Jovan Rašković (Serbian Cyrillic: Јован Рашковић, pronounced [jǒʋan rǎʃkoʋitɕ]; 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 studied medicine at the University of Zagreb, receiving his diploma in 1956 and a degree in psychiatry in 1962. He received a PhD in neuropsychiatry from the university's medical school in 1975.
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. 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. Moreover, later in 1990, Rašković was formally inducted into the organisation. Sometime in 1990, Rašković published a book entitled Luda zemlja (A Mad Country), in which he fused Freudian psychoanalysis with a Serbian supremacist worldview:
The Croats, feminized by the Catholic religion, suffer from a castration complex. That makes them totally incapable of exercising authority over others. They compensate their humiliation by their great culture. As to the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina and neighboring regions, they are the victims, as Freud might have said, of anal frustrations, which incite them to amass wealth and to seek refuge in fanatic attitudes. Finally, the Serbs, the Orthodox, an Oedipal people, tend to liberate themselves from the authority of the father. From this spirit of resistance, they draw the courage of the warriors, who are the only ones capable of exerting real authority over the other peoples of Yugoslavia. It is no wonder that the situation of complete hatred and paranoia develops in this country. 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. In February 1990, Rašković went into politics and founded and led the Serb Democratic Party (SDS), which took part in the first Croatian democratic elections. 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, working them into a "state of frenzy and paranoia."
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
