By Daniel Simpson
The New York Times
BELGRADE, Serbia, March 12
A sniper today shot and killed the Serbian prime minister, Zoran Djindjic, a reformer who helped overthrow Slobodan Milosevic and send him to face trial on charges of orchestrating genocide in the Balkans.
Within hours, Serbian government officials said they believed the killing was carried out by a notorious Belgrade underworld group accused of dozens of other murders and kidnappings. The leader of that group is a former special police commander, Milorad Lukovic, whose support helped Mr. Djindjic oust Mr. Milosevic in October 2000.
Officials said Mr. Djindjic had been killed because he had been preparing to arrest Mr. Lukovic and his associates, some of whom are suspected of committing war crimes.
The intense pressure on Mr. Djindjic by Western governments to arrest war crimes suspects, particularly Gen. Ratko Mladic, had forced him to confront holdovers from the Milosevic era, officials said. Mr. Lukovic had been a backer of the ousted president before switching sides.
The killing of Mr. Djindjic, 50, who was shot in the parking lot outside his office and had many political enemies, carried echoes in its portent for the Balkans of the June 1914 assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Today’s death leaves Serbia, a struggling country at the center of a conflict-ridden region ravaged by a decade of war, with neither a prime minister nor an elected president.
”The assassination portends a dark period for Serbia and the region,” said Brenda Pearson, a specialist on Balkan affairs at the Washington-based Public International Law and Policy Group. ”This period will see a resurgence of nationalism that was never repudiated by much of the Serbian establishment and continues to be allied with the underworld.”
