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Oliver Ivanovic, Kosovo Serb politician – obituary
Oliver Ivanovic, who has been killed in a drive-by shooting aged 64, was the first senior Kosovo Serb official tried by the EU’s Rule of Law Mission (Eulex) in Kosovo; in 2016 he was sentenced to nine years in jail for war crimes, but the sentence was annulled last year by the Appeals Court in Pristina, which ordered a new trial.
Despite the question marks over his role in Kosovo’s war of independence, it says much about the tense situation that still prevails that Ivanovic was regarded as a democrat and a moderate. He had been one of the chief Kosovo Serb negotiators with Nato, EU and UN officials based in Kosovo after the war.
Ivanovic was born on April 1 1953 in a village in western Kosovo, at the time part of Yugoslavia, into an academic family. His father was a history professor, his mother a professor of Serbian language and literature.
The cosmopolitan education, including a knowledge of French, which his parents gave him was unusual in provincial Kosovo but would serve him well as an interlocutor with the French contingent of Nato when it occupied the town.
Ivanovic enrolled in the Zagreb Military Academy to train as a pilot, but left after being diagnosed with a congenital eyesight problem. He then studied engineering and economics at the University of Pristina. Before Kosovo’s 1998-99 war, he had been a manager at the Trepca mines in the northern town of Mitrovica, where he lived.
During the conflict, which began when ethnic Albanians rebelled against Belgrade, prompting a brutal crackdown, Ivanovic became a leader of a paramilitary police unit and in June 1999 was appointed founding president of the Serbian National Council of North Kosovo and Metohija.
He held the post until 2001, after which he became a member of the Coordination Centre for Kosovo and Metohija.
After the November 2001 parliamentary elections, he was appointed a minister in the Assembly of Kosovo. As a member of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) he was a leader of the Serb List for Kosovo and Metohija in the parliamentary elections in October 2004.
Kosovo, the majority of whose inhabitants are ethnic Albanians, declared independence from Serbia in 2008, and was subsequently recognised by more than 100 countries, including the US and most EU states. However, Serbia and the 40,000 or so Kosovo Serbs living in the north refused recognition.
Between 2008 and 2012 Ivanovic was State Secretary of the Ministry for Kosovo and Metohija in the Government of Serbia and a member of the Coordinating Centre for Kosovo and Metohija. In 2009 he launched a new SDP Civic Initiative party, of which he served as president, but in 2013 he narrowly lost to a hardline Kosovo Serb in an election to be mayor of the Serb part of Mitrovica.
Ivanovic was arrested in January 2014 and in 2016 was found guilty of encouraging the killing of ethnic Albanians by Serb paramilitary forces. The Eulex tribunal ruled that he had known that “an operation of expulsions and killings of [ethnic] Albanians was under way” in Mitrovica in 1999 amid Nato bombing and had “encouraged paramilitaries to commit this crime”. Ivanovic insisted he was innocent and claimed the allegations were politically motivated.
In the meantime, Kosovo and Serbia had agreed to participate in EU-sponsored negotiations aimed at overcoming their differences, as part of which Serbia allowed its minority in four northern municipalities to vote in Kosovo elections despite rejecting its secession.
After his release from prison, Ivanovic’s party ran candidates in local elections in 2017. In the event the Serb List of Serbian parties won in all Serb-majority municipalities.
Ivanovic had been subject to death threats before. In 2005 a bomb detonated under his official car and last year another car was set on fire. He died of wounds sustained after he was shot while entering his office in North Mitrovica.
He and his wife Milena had three sons.
Oliver Ivanovic, born April 1 1953, died January 16 2018