Veteran Serbian Journalist Dejan Anastasijevic Passes Away

One of the most respected journalists in Serbia, Dejan Anastasijevic, a longtime correspondent for Time magazine, Vreme, Tanjug, B92, the BBC and many others, has died in Belgrade after a long illness.

Born in 1962, Anastasijevic reported from the wars in the former Yugoslavia and wrote extensively about war crimes, earning the wrath of the Serbian authorities at the time.

His reports on Serbian atrocities in Kosovo in 1998 resulted in criminal charges being filed against him, which prompted him to move to Vienna for some years, where he worked for the Central and East European Bureau of Time magazine.

After returning to Belgrade when the charges had been dropped and the regime had changed, he became the first Serbian journalist to testify against the now ousted former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic at the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia, ICTY, in 2002.

His fearlessness about naming the perpetrators of atrocities earned him many enemies. In 2007, he was the victim of a failed assassination attempt when unknown people placed two bombs on the window of his home.

He suspected that the ultra-nationalist Serbian Radical Party led by Vojislav Seselj and the former State Security chief Jovica Stanisic were behind the attack because of his many articles on war crimes and his testimony before the ICTY.

Anastasijevic won many national and international journalistic awards and fellowships, including the Nieman Fellowship for Journalists at Harvard University in 2002. He won the Oxfam/PEN prize for journalism in 2008.

He also wrote a number of acclaimed books, including Out of Time, published in London in 2000, on the Serbian opposition.

Besides his many other journalistic engagements over...