Milosevic wife missing her 'hero'

Markovic spoke to her husband after his first court appearance

ZAGREB, Yugoslavia -- The wife of suspected war criminal Slobodan Milosevic has said she feels lost without him as he awaits trial in a Dutch prison.

"I cannot do anything on my own, without him. He has always been around in my life and now I have to look after everything," Mira Markovic said in remarks reported by Croatian weekly Globus.

Milosevic appeared for the first time before the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague on Tuesday where guilty pleas for four charges were entered for him after he refused plead.

"I still find him very cute and likeable. What can I say? He is my hero," said Markovic, the former Yugoslav president's partner in politics and personal life since their teenage years, Reuters news agency reported.

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Markovic, 58, is widely regarded as the driving force behind Milosevic and has been referred to as "Red Witch" because of her neo-communist views and her passion for mysticism.

Globus said its article was compiled from interviews with Markovic in the past three months, the last one a day after Milosevic was handed over to the tribunal late last month.

Markovic said her husband had stopped reading newspapers after he was imprisoned in Belgrade on April 1 as part of a domestic investigation into corruption allegations.

"He did not read them in Belgrade and he most certainly won't read them there (in The Hague). We don't read papers. That is out of the question!" she said.

As she has done before, Markovic also criticised the tribunal, describing it as "the Gestapo of our time."

"Likewise, the Scheveningen prison (in The Hague) is nothing but a concentration camp for Serbs, with a few Croats and Muslims thrown in for good measure," she said.

She said her husband, nicknamed "Sloba," should have asked for guarantees of his safety when he conceded electoral defeat to reformers after a mass uprising last October.

"Sloba did not ask for anything in return (for conceding). And you know why? Because he was plain stupid. We told him he should have made a deal," Markovic said.

Markovic spoke to Milosevic by phone after his court appearance, Belgrade lawyer Zdenko Tomanovic told Reuters after visiting Milosevic in prison.

But while Tomanovic said Markovic planned to visit her husband once she had been granted a visa to travel to The Hague, the Dutch embassy in Belgrade said no visa application has been made.

Markovic is on a European Union blacklist that denies her entry to the Netherlands.

"As soon as she asks for a visa, we can consider her request. All we have now is a request from the (Hague) tribunal to co-operate with admitting her," Dutch foreign ministry spokeswoman Hannah Tijmes told Reuters.

A diplomatic source told Reuters that Markovic was likely to be granted a single-entry, short-stay visa -- which typically lasts up to three months -- if she applied.

Permitting her a longer stay was "totally out of the question," the source said.

Tomanovic told Reuters Milosevic had been denied permission to speak by telephone to his son on Tuesday, although it was Marko Milosevic's birthday.

Milosevic appeared before the court without legal counsel, and criticised it as being "illegal."

"I consider this tribunal a false tribunal and the indictment a false indictment," Milosevic said in English.

The case was adjourned until August 27 but the trial is not expected to begin hearing evidence until next year.