Mysterious Balkan Assassination Threatens Regional Peace
The victim was a man with many enemies. Many Albanians hated Ivanović for his alleged involvement in war crimes in 1999. An EU-established court in 2016 convicted Ivanović for involvement in the deaths of civilians during the Kosovo war, but that was soon thrown out on appeal. At the time of his death, Ivanović was awaiting a new trial.
However, Ivanović was no more popular among Serbian nationalists, who despised his willingness to parley with Prishtina over Kosovo’s final status, with the aim of protecting the country’s dwindling Serbian minority. Eventually, Ivanović accepted political reality—above all, that Kosovo has gone its own way, irrevocably—even if many in Belgrade still have not. In recent years, Ivanović had gotten more death threats from fellow Serbs than from Albanians. For anyone eager to scuttle any chance for rapprochement between Belgrade and Prishtina, Oliver Ivanović offered a tempting target.
For now, the region awaits word of who murdered Oliver Ivanović and why. This is the Balkans, so nobody expects quick justice or that official accounts will be especially truthful. It’s a safe bet that conspiracy theories will proliferate in every possible direction. Worse, any hope for normalization of relations between Belgrade and Prishtina anytime soon died with Ivanović, in a pattern that’s all too predictable in Southeastern Europe.
http://observer.com/2018/01/assassination-of-oliver-ivanovic-threatens-peace-in-balkans/