Belgrade, March 13 (Reuters): “Sleep well, my darling. When I wake up in the morning I will call you,” Slobodan Milosevic told his wife last Friday evening.

They were his last words to the childhood sweetheart to whom he was devoted all his life.

“We usually speak in the evening at around 8.30 pm, before he is locked up in his cell,” Milosevic’s widow Mirjana Markovic told the Belgrade daily Vecernje Novosti.

“He called me as usual around eight,” she told the paper and recounted his parting goodnight.

The bonds between “Mira and Sloba” were legendary in the top echelons of crumbling Yugoslavia. He doted on her. They addressed each other in baby-talk endearments in front of his political minions.

Mira visited Slobodan in detention regularly after he was extradited to The Hague in 2001She last saw her husband nearly three years ago.