BELGRADE, Serbia-Montenegro – A line of mostly elderly mourners filed by Slobodan Milosevic’s coffin Thursday, and though the turnout was light, the government was accused of allowing the late war crimes defendant to receive what was, in effect, an officially sanctioned wake.
The wooden casket lay in the Museum of Revolution, an out-of-the-way place once devoted to the communist leader Josip Broz, known as Tito. The location on a hill above the Serbian capital of Belgrade required something of a hike, yet several hundred mourners climbed the snowy steps to the hall where wreaths and Milosevic’s Socialist Party comrades flanked the closed casket.
The site is within a few hundred yards of the presidential residence where police arrested Milosevic in April 2001. The government later extradited him to the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague, where he died Saturday of a heart attack.
Outside the museum on Thursday, the waiting crowd had angry words for the tribunal. “Murderers! Traitors!” old women in shawls, roses in their hands, shouted at television cameras.
“We had everything taken from us when they turned him over to The Hague,” said Sava Darmanovic, 82. “He fought for his people. The stories about the crimes were inventions of the West and Serbian mercenaries.”
There were fewer mourners than Socialist Party organizers had predicted. But officials said thousands more admirers of Milosevic would gather in Belgrade on Saturday, when the party hopes to place the casket for outside the parliament building.
Socialist Party leaders criticized Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica for trying to keep the funeral out of the public eye. “They bowed to Western pressure, but we are managing to give Belgrade a chance to pay its respects,” said Alexander Vulin, a top party official.
So far, no flags on government buildings have flown at half-mast. The government sent no representative to the viewing.
But after television footage showed a government official inspecting the museum before Thursday’s wake, anti-Milosevic politicians attacked Kostunica for allowing the wake to take place. Ljiljana Cetinic, the museum director, complained that the place had been “turned into a funeral parlor” against her will.
As night fell, text messages began to circulate on cell phones calling on citizens to mount an anti-Milosevic demonstration in Belgrade on Saturday, after the body’s departure from the city.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
