- LONDON (Reuters) - The wife
of Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav leader now facing trial for
alleged crimes against humanity, has said that Western powers, not her
husband, were responsible for the bloodshed in Balkans.
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- Mira Markovic, whose husband is being held in a U.N.
detention centre in the Netherlands awaiting trial, said Western governments
had been intent on destroying Yugoslavia and had done so "in a bloodbath".
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- "The bloodshed in the Balkans was the result of
the policy directed from outside Yugoslavia, with the intent to destroy
Yugoslavia, to obliterate it," she told BBC television in an interview.
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- "Yugoslavia ceased to exist. It disappeared in a
bloodbath. The merit for such a sequence of events in Yugoslavia goes to
those centres of political, financial and other types of power -- primarily
in the West -- that had an interest in destroying this country," she
said.
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- The interview, for BBC News 24's Hardtalk programme,
is due to be broadcast on Monday evening.
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- Markovic, nicknamed Serbia's "Lady Macbeth"
for her powerful influence on her husband, defended Milosevic and hailed
him as "the embodiment of the struggle for truth, justice and freedom
for all".
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- She claimed that in the future Milosevic, who she said
had already become a source of inspiration "to many poor, small and
humiliated nations throughout the world", would be recognised as a
man of justice by the international community.
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- Milosevic was arrested in April by the reformists who
ousted him in elections last year and sent from Belgrade to The Hague in
late June to face trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the
former Yugoslavia.
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- The tribunal has charged the former Yugoslav president
with responsibility for the killing of more than 900 ethnic Albanians and
the deportation of 740,000 civilians from Kosovo during a Serb crackdown
in 1999.
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- The court is also expected to charge Milosevic with genocide
for alleged atrocities in Bosnia.
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