Dobrica Cosic

In memoriam

Author, Politician. He is best known as the first President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and for being a Serbian author, who wrote the novels "Koreni," "Deobe," "Vreme smrti" and "Vreme zla." In his youth, he was politically a Communist. When World War II reached Yugoslavia in 1941, he joined the Partisans and became the political commissar of the Rasina Detachment. Until the early 1960s, Cosic was close with Marshal Tito and was a devoted Titoist. The Yugoslav government at the time began decentralizing and Cosic changed his views from centralist to a more pro-Serb stance. He began being gradually moved out of public office and adopted a dissident role. In the 1980s following the death of Tito, Cosic initiated the Committee for the Defense of Freedom of Thought and Expression and became enthusiastic in defending pro-democratic writers. An influential member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Cosic was widely believed to be the author of the controversial "Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts." The unfinished memorandum was leaked to a Serbian newspaper and published in 1986. The memorandum claimed that Serbs were being persecuted and that changes are needed in Yugoslavia. Although not being the author of it, Cosic went on to endorse the leadership of Slobodan Milosevic in 1989, and two years later he helped raise Radovan Karadzic to the leadership of the Bosnian Serbs. When war broke out in 1991, Cosic supported the Serb side and became the first president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia upon its creation in 1992. He was removed from his post in 1993 for adopting anti-Milosevic stances. In 2000, he publicly joined the anti-Milosevic Otpor resistance and held those views until his passing in May of 2014. Prior to his death, he gave his last interview in which he advocated for a partition of Kosovo continuing his divided legacy.

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