Zoran Đinđić
A leader of the opposition to
Slobodan Milošević during the 1990s, and
Serbia's prime minister after Milošević's fall in October
2000. His murder on
March 12, 2003 made him the first sitting head of government to be assassinated since the Swedish leader
Olof Palme was killed in
1986.
Doctor and Democrat
The son of a
Yugoslav Army officer from the Bosnian town of
Bosanski Šamac, Đinđić was born in
1952 and attended the
University of Belgrade. As a student, he became involved with the
Praxis group, a circle of Marxist intellectuals whose criticism of
Josip Broz Tito's methods eventually came too close to the bone for the ageing dictator. In
1974, he was briefly jailed for attempting to start a student opposition movement with colleagues from
Croatia and
Slovenia; he had previously been expelled from
high school for protesting against constitutional amendments which made Tito
president for life.
Moving to
Germany, where he took a doctorate supervised by the
Frankfurt School philosopher
Jürgen Habermas, he supported himself by establishing businesses importing clothes and machine tools into Yugoslavia. The earnings from his commercial activities enabled him to found the
Democratic Party, or DS, when he returned home in
1989 to lecture in
Novi Sad, the capital of the
Vojvodina.
At the time, the Vojvodina, like
Kosovo, enjoyed a special autonomous status within the republic of Serbia, with its own assembly responsible for local matters and, crucially, its own vote on the complicated
rotating presidency which had adopted Tito's functions since his death in
1980. Đinđić had only been in Novi Sad a few months when Milošević took control of the Vojvodina assembly by surrounding it with thugs and promising to call them off if Vojvodina's leaders resigned in favour of his own placemen.
Although the first Democratic Party collapsed, Đinđić preserved the name for a second coalition of dissidents, many of them writers and intellectuals, who joined the
1996 protests against Milošević's refusal to recognise his own party's defeat in municipal elections across Serbia. After 88 days of marches, which sometimes saw over a hundred thousand people on the streets of
Belgrade, Milošević backed down and Đinđić became the city's first non-Communist mayor since Tito's rise to power during
World War II.
Together At Last
During this period, Đinđić worked in co-operation with the bearded nationalist leader - but no friend of Milošević -
Vuk Drašković in what was known as the
Zajedno (Together) coalition. Zajedno fell apart only six months later, when Drašković joined with the
Serbian Radical Party of ultranationalist
Vojislav Šešelj to vote Đinđić out of office.
During the
NATO bombing of Serbia in the spring of
1999, Đinđić was tipped off that he might be highly placed on Milošević's
hit list and was persuaded to take temporary refuge in Serbia's disgruntled sister republic
Montenegro.
Đinđić had consistently been one of Serbia's most enthusiastically pro-Western politicians, advocating collaboration with the
European Union instead of Milošević's
isolationism. (Still, he had made his own concessions to the nationalist lobby on occasion, once roasting an
ox with the Bosnian Serb president
Radovan Karadžić.)
During a conflict when Milošević was able to mobilise young Belgraders to attend rock concerts on strategic bridges as enthusiastic
human shields, Đinđić's orientation won him few
plaudits at the time.
Nonetheless, he returned to Serbia after the immediate crisis to join 17 other parties in the
DOS coalition, in which his own Democratic Party was among the most prominent. In October
2000, when Milošević adopted his old tactic of refusing to recognise the election victory of his opponent - in this case, the constitutional lawyer
Vojislav Koštunica, who had run against him for president - Đinđić revived the strategy of mass demonstrations, which this time
overthrew the Milošević regime.
In recognition of Đinđić's power within DOS, Koštunica appointed him prime minister of Serbia, but a rivalry soon developed between the two men, not least because Đinđić believed it was imperative for Yugoslavia to comply with demands for indicted war criminals to be extradited to the
Hague Tribunal.
Koštunica, or so Đinđić believed, was far from co-operative in helping to secure the extradition of Milošević himself, despite American warnings that a $1.25 billion foreign aid package would be at stake if Milošević did not make the trip to
the Netherlands. On
June 28, 2001 - which happened to be the Serbian national day
Vidovdan - Đinđić forced the issue by overruling a
Constitutional Court decision forbidding such extraditions. Koštunica swiftly departed from the ruling coalition, accusing Đinđić of carrying out a '
limited coup'.
