Vuk Draskovic

Vuk Drašković (Вук Драшковић, ; born 29 November 1946) is a Serbian writer and politician.

He graduated from the University of Belgrade Faculty of Law in 1968.

In 1968, Drašković participated in anti-bureaucratic student revolts in Yugoslavia.

After Josip Broz Tito promised reforms, Drašković initiated people to dance the Kozaračko kolo at the Faculty of Law.

Drašković was a member of the Communist Youth Organization and later joined the League of Communists of Yugoslavia.

From 1969 to 1980, he worked as a journalist in the Yugoslav news agency Tanjug.

He was a member of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia and worked as the chief of staff of the Yugoslav President Mika Špiljak.

Drašković was born in the small village of Medja in the Banat region to a family of settlers from Herzegovina.

He was three months old when his mother, Stoja Nikitović, 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.

He graduated high school in Gacko.

At 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 1969-78, he was involved with journalism.

He first worked for the state news agency Tanjug as its African correspondent stationed in Lusaka, Zambia.

He was discharged from his post after publishing misleading information regarding the Rhodesian Bush War, creating a diplomatic incident.

He then took a job as press adviser to the Yugoslav Union of Trade Unions (Savez Sindikata Jugoslavije) and then became editor-in-chief of Rad, a trade union paper.

During his time as press adviser, Drašković spent some time as the personal secretary to the organisation's president Mika Špiljak.

In the late 1980s, Drašković was in agreement with Šešelj's sentiments about deporting Albanians from Kosovo and suggested that "a special fund" was needed "to finance the repopulation of Kosovo by Serbs".

However, Jović, Šešelj and Drašković disagreed with each other and their party split into three.

In 1981, Drašković published his first novel Sudije (Judges) which described a judge resisting political pressure.

In 1982, Drašković was expelled from the Communist party after he published his second novel Nož (Knife).

The novel tells the story of a man who is raised as a Bosnian Muslim who comes to believe that Serbs killed his family, only to later learn that his ethnic heritage is Serbian and that his adoptive family was guilty of murdering his birth-family.

The book caused controversy as it reignited divisive ethno-nationalist issues which Tito and the Communist Party tried to suppress.

The party condemned and subsequently banned the book, which was also published in English.

His novels Molitva 1–2 (Prayer 1–2, 1985) and Ruski konsul (Russian consul, 1988) also explored the suffering of Serbs during World War II, while Noć generala (The General's Nights) published in 1994 dealt with Draža Mihailović's last days.

In March 1989, Drašković along with Mirko Jović and Vojislav Šešelj founded the Sava Association.

The group dedicated itself to the protection of the Serbian language and the defense of Kosovo and Metohija.

The Sava Association became the Serbian National Renewal Party under the leadership of Jović in January 1990.

On 26 September 1990, Drašković declared that his armed "volunteers" would be willing to defend Krajina Serbs, and three days later in an interview with Delo, Drašković stated: "Serbia must obtain all territories in what is today Herzegovina, Bosnia, Slavonia, Dalmatia, in these parts of Croatia where the Serbs made a majority of the population until 6 April 1941, when the Ustasha genocide against them began...Wherever the Serb blood was shed by the Ustashas knives, wherever there are our graves there are our borders".

He also claimed that most Bosnian Muslims are "burdened with Serbian origin" and that "they run away from themselves because they know that they are Orthodox and Serbs".

The Serbian Renewal Movement (SPO) 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.

Drašković founded the Serbian Renewal Movement (Srpski Pokret Obnove, SPO, a democratic nationalist party) in March, and then in February 1991 Šešelj created his Serbian Radical Party.

Following that failure Drašković kept 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 being brought in.

Clashes between police and protesters resulted in the deaths of a student and an officer, and injuries to over 200 people.

Demonstrations ended after the government agreed to concessions.

Drašković became a leading opponent of Milošević.

He is the leader of the Serbian Renewal Movement, and served as the war-time Deputy Prime Minister of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1999 during the rule of Slobodan Milošević and the Minister of Foreign Affairs of both Serbia and Montenegro and Serbia from 2004 to 2007.

The book was made into a movie in 1999 entitled The Dagger or The Knife in English.