| Vuk Drašković Вук Драшковић |
|
|---|---|
| Deputy Prime Minister of Yugoslavia | |
| In office 18 January 1999 – 28 April 1999 |
|
| Prime Minister | Momir Bulatović |
| Minister of Foreign Affairs of Serbia and Montenegro | |
| In office 3 March 2004 – 15 May 2007 |
|
| President | Svetozar Marović |
| Prime Minister | Vojislav Koštunica |
| Preceded by | Goran Svilanović |
| Succeeded by | Vuk Jeremić (Minister of Foreign Affairs of Serbia) |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 29 November 1946 Međa, Žitište, Serbia, FPR Yugoslavia |
| Nationality | Serbian |
| Political party | Serbian Renewal Movement |
| Spouse(s) | Danica Drašković |
| Alma mater | LLB of Univ. of Belgrade Fac. of Law |
| Profession | Writer |
| Religion | Serbian Orthodox |
Vuk Drašković (Serbian: Вук Драшковић, pronounced [v̞ûːk drâʃkɔvit͡ɕ]) (born 29 November 1946, Međa, Žitište, Serbia, FPR Yugoslavia), leader of the Serbian Renewal Movement, is a Serbian politician who served as the Deputy Prime Minister of Yugoslavia and the Minister of Foreign Affairs of State Union of Serbia and Montenegro and Serbia.
He graduated from the University of Belgrade's Law School in 1968. From 1969 to 1980 he worked as a journalist in the Yugoslav news agency Tanjug. He was also a member of the Yugoslav Communist Party and worked as the chief of staff of the Yugoslav President Mika Špiljak. Drašković also wrote several novels.
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Born in a small Banat region village to a family of settlers from Herzegovina, Vuk was six months old when his mother Stoja died. His father Vidak remarried and had two more sons - Rodoljub and Dragan; and three daughters - Radmila, Tanja and Ljiljana with Dara Drašković, meaning that young Vuk grew up with five half-siblings. Shortly after Vuk's birth, the entire family went back to Herzegovina where he finished primary school in the village of Slivlje, before secondary school studies in Gacko. On his father's insistence Drašković considered studying medicine in Sarajevo; however, the city was too "uptight and cramped" for his liking, so he went to study law in Belgrade instead.
Between 1969 and 1978, Drašković dabbled in journalism. He first worked for the state newsagency Tanjug as its African correspondent stationed in Nairobi, Kenya, before taking a job as press advisor in the Yugoslav Workers Union Council (SSRNJ). During his time at SSRNJ, Drašković also spent some time as the personal secretary to the organisation's president Mika Špiljak. During the same period his novels The Judge and Knife were published, raising quite a controversy among Yugoslav ruling communist elites. Soon afterwards, due to popular demand, Prayer and Russian Consul were published as well. Because of his controversial literary engagement, Drašković was considered somewhat of a dissident even though he had been a member of the Yugoslav Communist Party since his 4th year of university studies.
Together with Mirko Jović and Vojislav Šešelj, Drašković founded the Serbian National Renewal party (SNO) in 1989. However, the trio soon found themselves at political crossroads and their party disintegrated in three pieces.
In 1990, Drašković founded the Serbian Renewal Movement (Srpski Pokret Obnove, SPO), a democratic nationalist party. They participated in the first post-communist democratic elections, held on 9 December 1990, but finished a distant second amidst the total blackout from the pro-Milošević state media. Following that failure Drašković kept the pressure on Serbian President Slobodan Milošević via street protests, organizing mass demonstrations in Belgrade on 9 March 1991. The police intervened, and clashed with demonstrators with some damage to public buildings resulting in the Yugoslav People's Army having to be brought in.
Following the "Karadjordjevo meeting" with Slobodan Milosevic held on March 30th, 1991, Franjo Tuđman, then President of Croatia, publicly stated in a televised press-conference that during the March 9th events Drašković's associates had phoned his government in order to "seek help in toppling the current Serbian regime ". This was manipulated by Slobodan Milošević and the Serbian media to whip up public sentiment against Drašković . While Draskovic's partly vehemently denied any such contact was made with a Croatian regime, many in Yugoslavia began to fear a sense of a subtle but growing symbiosis between two totalitarian leaders in both Serbia and Croatia.
