Dejan Anastasijević

Dejan Anastasijević (1962) is the Brussels correspondent for Tanjug News Service. Until 2012, he was a senior investigative reporter for Belgrade-based VREME weekly, and a free-lance Balkan correspondent for TIME magazine. His reports have also been published in a number of international and regional news media outlets. Anastasijević’s 1998 reports on atrocities against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo led to criminal charges from Milošević’s regime for “spreading disinformation and aiding terrorists” (the charges were dropped in 2001). In April 1999, during the NATO bombing and Milošević’s crackdown on the independent media, Anastasijević fled to Vienna with his family. There he worked at TIME’s Central and Eastern European Bureau until August 2000. He moved back to Belgrade in time to cover Milošević’s downfall and his subsequent transfer to the Hague war crimes tribunal. In October 2002, Anastasijević was the first Serbian journalist to testify against Milošević in The Hague, and in April 2007 he survived an assassination attempt in which two hand grenades were placed on his bedroom window. Police investigation failed to yield any results. Apart from purely journalistic work, Anastasijević has edited “Out of Time” (IWPR London, 2000), an acclaimed book on the Serbian opposition as well as co-authoring several publications on organized crime in the Balkans. He is an alumnus of the 2002 Nieman Fellowship for Journalists at Harvard University, Cambridge, and was the recipient of two national press awards (NUNS and “Dušan Bogavac”) in 2003 as well as the Oxfam/PEN prize for journalism in 2008.