Slobodan Milosevic’s wife can visit her husband at his Dutch prison despite being on a blacklist, a European Union spokesman said yesterday.
Mira Markovic, known as the “Red Witch” and “Lady Macbeth of Serbia,” is among a dozen associates of the former Yugoslav dictator who are banned from the EU’s 15 nations.
But she can get a visa to travel to The Hague under a U.N. regulation allowing relatives to visit detainees at the international war crimes tribunal, spokesman Gunnar Wiegand said.
Mira Markovic said the other day she is lost without her “cute and likable” husband and she slammed the tribunal as the “Gestapo of our time.”
Milosevic, extradited from Belgrade last week, faces a possible life sentence when he is tried next year for crimes committed against humanity in Kosovo in 1999.
Yesterday, prosecutors turned their attention to two fugitive colleagues of Milosevic’s wanted for genocide against Muslims during the Bosnian war that ended in 1995.
They asked Bosnian Serb Prime Minister Mladen Ivanic to help catch Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb wartime leader, and his top military officer Ratko Mladic.
“Karadzic and Mladic have been at large for the past six years,” chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte said. “This unacceptable situation must come to an end now.”
But Karadzic’s wife said he has no intention of emerging from hiding.
“The attitude of Radovan Karadzic towards that tribunal has not changed, nor will it change under any conditions,” Ljiljana Zelen-Karadzic said.
She denied a Western report that her husband would surrender and testify against Milosevic.