Drašković focused his moderate right-wing program and rhetoric on Serbian pro-Western shift, anti-communism and romanticized Serbian identity-renewal. His plan was to rapidly transform the biggest and most populous part of Yugoslavia (Serbia) according to Western standards so that the eventual international involvement in solving Yugoslav crisis would turn in Serbian favour and produce a peaceful solution. Those with less understanding of fine details of Yugoslav history, or his ideological opponents, often cite his strong nationalist feelings (attempting rehabilitation of allied Serbian Chetniks, Kingdom of Yugoslavia's legal army during WWII) as contrarian to his insistence on peaceful solution to Yugoslav crisis. His opponents claim Vuk's political engagement at this early stage of his political career is full of inconsistencies and seemingly diametrically opposing views and actions. He insisted that Serbian government should promote radical democratic shift, renew traditional alliances with Western nations as a way to preserve some form of Yugoslav confederation rather than pursue direct confrontation with the Croats. On the other hand, he and his party SPO organized a paramilitary unit called the Serbian Guard led by former criminals such as Đorđe "Giška" Božović and Branislav "Beli" Matić with Božović dying in Croatia in October 1991, while Matić was killed by Milosevic secret police in April 1991. And although Drašković initially claimed this militia was an incitement to Serbian authorities to form a national armed force outside of Yugoslav People's Army (see last quote), he eventually distanced himself from the paramilitary formation altogether.
His rather emotional and poetic rhetoric often brought mostly malicious accusations of extremism.There is a contentious quote from his speech at SPO rally in Novi Pazar during the summer of 1990, in which Drašković said: "Those who, on Serbian land, lift any flag other than a Serbian one, whether it's a Muslim, Albanian, or Croat flag, will be left without the flag and without the hand". Milosevic propaganda immediately took such usage of vividly poetic medieval imagery to be very threatening and menacing, especially considering the fact it was delivered in a town with a large Bosniak population. Drašković's supporters, however claim he was merely pointing out Serbia would not tolerate separatism and partition of its territory. They also say this particular quote should not be viewed outside of context of his entire speech that day, which they say was very much calling for traditional tolerance and peace between Orthodox Serbs and Muslims living in the Sandžak region. It is ironic that Milosevic-controlled Serbian media throughout the 1990's continuously expressed disgust at Vuk for this statement, while heaping praise on Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic despite their involvement in crimes against Muslims in Bosnia.
Drašković's pronounced anti-war views came to the fore in mid to late 1991, particularly in November of that year when he wrote a passionate accusation of the Serbian bloody assault on Vukovar in a Serbian daily Borba. However, during the same period he maintained his focus on comprehensive Serbian anti-communist and pro-Western renewal, and righting anti-Serb taboos that existed in the communist Yugoslavia. While some saw such views as rabidly nationalistic, Vuk's views through interviews, soundbites and op-ed pieces merely reflected the type of care for one's nation's dignity found in any other country of the Western democratic hemisphere. See Quotations. As a final blow to those who accused him of extremism, Vuk in early 1992 called on all citizens of Bosnia to reject nationalism and was the only Serbian political figure to speak about crimes by Serb forces. Always leading the anti-Milošević struggle, Drašković and his wife Danica paid dearly for their activism. In 1993 they were arrested, savagely beaten and thrown into a high-security prison. Only his hunger strike, and the Western world's outrage forced the Serbian regime to set the Draškovićs free.
In 1996 SPO formed the opposition alliance Zajedno ("Together") with the Democratic Party of Zoran Đinđić and the Civic Alliance of Serbia under Vesna Pešić, which achieved major successes in the local elections in November that same year. After hints of holding secret talks with Milosevic, Zoran Đinđić and Vesna Pešić dissolved the coalition when they reneged on the signed coalition document to support Drašković as a joint candidate in the subsequent Presidential elections in the fall of 1997. Drašković's SPO participated on its own at the September 1997 election, boycotted by his former partners despite an array of local electronic media outlets being in opposition hands. The decision by Djindjic and Pesic to boycot 1997 elections would later prove fatal for Serbia, as the subsequent extremist Milosevic/Seselj government pushed Serbia on a collision course with NATO.
In January 1999, SPO, a parliamentary party, was asked to join a coalition with Milošević's Socialist Party of Serbia as tension with US and NATO increased in order to use his influence with Western politicians. In early 1999, Drašković became the deputy prime minister of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. He did so in response to Milošević's appeal for national unity in the face of Albanian uprising in Kosovo and a looming confrontation with NATO.[1] He was sacked by the Prime Minister Momir Bulatović on 28 April 1999.[2]
Unsuccessful attempts at assassinating Drašković took place on 3 October 1999 on the Ibar highway when four of his close associates were murdered, and on 15 June 2000 in Budva. As of 2006[update], Milorad Ulemek is on trial for this murder and those of Đinđić and Ivan Stambolić; Milošević was also being prosecuted for the attempt until his death in the Hague.
In what he himself later termed "a bad political move", Drašković kept his SPO out of the wide anti-Milošević Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS) coalition that formed in 2000, meaning that his candidate in the 24 September 2000 federal presidential elections, Vojislav Mihailović, achieved little success and that SPO also was not successful in the subsequent parliamentary election where the DOS won overwhelmingly. Because of this, Drašković and his party were marginalized over the next three years.
