BOSNIA-HERZGOVINA: Bosnian serb Mourners from Banja Luka depart to Belgrade to pay their last respects to former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic

Record ID: 565083

  • Title: BOSNIA-HERZGOVINA: Bosnian serb Mourners from Banja Luka depart to Belgrade to pay their last respects to former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic
  • Date: 18th March 2006
  • Summary: PEOPLE IN BUS MAN HOLD PHOTO OF SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC CLOSE UP OF MAN WOMEN IN BUS
  • Embargoed: 2nd April 2006 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Topics: International Relations,People
  • Reuters ID: LVA3KPTZ5KE9IMO37BUXKGIXJQ6D
  • Story Text: Bosnian serbs across Bosnia departed their home towns to attend the funeral of Slobodan Milosevic on Saturday (March 18).
    In the town of Banja Luka, a bus load of Milosevic supporters departed to Belgrade. Others commemorated Milosevic in a church service, while lighting candles and saying prayers for their 'hero'. Milosevic is due to be buried in a funeral on Saturday that is shaping up as a contest to settle who really represents Serbia - his diehard nationalist followers or the pro-Western democrats who ousted him in 2000.
    The former strongman was denied the state funeral his supporters said he had a right to. But they made sure he lay on public display in Belgrade since Thursday as if lying in state.
    His opponents say this "celebration" of Milosevic has gone too far and aim to prove once and for all that they outnumber his dwindling loyalists - except perhaps in years of age.
    Milosevic's once mighty Socialist Party is today a shrunken faction. But it predicts that 200,000 Serbs will turn out to pay their last respects when the coffin is put out in central Belgrade before burial, a show that could boost their place in the polls.
    They plan to place the coffin on a podium on the sidewalk outside the federal parliament, where huge crowds of fist-waving Serbs brought him down in October 2000, yelling their slogan "He's finished!"
    Milosevic, who died in detention at the Hague war crimes tribunal last Saturday of heart failure, aged 64, is to be laid to rest in the afternoon in the garden of his provincial home in Pozarevac, east of Belgrade.
    "We are going to attend the funeral of our formal President, the only president who fought for Yugoslavia and Serb people. I think that it's a big mistake of current government in Serbia not to allow that man (Slobodan Milosevic) to be buried where he should be," said Svetozar Mitrovic from Banja Luka as he and many others boarded a bus to attend Milosevic's funeral.
    The Serb Orthodox Church, which never wavered in its support for Milosevic's hardline brand of nationalism, is on the Socialist side and will administer at the burial, something of a surprise for a man who was a lifelong communist.
    The grave lies under an old lime tree where Milosevic is said to have first kissed Mira Markovic, the childhood sweetheart who became his wife and partner in power.
    She and their son Marko fear arrest or worse if they return to Serbia and have chosen not to, Socialist Party officials said on Friday. They said threats had been made against them.
    At the same hour as the interment, organisers of the street protests which ousted him following a botched Socialist effort to steal re-election, plan to hold an anti-Milosevic rally in the capital, complete with party balloons.
    So far there has been no sign of the city authorities stepping in to pre-empt possible confrontations.
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