The two sniper bullets that killed Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic at lunchtime in Belgrade on Wednesday March 12 cut down a politician who had just begun to exercise power after a couple of decades of opposition, jail, exile and power struggles.
His murder, and the boldness with which it was executed, in broad daylight outside his office in the centre of Belgrade, raises the question: who is really running Serbia?
It is only two weeks since Djindjic narrowly survived an earlier attempt on his life when a well-known Belgrade gangster tried to drive a lorry into his convoy on the motorway to Belgrade airport. Again, in broad daylight. The arrested gangster was released by a Belgrade court after four days, and has disappeared.
That Djindjic should be killed within a fortnight of the road crash shows extremely lax security arrangements, as well as the impunity with which war criminals and Mafiosi operate in the Serbian capital.
For months Serbian commentators and Western diplomats in Belgrade have been talking darkly about the ”capture of the state” by an alliance from the security services and the underworld. In the Serbia bequeathed to Djindjic by Slobodan Milosevic it is often difficult to tell where state security operations end and gangsterism begins.
Djindjic himself walked the fine line between fighting and coopting the Mafia leaders. His government has a poor reputation for unsavoury profiteering at the cost of delayed reforms. Its performance has given democracy a bad name in Serbia.
Just when it seemed he was beginning to move against the sinister power-brokers, they appear to have got him first.
Djindjic brushed off the murder attempt a fortnight ago, saying it was a ”huge delusion if someone thinks the law and the reforms can be stopped by eliminating me”.
He had just appointed a new chief investigator to concentrate on rooting out organised crime. But Jovan Prijic is said to have been the last choice for a job turned down by a host of other nominees.
Djindjic led the uprising on the streets of Belgrade that deposed Milosevic in October 2000.
He then proceeded to fight the president of Yugoslavia, Vojislav Kostunica, throughout the two years of his premiership, a battle that paralysed government and disillusioned Serbs with democracy.
Kostunica bowed out last month, temporarily at least, when Yugoslavia was dissolved, leaving Djindjic in control and able at last to get down to the business of reforming and democratising a country struggling with Milosevic’s legacy of crime and lawlessness.
He was under strong United States and European Union pressure to clean up the government, start arresting indicted war criminals and close down the criminal channels that make Serbia a haven for people-traffickers, the sex trade, drugs and violence.
Most of the thugs controlling organised crime are veterans of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, in which they served the Milosevic regime as paramilitary leaders and ethnic cleansers, committing atrocities in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.
With the wars over, they moved into smuggling and crime, making fortunes from the privatisation of state enterprises and forming alliances with the political elite and the security services.
Djindjic took the risky decision, vehemently opposed by Kostunica, to turn Milosevic over to The Hague tribunal in 2001 to be tried for genocide. That apart, he did not do much to arrest the war criminals and gangsters, not least because he owed his premiership to some of the thugs who served the old regime and then switched sides.
In October 2000 when Milosevic was deposed, the real surprise was that the ”revolution” was so bloodless.
But Milosevic went without a fight because Djindjic persuaded some of his henchmen to change sides. In consequence, the army and the paramilitary police did not turn their guns on the demonstrators on the streets.
Foremost among the security service officials who sealed the victory of the anti-Milosevic forces was the feared paramilitary boss known as ”Legija”, the former French foreign legionnaire Milorad Lukovic, who headed Milosevic’s Red Berets, the special operations unit of the Interior Ministry that served as shock troops in the wars and carried out repeated atrocities.
Belgrade has been buzzing with rumours that he has been secretly indicted with war crimes by The Hague. Western diplomats in Belgrade describe him as one of the most powerful men in Serbia. Djindjic and Legija publicly praised one another during the revolution, and Legija helped Djindjic get Milosevic arrested.
In recent months the Belgrade media have been reporting a feud between Legija and another underworld boss, known as Buha. The unusual public slanging match suggested that attempts were being made to curb the powers of the gangsters. Indeed, the government was under intense Western, particularly US, pressure to investigate and arrest the Mafia leaders.
But the prompt release of the lorry driver and Wednesday’s shooting show how powerful the bosses are.
There is no shortage of suspects for the assassination, for Djindjic had plenty of enemies and murder is a not uncommon way of settling political battles in Belgrade.
The Milosevic camp nursed intense grudges against Djindjic, who was being told by the US to get General Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb commander and indicted war criminal, said to be protected in Serbia by military colleagues, on an aircraft to The Hague.
Djindjic’s death leaves a vacuum in political power in Belgrade and it is not clear who will fill it. — Â