In the fall of 2002, he attempted a comeback as one of the eleven candidates in the (subsequently unsuccessful due to low turnout) Serbian presidential elections. Despite a polished marketing campaign that saw Drašković change his personal appearance and tone down his fiery rhetoric, he ended up with only 4.5% of the total vote, well behind Vojislav Koštunica (31.2%) and Miroljub Labus (27.7%), both of whom moved on to the second-round runoff.
His next chance for political redemption came in late 2003. Fully aware of SPO's, as well as his own, weak political standing after more than 3 years in political oblivion, Drašković entered his party into a pre-election coalition with New Serbia (NS), thus reuniting with old party colleague Velimir Ilić. Joining forces for the 2003 parliamentary election, they achieved limited success, but more importantly managed to get into the coalition that formed the minority government (along with DSS, G17 Plus), providing it with critical parliamentary seats to keep the far-right radicals (SRS) at bay. In the subsequent division of power, Drašković received the high-ranking position of Serbia and Montenegro's foreign minister.
In response to Montenegro's vote for independence, Drašković called for a restoration of Serbia's monarchy: "This is an historic moment for Serbia itself, a beginning which would be based on the historically-proven and victorious pillars of the Serbian state and I am talking about the pillars of a kingdom." After the breakup with Montenegro in June 2006, Drašković served (until May 2007) as the foreign minister of the Republic of Serbia, a successor to the state union of Serbia-Montenegro.
In August 2010, Vuk Drašković argued in favour of changing the Serbian Constitution of 2006 to remove references to Kosovo as a part of Serbia because according to him “Serbia has no national sovereignty over Kosovo whatsoever. All of Serbia knows that Kosovo is not really a province within Serbia, that it is completely beyond the control of the government and the state of Serbia”.[3]
Vuk and his wife, Danica, met in the 1960s as students at the University of Belgrade's Law School, but she was reportedly unresponsive to his clumsy advances. They would run into each other again during 1968 student demonstrations, but this time it was politics that kept them apart. Danica reportedly did not appreciate Vuk's soft stance and no-questions-asked acceptance of Tito's supposed concessions to student demands for democratization. Finally on New Year's Eve, 1974, they ran into each other at a supermarket and Danica invited him to a party at the apartment where she lived with her brother. "I forgot about my fiancée who waited for me to come back from grocery shopping and ended up playing chess the whole night with Danica's brother Veselin Bošković", Vuk would later admit.
Vuk and Danica (née Bošković) married on 10 June 1974, and according to those close to the couple, she became the most important figure in his life, both personally and professionally. She was by his side at all the street protests he later became famous for, and from the very beginning she wielded a lot of power in her husband's political party, SPO. Danica hails from Montenegro, coming from Bijelo Polje.
He speaks English and Russian.
"In Croatia, an Ustaša government has been re-established; armed formations of Serb-killers are being founded. The Ustaša Supreme Leadership has concluded an anti-Serb pact with the Arnauts [archaic Serbian term for Albanians] and Muslim fundamentalists, the de-Serbianized but militant and loud minority in Montenegro, and the Serbophobic staffs around Macedonia, who are openly asking for our territories. The Serbian people are faced with a united hatred, as they were in 1914 and 1941. We must oppose the menacing Evil as soon as possible, immediately. We must not allow ourselves, for the third time in this century, to be overtaken by events. It is our duty to subordinate to the defence of the nation"[4]
"The Ustaša knife is being held to the throat of the Serbian people in the western Serbian Krajinas and only Serbia can and must help them. More than 200,000 Serbs from the Croatia of the Anti-Fascist Council of National Liberation of Yugoslavia have already abandoned their hearths, and Serbia authorities have the audacity to say that the country is not at war with the Ustaše. Had the Ustaše done nothing other than blowing up our martyr church in Jasenovac as they did several days ago, it would be reason enough to declare war on them, both as a nation and as a state."[5]
Never would a Serbian Army allow a 50 year Golgotha [meant since the Partisan liberation of 1945 that slowly pressured Serbs to abandon some long-inhabited territories] of its people in Kosovo, Bosnia, Raska or Krajina [part of Croatia with a Serb majority]. And it would not allow arming to the tooth of those whose ethnic and religious ideal is for Serbs to vanish. However it is not, and it can never be a Serbian Army that which aspires to bring back with its tanks, a political system to Croatia, Slovenia or Macedonia that its people have rejected.[6]
| Government offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Goran Svilanović |
Minister of Foreign Affairs 2004 – 2007 |
Succeeded by Vuk Jeremić |