Milosevic widow dies in Moscow

Markovic fled Serbia for Russia, where her son Marko was reported to have been living, in 2003 while her husband was standing trial at the UN war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague. She has not been seen in public since then and did not attend her husband’s funeral in their home town of Pozarevac.  

Hadzi Dragan Antic, a confidante of the Milosevic couple and former CEO of the Politika newspaper publishing house, said that Markovic died on Sunday afternoon in the Russian capital at the age of 77.  

 Markovic was born in the eastern Serbia town of Pozarevac in 1942. She majored in sociology at Belgrade University and went on to get a doctorate there. She taught sociology at the university School Natural Sciences and Mathematics.  

Markovic was a founder of the Yugoslav Left (JUL) political party in the 1990s. JUL officials took a number of senior posts at both federal and republic level in Serbia with some members, including the current Serbian Defence Minister Aleksandar Vulin, surviving the fall of the Milosevic regime and going on to join other parties or form their own. Markovic’s party met with some opposition in Milosevic’s Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS).  

Markovic’s name was brought into connection with the assassination of newspaper publisher Slavko Curuvija, who had access to her despite being viewed as part of the opposition to the Milosevic regime, but she was never charged in that case. The only charges against her were for pressuring a government commission to unlawfully allocate an apartment to her grandson’s nanny. She was sentenced in absentia to a year in jail after 15 years of hearings but the sentence was overturned in mid-2018 and a re-trial ordered.