Regards, Ivan
Posted on 03/12/2003 3:32:22 PM PST by MadIvan
FOR the first time in months, the Monument Café had put tables outdoors in the sun for the gathering lunch crowd. Waiters doled out menus and mineral water. No one noticed when, at 12.35pm, the barrel of a high-powered rifle peeked out from the second-floor window of a dingy, half-empty building next door.
Less than 200 metres away, across an empty park, Zoran Djindjic, the Serbian Prime Minister, and his security men left a side door of the government headquarters on Nemanjina Boulevard. One of the café’s waiters heard two or three soft cracks, but hardly anyone else noticed.
The first bullet hit Dr Djindjic in the chest, passing straight through his aorta. The second hit him in the abdomen. Within minutes he was dead.
Back at the café, customers and staff carried on eating, blissfully unaware of the carnage and the political chaos it would unleash. Four burly policemen, none in uniform, barged into the café, flashed their badges, and said that no one could leave. They checked everyone’s identification, scribbling names and phone numbers in notebooks. The customers thought that it was a tax police raid, or a search for an indicted war criminal. Neither would be a surprise in Belgrade.
Soon scores of uniformed officers, some with machineguns, had arrived, pointing at rooftops and open windows and hustling into every nearby building. I tried to use my phone, but the network was jammed. Clearly, something serious had happened.
A shaven-headed policeman then told us that Dr Djindjic had been shot — the first European Prime Minister to be assassinated since Sweden’s Olof Palme in 1986.
It was obvious from watching his colleagues where the sniper had fired from. The little grey building at 14 Admirala Gerrata Street had, I thought, become Serbia’s Texas Schoolbook Depository, Lee Harvey Oswald’s lair: an expert marksman had cut down the country’s leader in his prime.
With America poised for war against Iraq, another parallel sprang to mind: the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 that triggered the First World War.
Eventually we were allowed to leave the café. The traffic was blocked. Tram cars stood frozen in a long line. A crowd had gathered on Nemanjina Boulevard, directly across from where Dr Djindjic had fallen.
By now the Government had called a state of emergency. On the street, Serbs cursing the sad, violent state of their country.
Regards, Ivan
Soft cracks? From a hi-powered rifle next door??
I hate to be cruel, but there is a *reason* that Serbia, which was bombed by France/Germany/U.S./UK in 1999 without UN approval, is not complaining to every Western reporter with a pen, a laptop, or a TV camera about the "double-standard" for bombing Iraq today, and more than likely that reason died with the assassins' bullets today...
Ergo, almost certainly the hit was performed by those angered by the silent double-standard (i.e. Milosovic's loyalists).
You mean, is France and/or Germany trying to insure that their little game plays out the way that they want it?
Beyond my scope.
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