Dejan Anastasijevic (1962-2019)

Dejan Anastasijevic (1962-2019) was a Serbian investigative journalist and writer who freelanced for The Time Magazine and The Guardian amongst others. He fled Belgrade due to serious threats to his and his family’s lives and became Brussel’s first ICORN Guest Writer between 2008 and 2010.

In 1998, Anastasijevic’s articles on the violence against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo put him in direct conflict with the Milosevic regime. In April 1999, during the NATO bombardments and the subsequent suppression of press freedom, he fled to Vienna where he worked for Time until 2002.

Anastasijevic returned to Belgrade to witness the Milosevic’s downfall and was the first Serbian journalist to testify against the former president at International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague.

Dejan Anastasijevic’s later work primarily focused on organised crime and insecurity in Serbia and, most notably, his acclaimed book Out of War (London, 2000) detailing Serbian opposition. In 2008, he won the Oxfam/PEN prize for journalism.

After a long illness, Dejan Anastasijevic passed away in Belgrade in April 2019.