Jovan Rašković (, ; 5 July 1929 – 28 July 1992) was a Croatian Serb politician. He was leader of the Serb Democratic Party.
Early life
Rašković was born in Knin in 1929. During World War II in Yugoslavia, after a pogrom by the Ustaše which resulted in the deaths of his relatives, he was exiled to Kistanje in Italian-occupied Dalmatia.
Witnessing, in 1941, the psychological effect of genocide on a bereaved man from Kistanje who had lost his family left a strong impact on his worldview.
He passed his secondary school exams in Šibenik, and graduated in Zagreb. He then studied electrical engineering and medicine at the University of Zagreb, where he obtained his diploma and a PhD from the university's medical school.
Career
Before the wars
In the 1960s, he served as director of Šibenik city hospital and later director of the medical center. He was one of the founders of the Medical Research Institute of Neurophysiology in Ljubljana. Rašković was a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, the Academy of Medical Sciences of Croatia and a number of psychiatry associations in the United States, Czechoslovakia and Italy. He was a university professor in Zagreb and Ljubljana and a visiting professor at the Universities of Pavia, Rome, Houston and London. Rašković split his time between his house in Primošten and his apartment in Šibenik. While working at Šibenik, he reportedly had a reputation of "taking pleasure in" administering electroshock therapy to Croats and Croatian women in particular.
Although he was not a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts at the time of its drafting, at least one source claimed that he was extensively consulted from his home in Croatia by Serbian nationalist intellectual Dobrica Ćosić when the controversial 1986 SANU Memorandum was being developed.|source=
In this book, he also argued that the lack of collective guilt on the part of Croats for the genocides during World War II, which had left Serbs traumatised, had brought about "asymmetrical memories of recent history," which would bring conflict between the two ethnic groups. He noticed that there was no equivalent party in Bosnia and Herzegovina so he contacted Radovan Karadžić, a colleague, to suggest for him to establish one. The two, both psychiatrists by profession, gave lectures in Bosnia-Herzegovina from the period of 1990–1991, in which they tried to incite "hatred and militancy" among the local Serbs there, Tuđman's chief political advisor, Slaven Letica, had the words secretly taped and leaked the transcript to Croatian media to discredit Rašković among his people and then replace him with someone more acceptable to the Croatian government. That backfired, as, instead of rejecting Rašković, many Serbs lost any trust in Croatian government and embraced extremism and then armed conflict. For his part, Tuđman, an ardent Croatian nationalist, rejected Rašković's more moderate demands, thus legitimising the rise of more radical Serbian nationalist resistance forces. The most important of these demands was the continued recognition of Serbs as a constituent people of Croatia, which Tuđman's government rejected; in December 1990, a new Croatian constitution was passed which, although it granted cultural autonomy to Serbs, said that Croatia was legally the "national state of the Croats" only.
To make matters worse, Rašković was also receiving pressure from Belgrade, which political scientist Nina Caspersen argued was more instrumental in increasing tensions than Tuđman's hardline stances. Moreover, Rašković, an anti-communist nationalist, publicly opposed Serbian president Slobodan Milošević, whom he referred to as "a big Bolshevik, a communist, and a tyrant to the tips of his toes." He also tried competing electorally in Serbia against Milošević, whereas the more militant Milan Babić showed unreserved support for Milošević and, in turn, received support from him.
Rašković later expressed fear about the collective state of mind of Serbs, saying that "Serb myths have entered the Serb spirit, but with a dose of poison, spite, vengeance, [and] regression," which he believed needed to be "controlled in order to make less poisonous."
Death and legacy
Rašković died in Belgrade from a heart attack on 28 July 1992 at the age of 63. Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić, who was a friend and colleague, considered Rašković to be "his main role model and inspiration."