Empty Vessel (Page 3)

If Milosevic was a colorless villain, his family provided Serbia with a little dark comic relief. The Serbian leader's children, Marko and Marija, exemplified the crass, brutal, self-seeking criminal culture their father's regime had cultivated. Marko terrorized the small town of Pozarevac, where his parents were born. He ran several shady business outfits, including a nightclub, a cut in the cigarette-smuggling business and a park called Bambiland. Marija ran a radio station, packed heat and flew into rages. And of course, there were few public figures Serbs loved to hate more than Slobo's wife, with her intellectual pretensions, her incoherent diary column in a Belgrade magazine, her jealous death grip on her husband and the flower she liked to wear in her hair. LeBor spent good time with Mira, and his book is enlivened by lengthy quotes from their discussions.

Mira's grip on reality is demonstrably weak. She is fond of saying things don't exist that clearly do. When a BBC reporter asked Mira about something that appeared about her in the Croatian magazine Globus, she characteristically replied, "Honestly, I've never heard of such a magazine. I don't know about its existence or what it says, and what you just said is like telling me it's Sunday today whereas it's actually Tuesday." Her life was apparently shaped by the early abandonment of her father, a partisan hero, and by a romanticized, heroic memory of her dead mother, his lover during the war who was later executed on murky charges of spying for the Nazis. Mira rejected the official history that viewed her mother as a traitor, preferring instead to cast her as a martyr to the partisan cause.

By all accounts, Mira encouraged her husband's ambitions and helped mastermind his rise to power. She publicly feuded with some of his nationalist attack dogs, like the fascist paramilitary leader and indicted war criminal Vojislav Seselj. But she was more successful in severing her husband's ties with friends and family members of whom she was jealous. Serbia's ruling couple forged a bond so exclusive and co-dependent that virtually no one could get truly close to either of them. Ivan Stambolic, whom Milosevic would betray in his rise to power and in connection with whose assassination Mira is wanted by The Hague, was not only Milosevic's mentor but his kum, or best man. Serbian culture values friendship like family and considers a man's kum to be somethingalmost more than a brother. But of Stambolic Mira told LeBor, "They were not such great friends. People have made that up, we were not even family friends. We did not visit each other. I could spend three days denying all the things that were written about us."

Beyond denying, however, are the hilarious transcripts of Croatian secret service wiretaps of the Milosevic family telephones, published in Globus and excerpted in Milosevic. My favorite is a 1997 conversation between Milosevic and his son Marko, who wants to have an operation to pin back his ears:

Slobodan: Alright, my lovely. Listen, I've been talking to a doctor here and I did some thinking with my own head. You know why it looks that way to you? Because you're terribly skinny, and every geek your age looks that way. As soon as you fill out and, as they say, stabilize a bit, everything will fall into place. I looked even worse at your age.
Marko: Look, I agree, but I do not intend to start looking good in fifteen years.
Slobodan: Marko, what I want to tell you is that it only appears that way because you're skinny. Even a chicken has some fat behind the ears. And you have only bones, you see, so any violence against nature is stupid. Secondly, you are handsome as a doll, your father's image. So don't screw around.
Marko: But dad...
Slobodan: I'm against it and I am your parent. There you go.
Marko: Excellent. And I am in favor of it and I am of age.
Slobodan: Well, since you're of age, I'm going to beat you up as soon as you show up here.... I want to tell you this only because you're skinny. Your head is all drawn thin, your stomach is like a five-dinar coin (i.e., thin). Why don't you put some more fat on it?

There is something so tantalizingly weird about hearing Slobodan Milosevic speak man-to-man with his son about his ears. It is also in perfect keeping with Milosevic's prosaic life and rule. Maybe the authorized--or posthumous--Milosevic biography will one day read as nothing but this: the catalogue of a small man's small life. The great stuff of even a villain's biography--grand delusions, battles of conscience, doubts and regrets followed by self-deceit--may simply require a greater man.

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