Some 20,000 Serbians, led by the president of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), Cedomir Jovanovic, walked through the centre of Belgrade on Saturday commemorating the ninth anniversary of the assassination of Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic. Delegations laid wreaths outside the Serbian government headquarters and at Djindjic's grave.
Speaking to reporters outside the government headquarters, Jovanovic said that Serbia today would be a better country had it continued on the path it had been moving along until Djindjic's assassination.
Djindjic was killed in the yard of the government headquarters on March 12, 2003. His funeral was attended by more than 70 foreign state delegations and several hundred thousand people. He was Serbia's first prime minister after the fall of the Slobodan Milosevic regime and the coming into power of the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS) in 2000. During his term in office, the process of democratisation of the Serbian society and radical economic and social reforms started.
Djindjic's government advocated cooperation with the Hague war crimes tribunal and at that time, several indictees of the UN tribunal were arrested, including former Serbian and Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, who was transferred to The Hague on 28 June 2001.
Djindjic was one of the founders of the Democratic Party (DS) and its president from 1994 to his assassination. He was also a veteran of the Serbian opposition and one of the most prominent leaders of the democratic opposition that defeated Milosevic's regime in the September 2000 elections.
In May 2007, the commander of the now defunct Special Operations Unit of the Serbian Interior Ministry, Milorad Ulemek, was sentenced to a 40-year prison term for organising Djindjic's assassination, and his deputy Zvezdan Jovanovic was sentenced to 40 years as the direct perpetrator of the assassination.
The verdicts against Ulemek and Jovanovic were upheld by the Serbian Supreme Court in 2008 and 2009.
