Dobrica Ćosić

Early life and career

Ćosić was born as Dobrosav Ćosić in 1921 in the village of Velika Drenova near Trstenik, then in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Some sources have incorrectly stated his birthdate as 4 January 1922.

Before the Second World War he was able to attend vocational agriculture school in Aleksandrovac. He joined the communist youth organization in Negotin in 1939. When the Second World War reached Yugoslavia in 1941, he joined the communist partisans. After the liberation of Belgrade in October 1944, he remained active in communist leadership positions, including work in the Serbian republican Agitation and Propaganda commission and then as a people's representative from his home region. In the early 1950s, he visited the Goli otok concentration camp, where the Yugoslav authorities imprisoned political opponents of the Communist Party. Ćosić maintained that he did so in order to better understand the Stalinist mind. In 1956 he found himself in Budapest during the Hungarian revolt.

He came for the meeting of the editors of literary magazines in socialist countries on the day when the revolution started and remained there until October 31 when he was transported back to Belgrade on a plane that brought in Yugoslav Red Cross help. It remains unclear whether this was purely a coincidence or he was sent there as a Yugoslav secret agent. Nevertheless, he even held political speeches in favor of a revolution in Budapest and upon his return he wrote a detailed report on the matter which, by some opinions, greatly affected and shaped firm official Yugoslav view on the whole situation. Parts of his memories and thoughts on the circumstances later will be published under the name Seven days in Budapest. In 1961, he joined Marshal Tito on a 72-day tour by presidential yacht (the Galeb) to visit eight African non-aligned countries. The trip aboard the Galeb highlighted the close, affirmative relationship that Ćosić had with the administration until the early 1960s.

In opposition

Until the early 1960s, Ćosić was devoted to Tito and Tito's vision of a harmonious Yugoslavia. Between 1961 and 1962, Ćosić got involved in a lengthy polemic with the Slovenian intellectual Dušan Pirjevec regarding the relationship between autonomy, nationalism and centralism in Yugoslavia.

Pirjevec voiced the opinions of the Communist Party of Slovenia which supported a more de-centralized development of Yugoslavia with respect for local autonomies, while Ćosić argued for a stronger role of the Federal authorities, warning against the rise of peripheral nationalisms. The polemic, which was the first public and open confrontation of different visions within the Yugoslav Communist Party after World War II, ended with Tito's support of Ćosić's arguments. Nevertheless, actual political measures undertaken after 1962 actually followed the positions voiced by Pirjevec and the Slovenian Communist leadership.

As the government gradually decentralised administration of Yugoslavia after 1963, Ćosić grew convinced that the Serbian population of the state was imperilled. In May 1968, he gave a celebrated speech to the Fourteenth Plenum of the Central Committee of the Serbian League of Communists, in which he condemned then-current nationalities policy in Yugoslavia. He was especially upset at the regime's inclination to grant greater autonomy to Kosovo and Vojvodina. Thereafter he acted as a dissident. In the 1980s, following the death of Tito, Ćosić helped organize and lead a movement whose original goal was to gain equality for Serbia in the Yugoslav federation, but which rapidly became intense and aggressive. He was especially enthusiastic in his advocacy of the rights of the Serb and Montenegrin populations of Kosovo.

Ćosić was a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and is considered by many to have been its most influential member. While Ćosić has been credited with writing the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, which appeared in unfinished fashion in the Serbian public in 1986, he in fact was not responsible for its writing. In 1989 he endorsed the leadership of Slobodan Milošević, and two years later he helped raise Radovan Karadžić to the leadership of the Bosnian Serbs. When war broke out in 1991, he supported the Serbian effort.

During and after the Yugoslav wars

In 1992, he became the president of Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which consisted of Serbia and Montenegro. On Eastern Orthodox Christmas Eve of January 1993, Ćosić appeared on Serbian television to warn of demands for “national capitulation” from the West. "If we don't accept, we are going to be put in a concentration camp and face an attack by the most powerful armies of the world". These outside forces, he said, are determined to subordinate "the Serbian people to Muslim hegemony." Later that year Ćosić turned against Milošević, and was removed from his position for that reason.

In 2000, Ćosić publicly joined Otpor!, an underground anti-Milošević organization. In 2010, he expressed support for the Bosnian Serb Army under the command of Ratko Mladić during the Bosnian War.

In 2011, an internet hoax led to state-run Serbian television announcing wrongly that Ćosić had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. That honour had in fact gone to Tomas Tranströmer.

Ćosić and Chomsky

In 2006, Ćosić received support for his proposal for a partition of Kosovo by Noam Chomsky. In a Serbian television interview, Chomsky was asked what the best solution for Kosovo's final status is. He responded:

My feeling has been for a long time that the only realistic solution is one that in fact was offered by the President of Serbia [i.e. Dobrica Cosić, then President of Yugoslavia] I think back round 1993, namely some kind of partition, with the Serbian, by now very few Serbs left but the, what were the Serbian areas being part of Serbia and the rest be what they called "independent" which means it'll join Albania. I just don't see…I didn't see any other feasible solution ten years ago.

Death

Dobrica Ćosić died on 18 May 2014 in his home near Belgrade. He was 92 years old.

Literary works

Ćosić was a prolific writer who twice won the prestigious NIN award for literature.

On Ćosić