A tryst in the Hague tribunal’s “love room” for conjugal visits produced a daughter this week for former Yugoslav Army Chief of Staff Nebojsa Pavkovic and partner Maja, Serbian media reported on Thursday.
The baby was born at virtually the same time as Pavkovic’s daughter gave birth to a girl in the same clinic, the dailies Press and Kurir quoted family friends as saying, making Pavkovic a father and grandfather on the same day.
Pavkovic is on temporary release from the U.N. tribunal pending his trial for war crimes against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo in 1998-99, when he led forces combating a guerrilla insurgency.
The general, 58, is not allowed by the Hague tribunal to talk to the media, but friends told the newspapers he was “glowing.”
He met his partner Maja, 26, in 2003 after divorcing his fourth wife Gloria in 2003. The daughter was Pavkovic’s fifth child and his first with Maja.
'Drunk with happiness'
“The child was conceived in the middle of June last year, when Maja visited Nebojsa in The Hague. They took the opportunity to spend the day alone in the so called ’love room’ and it happened,” a friend told Press.
“Nebojsa is drunk with happiness. He has been celebrating all day. Such a thing happens once in a lifetime or not at all.”
A tribunal spokeswoman in The Hague said the court did not comment on anything concerning the private lives of detainees and would not say whether any other child has ever been conceived at Scheveningen detention center.
The image of the Hague tribunal in Serb minds — never bright since many believe it is biased against them — was further darkened last week by the sudden death in detention of former strongman Slobodan Milosevic, on trial for genocide.
Milosevic died of a heart attack but reports in Serbia allege he was somehow poisoned by his jailers. He was the second Serb to die in detention in a week, following the suicide of former Croatian Serb rebel leader Milan Babic.
