition student movement, which in 2000 helped drive Milosevic from power.
But the biggest reaction in Pozarevac on Saturday was apathy. A minority on both sides have passionate views on the former Yugoslav president. But most people, it became clear, don’t really care. Milosevic’s legacy, it appears, is not just a fragmented country, but a fractured society, in which pessimism, indifference, and even boredom rule. ”I don’t really think he was evil. He was OK,” said Milos, an 18-year-old student who admitted the wars in the 1990s were a fuzzy memory. ”I think it’s weird being buried in your back garden,” he said. ”When you wake up in the morning you don’t want to be reminded of the dead. And you wonder about the smell.” – Guardian Unlimited Â