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NEWS & LETTERS, APRIL 2003
Our Life and Times by Kevin A. Barry
Murder of Serbian prime minister
The unfinished character of Serbia's efforts to move
beyond its genocidal past became all too apparent with the March 12
assassination of Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic. Shot in the back right outside
his office by a sniper from a hundred yards away, Djindjic's fate was similar to
those of many of the innocent citizens of Sarajevo during the 1992-1995 siege of
that multiethnic city by Serbian neo-fascists. The similarities do not end there, for the prime
suspects today are former members of the Red Berets, an elite police unit under
Milosevic, many of whose members committed genocide in Bosnia while serving
under the notorious Arkan. However, Djindjic himself had ties to the Red Berets,
who finally broke from Milosevic, helping the people's uprising of October 2000
that allowed Djindjic and other more moderate Serbian nationalists to claim an
electoral victory that Milosevic had blatantly stolen. While Djindjic extradited Milosevic and a few other key
leaders to the Balkan War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, the two most prominent
remaining perpetrators of the Bosnian genocide, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko
Mladic, remain at large. However, under intense international pressure, Djindjic
had shown some signs just before his death of moving against some of these
figures, including members of the Red Berets themselves. The latter remained
heavily involved in organized crime under Djindjic's government. Djindjic enjoyed only limited popularity among the
people of Serbia. Legitimately, there was opposition to his "free
market" economic policies. More ominously, there was resentment of his
extradition of Milosevic and of the possibility of the same for Mladic and
Karadzic, who remain extremely popular among Serbs. Nonetheless, in a vast outpouring not seen since the death of Marshal Jozef Broz Tito in 1980, hundreds of thousands lined the streets to mourn Djindjic's brutal death. This represented a continuing desire by the Serbian people to move beyond the neo-fascist nationalism of the Milosevic era. |
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