Politician: Two Decades after Djindjic Assassination, Serbia Has Been Set Back by Two Centuries

Zoran Zivkovic (Photo: Beta)

Twenty years after the assassination of Serbian prime minister Zoran Djindjic an absolutely non-democratic system, crime, evil and primitivism reign in Serbia, Zoran Zivkovic, a former prime minister of Serbia and a former leader of the Democratic Party, said on March 12.

Speaking on the 20th anniversary of the assassination, Zivkovic said that “everything Zoran Djidjic fought against together with his associates and citizens, everything that was stopped on Oct. 5, 2000 and changed in the next few years, all that is back again.” “Today we have a lawless state, disregard for the Constitution, and are falling to a level lower than the 1990s. This degree of primitivism, in politics and in the media, did not exist under Slobodan Milosevic,” Zivkovic said in a comment for BETA.

The murder of Djindjic, “the leader of change” left “a deep mark on Serbia.” “A mere year after the assassination reforms were already slower, the transition process became entangled, and the brave moves, plans and goals Zoran had set were already abandoned,” said Zivkovic, who replaced Djindjic as head of government after the assassination.

“Since then we have been witnessing what we could call a ‘Dorian Gray’ policy. Something along the lines: ‘As long as I’m in power, handsome and smart, the state doesn’t matter very much,’” Zivkovic said. He explained that such politics “created conditions for a counter-revolution in 2012, when the same forces defeated on Oct. 5, the same individuals who had pushed Serbia into blood, war and despair in the 1990s, could regain power, slightly changed.”