Vasilije Krestić

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Vasilije Krestić (Василије Крестић, 1932) is a Serbian historian. His focus is the history of the Serbs of the Habsburg Monarchy. He is a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

In his early career, Krestić wrote about the history of Croatia before and after the Nagodba of 1868, with special reference to the Serbs of Croatia and Hungary. He has written numerous articles on related subjects.

In the mid-1980s, though, Krestić became involved in the politics of opposition to communism in Serbia. He also became a voice of discontent regarding the status of the Serbs of Croatia. He was one of the leading authors of the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, which was a founding document in the creation of the Serbian nationalist movement of the 1980s. Krestić was responsible for the sections that described the Serbs of Croatia as suffering genocide in that Yugoslav republic. He later (1995) published a defense of the Memorandum, with Kosta Mihailović, another of the Memorandum's original authors. Krestić was also active in the defense of Slobodan Milošević before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).