The Red Berets
The controversy over war criminals had already provided Đinđić, in April
2001, with perhaps the most fraught days of his premiership, when the
special forces unit known as the
Red Berets staged a display of strength and brought its tanks to the left bank of the
Sava River, opposite government buildings on the right. The Berets' commander,
Dušan Marčić, had been angered after five of his men had been tricked into arresting two low-grade indictees and not informed that they were destined for The Hague.
Marčić's reticence was understandable, perhaps: the Berets were suspected of having carried out several political assassinations for Milošević before seamlessly changing their spots when Koštunica came to power. Moreover, they had formed a paramilitary unit active, like those belonging to the ultranationalist
Vojislav Šešelj and the warlord
Arkan, in
ethnic cleansing operations in Croatia and Bosnia.
Nonetheless, the so-called
October Revolution might well have been unsuccessful if not for the Red Berets' refusal to support Milošević at the
eleventh hour. According to rumours, they had only stood down because their commander at the time,
Milorad Luković, who owed his nickname of
Legija to his service in the
French Foreign Legion, had made some kind of pact with Đinđić. Legija, too, led the unit that arrested Milošević at his home in the rich Belgrade suburb of
Dedinje, although before beginning his special forces career he had belonged to Arkan's paramilitaries, the
Tigers.
After his replacement by Marčić, Legija had turned to - or resumed - a career in
organised crime, endemic in Serbia since the economic collapse of the Milošević years turned
sanction busting and
tobacco smuggling into a national
get rich quick scheme. He reportedly took over as head of the
Zemun gang, named after the nearby city where it was based.
Gangs of Belgrade
In late
2002, Đinđić had announced a crackdown on the Serbian mafia, leading to speculation that his assassins were connected to the Zemun gang. An earlier attempt on his life the previous month had been carried out by
Dejan Milenković, another alleged Zemun man, who drove his lorry into the middle of the prime ministerial
motorcade. The same method, curiously, had been employed by persons unknown against Vuk Drašković in 1999.
In the light of Serbians' rumours about Đinđić, however, it might be premature to remember him as the Balkans' answer to
Eliot Ness. Đinđić was popularly supposed to have had his own
gangland connections, not least because of his supposed agreements with the Red Berets. One theory current after his death was that he had recently dropped Zemun and instead began to favour the
Surčin gang, with whom Zemun were in
active conflict.
The previous few months had also seen Đinđić under pressure to find and extradite the Bosnian Serb general
Ratko Mladić, one of The Hague's
most wanted men at large. While fearing a nationalist backlash if he turned Mladić over - assuming, of course, that he even knew where to find the general - Đinđić attempted to placate the tribunal by delivering the former Serbian president
Milan Milutinović.
Although Đinđić's struggle with Koštunica might have appeared over when the new federation agreement between Serbia and Montenegro robbed Koštunica of his job, the two remained at loggerheads over the Mladić case and Đinđić could not count on a stable parliamentary majority. In an attempt to encroach on Koštunica's nationalist ground, he had associated himself with the building of Belgrade's grand new
Church of Saint Sava, and asked
NATO to allow Serbian police back into Kosovo.
On
March 12, 2003, Đinđić was shot in the back and stomach outside the
Military Medical Academy, dying of his injuries an hour later: two
sniper rifles were discovered on the roof of a building opposite. The parliamentary speaker
Nataša Mičić, only serving as Serbian president because three elections had failed to produce a high enough turnout, immediately announced a
state of emergency, which would last until the assassins were found.
Government officials immediately blamed the killing on the Zemun gang, and forty of its supposed 200 members had been arrested the next day, although Legija himself remained at large. Among those interrogated were the founder of the Red Berets, Milošević's old associate
Frenki Simatović, and the
turbofolk star
Ceca, suspected of having sheltered Legija in the run-up to the murder.
Several hundred Belgraders turned the site of Đinđić's murder into an impromptu
shrine, bedecked with candles and flowers like the gates of
Kensington Palace, and a
book of condolence was opened for the premier. His immediate successor was his deputy prime minister
Nebojša Čović, who had previously mediated a
modus vivendi in Kosovo. On his own, however, Čović seemed unlikely to be able to fill the
power vacuum Đinđić left behind, or to dismantle the many-tentacled Serbian mafia.