Zoran Djindjic

Zoran Djindjic organised the movement that removed Slobodan Milosevic, became Serbia's prime minister, sent him to The Hague, and was shot dead outside a government building fourteen months later. He was a philosopher by training, took a doctorate under Jurgen Habermas in Germany, and had been convicted at twenty-two of attempting to found an independent student organisation in Tito's Yugoslavia. He co-founded the Democratic Party in 1989 and spent the 1990s in an opposition that Milosevic divided repeatedly; his own record in that decade includes a period of nationalist positioning he was afterwards criticised for. The 2000 election was the turn: he built the eighteen-party coalition that ran Vojislav Kostunica as a candidate Milosevic could not discredit, and when the results were annulled he organised the general strike and the march on Belgrade that ended the regime. As prime minister he pushed privatisation, courted foreign investment, and in June 2001 handed Milosevic to the tribunal over the objections of his own president and against a constitutional court ruling, which brought a suspended aid package and permanent enemies. Those enemies were specific: the Zemun criminal clan and the Red Berets, the state security special operations unit that had killed Ivan Stambolic and had mutinied against him in 2001. He was hit by a sniper at Belgrade on 12 March 2003. Forty-five people were convicted; the unit was disbanded, and the emergency that followed detained thousands. He had said the war against organised crime would be won by whoever survived it. Around half a million people attended his funeral in Belgrade. Serbia has held an annual commemoration since. His daughter and son were small children when he died.

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