Habermas taught Zoran Đinđić that thinkers must act; he became prime minister
Convicted as a student for trying to organise an independent political movement, Zoran Đinđić was spared prison when Willy Brandt persuaded Yugoslavia to let him go to West Germany. There he earned a philosophy doctorate under Jürgen Habermas, absorbed the lesson that intellectuals must act, and eventually returned to lead Serbia.
Đinđić was born on 1 August 1952 in Bosanski Šamac, where his father was serving as an officer in the Yugoslav People's Army. The family moved with his postings, spending ten years in the Bosnian town of Travnik before settling in Belgrade after his mother took a job there. He attended the Ninth Belgrade Gymnasium then read philosophy at the University of Belgrade, finishing in 1974, the year the communist authorities convicted him for his student organising.
In Germany he completed a PhD at the University of Konstanz in 1979, supervised by Habermas. A fellow Yugoslav student remembered him as brilliant but far from the stereotype of a dry academic, someone who knew how to enjoy life. He mixed with anarchist student circles, attended the Praxis group's summer school on Korčula, and became fluent in German; English he mastered only three months before taking office as prime minister.
Back home in 1979 he taught at the University of Novi Sad, wrote for the Belgrade journal Literary Review and held a Humboldt Foundation fellowship. His essays, which one reader recalled as calm arguments against nationalism at a time of inflammatory rhetoric, marked him as an opponent of Slobodan Milošević. He was one of thirteen people who revived the Democratic Party, becoming its president in 1994, and co-led the opposition through the 1990s. In 1997 he became mayor of Belgrade, the first non-communist to hold the post since the Second World War.
After Milošević was overthrown, Đinđić became prime minister in 2001. His government ratified the European Convention on Human Rights, created institutions to protect civil liberties, helped Serbia and Montenegro join the Council of Europe in 2003, and cooperated with the war crimes tribunal in The Hague. That cooperation provoked an armed mutiny by the Special Operations Unit in November 2001. On 12 March 2003 he was assassinated by Zvezdan Jovanović, a former member of that unit linked to the Zemun criminal clan.
Source: Zoran Đinđić
