The widow of Slobodan Milosevic, often dubbed the "Lady Macbeth of the Balkans", on Thursday released a lengthy autobiography defending the Serbian strongman and revealing how they fell in love.
In the two-volume memoir titled "Bilo Je To Ovako" (This Is How It Was), 73-year-old Mirjana Markovic describes her husband -- who died in 2006 at The Hague where he was on trial for war crimes -- as "the leading political figure" of the late 20th century.
Ultranationalist Milosevic was ousted as president by a popular uprising on October 5, 2000, after 13 years of iron rule in which he fuelled brutal ethnic conflict and mass murder in the former Yugoslavia, defying international sanctions and NATO bombs.
Running to more than 900 pages, the book describes the couple's rise and fall, from when they met until Milosevic's death, as well as her childhood and her time in exile in Russia since 2003.
Markovic, who was known to have a huge influence on her husband, describes how in the late 1950s at high school in Pozarevac, about 70 kilometres (44 miles) southeast of Belgrade, the lovestruck pair made vows of eternal devotion.
- 'All had faults except him' -
"All the boys had faults, except him," Markovic wrote. "On March 10, I decided to tell him, and I did so looking down. A few days later, on March 17, we swore to love each other forever."
Recalling the morning of March 11, 2006 -- the day Milosevic died of a heart attack in his cell -- she said she tried to call him in prison.
"He did not answer his phone and I got worried. I called his lawyer who assured me he was probably taking his walk," she wrote.
"Later, an English voice told me that Slobodan was dead and I was alone."
Milosevic, whose rule left the Serbian economy in ruins, was arrested six months after his ouster and transferred to the United Nations war crimes court in June 2001. He remained unmoved by charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
In 2003, Markovic left Serbia, where she was charged with abuse of power and suspected of cigarette smuggling and political assassination. In an interview in 2010, she said she did not intend to return.
Her book calls her husband the "the leading political figure" of the last decade of the 20th century, "whose name was mentioned more often than those of the Russian, American and Chinese presidents put together."