Milorad Ekmečić

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Milorad Ekmečić (Serbo-Croatian Cyrillic: Милорад Екмечић; 4 October 1928 – 29 August 2015) was a Yugoslav and Serbian historian. During World War II he became a member of the Yugoslav Partisans after the fascist Ustaše perpetrated the Prebilovci massacre, in which 78 members of his family were killed, including his father. He studied at the University of Zagreb and went on to be a professor at the University of Sarajevo, and later at the University of Belgrade. He was a member of several Yugoslav academies of sciences and arts, the author of more than a dozen historical books, and received several significant national awards. Ekmečić authored several important works in socialist Yugoslavia, including his contribution to the acclaimed History of Yugoslavia published in English in 1974, and Stvaranje Jugoslavije 1790–1918 [Creation of Yugoslavia 1790–1918] in 1989. He adopted Serbian nationalist views significantly during the breakup of Yugoslavia, served as an advisor to the convicted war criminal Radovan Karadžić when he was President of Republika Srpska during the 1992–1995 Bosnian War, and was a founder of Karadžić's radical nationalist Serb Democratic Party in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He was active in the revisionist wave of Serbian historiography from 1991. This involved local historians eschewing the standards of international scholarship and concentrating exclusively on sectarian myths, resulting in the production of what has been described in historiographical assessment of the period as "pseudohistory". Ekmečić added a religious flavour to this by claiming that the Vatican was an enemy of the Serbian nation, and also posed the biggest obstacle to Yugoslav unification in 1918. An analysis of Serbian historiography since 1991 concluded that Ekmečić was "complicit in the weaponisation of history, in particular that of the mass atrocities of the Second World War". (Source: DBPedia)