Raif Dizdarevic, Last President of Yugoslav Presidency, Dies

Raif Dizdarevic, the last man to head the Presidency of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia before the body lost any real power to hold the federation together, died today in Sarajevo. For Belgrade this is more than an obituary note: Dizdarevic led the collective body that had been, since Tito’s death in 1980, the last barrier against open conflict between the republics, and it was in the years right after his term that the barrier gave way, dragging down the entire territory of the former joint state, Serbia included.

The news was first reported by historian Husnija Kamberovic on his Facebook page and was picked up by N1, which states that Dizdarevic died in his hundredth year. Glas Srpske, citing the Kliks portal, writes that he died this morning at seven o’clock in Sarajevo, though it does not give an age, only his date and place of birth: December 9, 1926, in Fojnica. Some other outlets report that he was 99, a discrepancy that comes down to the convention used for counting age, since his ninety ninth birthday would not have fallen until December of this year.

From partisan fighter to head of Yugoslav diplomacy

Dizdarevic joined the National Liberation Struggle in 1943 at the age of seventeen and was admitted to the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in 1945, right after the war ended. He spent the following years in the security services, first in the Department for the Protection of the People and then in the State Security Administration, before moving into the diplomatic service in 1951.

There he built a career that took him through some of the most sensitive points of Cold War Europe: he served at the embassy in Bulgaria from 1951 to 1954, in the Soviet Union from 1956 to 1959, and in Czechoslovakia from 1963 to 1967, years in which Yugoslavia’s non-aligned policy balanced between the two blocs. In 1972 he became assistant federal secretary for foreign affairs, and both republic-level and federal posts followed: president of the Presidency of the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina from April 1978 to April 1982, then president of the Assembly of the SFRY from 1982 to 1984, and federal secretary for foreign affairs from 1984, a post in which he also represented Yugoslavia within the Non-Aligned Movement.

A year leading a federation already splitting at the seams

He took the helm of the Presidency of the SFRY on May 15, 1988, and held the post for exactly one year, until May 15, 1989. His term fell in a period when the Yugoslav federation was already deep in economic crisis, with hyperinflation eating away at living standards, and in a political crisis openly centered on the status of Kosovo and on relations between the republics, the very issues that, a few years later, would decide the fate of the entire country. Unlike the earlier handovers in the rotating leadership, which had passed almost unnoticed, his year at the head of the Presidency played out in full public view, before an audience that already understood that the system of collective leadership, designed to prevent any concentration of power after Tito’s death, could not stand in for a single arbiter once the republics each began going their own way.

After withdrawing from active politics, Dizdarevic stayed on in Sarajevo and turned to writing. He published two memoirs, rendered in English as “From Tito’s Death to Yugoslavia’s Death” and “A Time Worth Remembering,” in which he described firsthand the collapse of the institutions he himself had once led, books that now, with his death, stand as one of the few inside accounts of the joint state’s final years.

His passing closes another page on the generation that built Yugoslavia out of the partisan movement and led it through the Cold War, a generation whose members, seen from Belgrade, can less and less often testify in person to what the system of power looked like before it collapsed, well before the wars of the nineties even began. Details of the commemoration and the funeral have yet to be announced, according to word out of Sarajevo.