Bloody history strewn with bodies of leaders

Few Serb leaders have died peacefully in their beds – a legacy of the tradition of violent regime change that has plagued Serbia since it was freed from Turkish rule in the 1800s.

The fate of the first ruler of modern Serbia, Karadjordje Petrovic, was telling. Betrayed by his rival, Milos Obrenovic, who wanted to rule, he was decapitated in 1817. Dynastic rivalry continued to plague Serbia, for in 1868 Obrenovic's son and successor, Mihajlo, was assassinated in Belgrade.

The fate of the last Obrenovic monarch, Aleksandar, was the most shocking of all. Hated for his marriage to a former lady-in-waiting, pro-Karadjordjevic guardsmen broke into the palace in 1903 and hacked to death the king and queen.

The grisly slaughter returned the exiled Karadjordjevics to power, but they were haunted by violence. In 1934 King Aleksandar Karadjordjevic was assassinated in Marseilles, victim of a joint conspiracy of Croatian and Macedonian terrorists.

The overthrow of the monarchy in 1945 ended the bloody rivalry between the Obrenovic and Karadjordjevic houses and for 35 years Yugoslavia settled down under Josip Tito. But with Tito's death, and the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Serbian politics resumed their old, unstable course.

Slobodan Milosevic escaped a violent death in 2000 but his predecessor, Ivan Stambolic, was not so fortunate. The ex-president "disappeared" while jogging in August 2000. He was never seen again. With Zoran Djindjic's brutal death, another Serb leader has made a violent exit – the latest, but sadly, almost certainly not the last such victim, in a country that has yet to discover the secret of peacefully transmitting power.