Stojan Cerović

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Stojan Cerović (1949 – 2005) was a Serbian journalist, born in Podgorica, Montenegro.

Stojan Cerovic, who has died, aged 56, from complications following a heart transplant, was one of Serbia's finest and most widely respected journalists. During the early 1990s, he distinguished himself as a columnist on the Belgrade weekly news magazine he co-founded, Vreme (Time), developing into the most articulate and perceptive critic of the then Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic's warmongering and abuse of power.

Stojan's death has stunned Belgrade, where he was admired by a broad spectrum of political opinion, despite his trenchant and unwavering criticism of Serbian nationalism.

Just as many Scots succeed in the London newspaper world, so do journalists from Serbia's tiny sister republic, Montenegro - like Stojan - often attain prominent positions in Serbia's media landscape. He was born and spent his childhood in the Montenegrin capital, Podgorica, before moving to the Yugoslav capital to study psychology at Belgrade University. He stayed on as a junior lecturer, and also taught at the University of Nis, before graduating as a clinical psychologist in the mid-1980s.

At the same time, he began engaging in dissident politics in the Yugoslavia that followed the death of Marshal Tito in 1980, and became closely associated with the Helsinki human rights committee. Although Yugoslavia enjoyed the reputation of being more liberal than other east European countries, its political police, the Udba, had one of the most ruthless records of all. Though Stojan never ran into any serious trouble with them, it still required considerable bravery to speak out.

It became even riskier to do so in the mid-1980s, when Stojan changed his profession and went to work as the Belgrade correspondent of Radio France International (RFI) - he was fluent in both French and English. This was during the rise of Milosevic, when a large number of intellectuals embraced Serbian nationalism, laying the ground for Milosevic's assault on power. Speaking out against this wave of irrational politics was a dangerous business, but Stojan was keen to reach a broader audience than RFI afforded him.

He got the opportunity in 1990, when the human rights lawyer Srdja Popovic decided to finance a liberal magazine to counter the nationalist rantings which had come to pass for journalism in large parts of the official Yugoslav press. Stojan leapt at the chance to be a co-founder of the project, and soon Vreme became a beacon for both the intellectual and political opposition in Serbia.

The magazine's chaotic offices in the centre of Belgrade were also a magnet for western correspondents covering the deepening crisis in Yugoslavia, as the journalistic team included some gifted investigative writers who were also fluent English speakers, like Milos Vasic and Dejan Anastasijevic.

From the first, Stojan distinguished himself with thoughtful commentaries which came to symbolise the rational intellectual response to Milosevic's manipulative policies.

"He was both a voice of reason and the provider of surgical analysis of Milosevic's authoritarian regime," said Ivan Vejvoda, a Belgrade political scientist and direc tor of the Balkan Trust for Democracy, adding that Stojan "was able to pinpoint the numerous inconsistencies between rhetoric and action during the war years. Few people can have irritated Milosevic more than Stojan."

Soon after starting work as a columnist, Stojan became co-founder and president of the Belgrade Centre for Anti-War Action, the original and most important non-governmental organisation to be established in Serbia in response to the war. It was regularly pilloried as treacherous in the Milosevic media, but despite numerous threats and intimidation, Stojan continued writing and travelling around the world to testify that Serbia could boast a vibrant and fearless opposition to Milosevic and his policies.

I remember Stojan as one of the most gentle and decent people in the Balkans, a man driven by a deep humanity and someone who avoided the mudslinging that many of his colleagues indulged in during the war. We often appeared on panels together in Europe and the United States, where he was always warmly received.

The winner of several journalist awards at home and abroad, he was awarded a Nieman Foundation scholarship to study at Harvard University for a year in 1993; he was appointed senior researcher at the US Institute for Peace in 2000. He also lectured at the Central European University in Budapest, which was established by George Soros after the fall of the Berlin wall.

Charles Simic, the American poet of Serbian origin, described Stojan's most recent collection of essays, Exit From History (2004), as the "diary of a rational man who, through no fault of his own, has been living locked up in a madhouse".

Stojan was separated from his wife Tinda, and is survived by two sons and a daughter.

· Stojan Cerovic, journalist, born July 15 1949; died March 21 2005