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Zoran Djindjic
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BELGRADE, Wednesday (Beta) --- Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, who was gunned down outside the parliament this afternoon, was born in Bosnia on August 1, 1952 in Bosanski Samac.
He graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade in 1974.
He was jailed by communist leader Josip "Tito" Broz in 1974 for attempting to
organize an independent student union.
On his release he went to West Germany where he worked at a number of universities and social science institutes in Konstanz, Bonn and Frankfurt, where he completed a Ph.D in philosophy.
He was one of the founders of the Democratic Party and in 1990 was elected president of the party's executive. In 1994 he became president of the party.
During this period he was a senior consultant in the Centre for Philosophy and Social Theory in Belgrade and also taught at the Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad.
Djindjic as a member of the Serbian Parliament and the upper house of the Federal Parliament from the beginning of multi-party politics in Yugoslavia.
After heading, together with the leaders of the Serbian Renewal Movement and the Civil Alliance of Serbia, three months of demonstrations in Belgrade in the winter of 1996-97 which resulted in the overturn of fraudulent local election results, he was elected mayor of Belgrade in February, 1997.
He was dumped from the job little more than six months later when the Serbian Renewal Movement, with whom Djindjic's Democratic Party was in coalition, joined the Socialist Party and the Serbian Radical Party to vote against him.
He was given a four month suspended prison service after a legal dispute with then Serbian Prime Minister Mirko Marjanovic in 1996. The Serbian Supreme Court later extended the sentence to seven months, suspended for three years.
In June, 2000, Djindjic undertook the campaign leadership for the DOS coalition, bringing about a win for the coalition's presidential candidate, Vojislav Kostunica.
In the same elections, he again won a seat in the Federal Parliament's Chamber of the Republics.
Djindjic was elected Serbian prime minister on January 25, 2001, after the DOS coalition victory in Serbian parliamentary elections in December, 2000.
US news magazine Time, in September 1999, included Djindjic among fourteen leading European politicians for the Third Millennium.
He was also a winner of the German Bambi Award in 2000, and in 2002 won a Polak Foundation award for his contribution to the development of democracy in Serbia.
He is the author of a number of books including "Subjectivity and Violence" and "Yugoslavia as an Unfinished State" and edited a philosophy journal.
He is survived by his wife Ruzica, daughter Jovana and son Luka.
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