Quick Facts
Biography
Petar Bošković (Brčeli, 9 July 1931 – Belgrade, 14 January 2011) was a Yugoslav and Serbian diplomat. He was an ambassador of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to the Republic of Cyprus.
Life and Work
Petar Boškovic was born on July 9, 1931, in the Montenegrin village of Brčeli situated near the coastal city and port of Bar. His father worked in the United States while he remained with his mother and brothers in Yugoslavia. Word War II national hero Milo Bošković was his brother. Later 1952, as a young man Petar joined his father Ivo in the United States. He graduated from the Faculty of Political Science at the Carlisle Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. He completed his master's degree in political sciences 1973, at the Belgrade Faculty of Political Science, University of Belgrade. From 1960 until 1965 he worked in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia. In the period of 1965-1976 he was appointed as the first deputy director of the Fulbright Commission for scholarships for postgraduate studies in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. The Fulbright treaty signed between the US and Yugoslavia at the end of 1964 for the exchange of Fulbright scholars and professors was the first such agreed with a Communist country. From 1976 to 1980 he served as First Counselor at the Embassy of Yugoslavia in London. After his return from London, he worked as the head of the department for Western Europe and USA within the Central Committee of the ruling League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY) party.
He was engaged several times within the Central Committee of the ruling LCY party, although he was never a member of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. From 1982 until the end of 1984 he served as director and chief editor of the daily Montenegrin newspaper “Pobjeda”.
Then from 1985 to 1988 he served as foreign policy advisor to the Central Committee of the LCY. In 1988 he was appointed as the ambassador of Yugoslavia to the Republic of Cyprus. He held this post until 1993. At the end of 1993 and in 1994 he held a series of lectures at the American universities Bradley, Dickinson, Lafayette, Lebanon Valley, Colgate, Penn State and Beavers College where, among others, he tried to point out to the public America’s one-sided approach towards the Yugoslavian conflict. In 1999 he was invited once more by American universities as a foreign policy expert to lecture on Serbian-Albanian relations. During 1999, he was one of the most important witnesses in the trial of the Ustasha World War II criminal Dinko Šakić. He wittnessed how Dinko Šakić killed his brother Milo Bošković in Jasenovac concentration camp. He died on January 14, 2011 in Belgrade.
Works
He was a contributor to many newspapers and magazines in Yugoslavia and abroad. In addition to numerous articles published during his career, two books are of particular importance:
- Recent developments in the Western European Left, Belgrade, 1982
- The challenges of technological change, Belgrade 1987