Djindjic assassinated. Macedonia trip cancelled.
It’s really awful.
I last met Djindjic at a conference we were both speaking at in Brussels in October last year. By some quirk of the organisers we were put sitting next to each other, and I remember joking with him about the boring speeches made by the Eurocrats present, and speculating about how much Coca-Cola is drunk in the Balkans (Coca-Cola had sponsored the conference). He was a funny, smart, devious guy and Serbia has suffered a huge loss.
I had just been editing a report on the internal situation in Serbia when the news came through. It is no joy that the draft basically predicted that there would be more assassination attempts on Djindjic from the combined forces of the Yugoslav military, organised crime and indicted war criminals (there had already been an attempt at the end of last month). I’d much rather it was wrong and Djindjic still alive.