The wife of toppled Yugoslav president Mr Slobodan Milosevic has branded the Hague tribunal the "gestapo" of the 20th century and blamed British Foreign Secretary Mr Robin Cook for an alleged NATO attempt to kill her daughter.
In a rare press appearance, Mrs Mirijana Markovic, the head of the Yugoslav Left party, which shared power with Milosevic's Socialists until the October uprising, said: "The Hague tribunal is the concentration camp and gas chamber of the 20th century."
She said she blamed herself for endangering her children with an open letter to British Foreign secretary Robin Cook after he alleged that they were out of the country during Nato bombing. Days after she had written that they were in Yugoslavia, a NATO missile struck the television station in Belgrade where her daughter Marija had been working.
Ms Markovic's rare appearance was a bid to rally support for her party, which has virtually disintegrated in the last two months, before crucial elections in Serbia next Saturday.
In a rambling interview lasting more than 90 minutes, she said the left coalition of the former regime had "won the elections, but lost power" in the federal poll because the Montenegrin socialists had defected to the anti-Milosevic coalition.
But she said she was optimistic about the future of left-wing forces. Asked about money and property that the family had allegedly hidden away, she said. "My family didn't get rich at all. In general we are a family that doesn't have a feeling for material values."
Her appearance followed a few days after the first television interview by Mr Milosevic, who was re-elected president of the Socialists at a November party conference.
The couple's public interviews come as the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS) coalition, which won a landslide victory in September's election, continued to show massive leads in all opinion polls.
The Strategic Marketing group estimated that DOS will gain three-quarters of the seats in the new Serbian parliament. It is in fact so certain of victory that it has announced that Mr Zoran Djindjic, head of the Democratic Party, will be prime minister and he has already named his cabinet.
"The key issue in these elections is ending the era of Milosevic," said Mr Miljenko Dereta of the non-government group Civic Initiatives. The new republic government will replace a temporary one formed after the October uprising in which each ministry has three ministers.
Mr Milosevic meanwhile is growing increasingly isolated and power is seeping from him. The Socialist party has fractured dramatically, with two rival groups already set up headed by former party officials.
Across Belgrade, posters of the youth resistance movement Otpor cover billboards. The slogan is "Overi" which means "finish the job".