Milosevic by Adam LeBor

Stalin also share a history of paternal deprivation, together with a whole range of twentieth–century political leaders, including Bill Clinton and Saddam Hussein. Psychologists argue that an absentee father is likely to produce feelings of low self–esteem in a young boy. A child will question why his father has left, or does not want to be with him. The lack of a suitable domestic male role model also means the child is deprived of guidance in forming relationships in the wider world. In later life this can create a powerful drive to overcompensate. Some will seek to validate their self–worth through sexual promiscuity. Others enter politics.
    Like Mira Markovic, Milosevic certainly had little contact with his father, who left Pozarevac for good in 1947. Perhaps a provincialbackground and dysfunctional paternal relationship is a requirement for a career as a political leader. Stalin, born Josef Dugashvili, passed a miserable childhood in the Georgian city of Gori, where he was beaten by his drunken cobbler father and brought up by his mother. Bill Clinton never knew his father, a travelling salesman who was killed in a car crash before he was born. Bill Clinton’s stepfather, Roger Clinton, was an alcoholic and a gambler who beat his wife. Saddam Hussein, born in the village of Tikrit in northern Iraq was abused by his stepfather, who prevented him from going to school, made him herd sheep and called him a son of a dog. Names too, seem to play a role. Saddam translates as ‘one who confronts’. Dugashvili later chose the name Stalin, meaning ‘man of steel’, even though he was short, with a withered arm. Perhaps it was mordant Balkan wit then, that gave Slobodan Milosevic a first name that translates as ‘freedom’.
    In 1962, tragedy struck the Milosevic family. Isolated and alone in Montenegro, Svetozar slid into depression and shot himself in the head with a pistol. Svetozar was a deeply religious man, who took comfort in the spirituality of Serbian orthodoxy. One of the key tenets of Orthodoxy is a sense of continuity and affirmation. The sonorous chants, contemplative tradition, even the wafts of incense that characterise an Orthodox mass are all threads in a spiritual cord of faith, stretching through the centuries, from the time of Jesus right to the present day.
    In Communist Yugoslavia, across the Balkans, that link was severed. For believers, Marxism was no substitute. Svetozar left a suicide note, which his sister Darinka found, explaining his decision. Like so many of his generation. Svetozar Milosevic had seen his life torn apart by the war, and he had never been able to make his peace with the new order, said his older son Borislav. ‘The death of my father was a surprise. It was not a straightforward event. For him, the war was the central event of his life. After that the old world was broken, and there was a new one that he did not understand. His ambitions and intentions were different, and he was not satisfied, because his life lacked enough activity and meaning. There were many people in the same situation, but most did not do what my father did.’ 8
    Borislav was closer to his father than Slobodan was, and greatly missed him when he returned to Montenegro. In 1954, after graduating from secondary school, Borislav had spent a memorable summer with hisfather, walking and talking in the hills. Stanislava had encouraged Borislav to join the Communist youth movement, but he was still his father’s son. He wondered about theology and spiritual matters. Svetozar told him about the philosopher Immanuel Kant, but said that some mysteries could never be fully understood, quoting Emil du–Bois Raymond’s epigram, ‘Ignoramus et ignorabimus’, ‘we are and shall be ignorant’. Borislav recalled: ‘I asked him about God. He told me that the church says something different, but I should know that Jesus of Nazareth was not born as the son