Bogoljub Jevtić

Bogoljub Jevtić

Bogoljub Jevtić (24 December 1886, Kragujevac, Kingdom of Serbia – 1960, Paris, France) was a Serbian diplomat and politician in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

He was plenipotentiary minister of Yugoslavia in Albania, Austria and Hungary. After the assassination of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia, on 22 December 1934 he was appointed prime minister of Yugoslavia, holding this position till 24 June 1935.

Born in 1886 in Kragujevac he completed his elementary and high school education in his hometown. He enrolled at the University of Belgrade and became a doctor of laws in 1911. This aroused his ambition. Jevtić completed his post-graduate studies at the University of Zurich and, since that didn't teach him enough, continued in the Handelshochschule in Berlin, where he took his second doctor's degree. His fellow countrymen studying in Berlin regarded him as merely a hard-working man. They did not know how hungrily he devoured his education.

Meanwhile, the pan-Slavic-Greek alliance of the Balkan states against their mortal Turkish enemy, who still stood on Serbia's soil, was being concluded. In the north Austrians were threatening. Every man was needed to participate in the holy war. Jevtić, a patriot, soon took his place in the firing line, first with the Greeks and Bulgarians against the Ottomans, then against the Bulgarians who wanted to compromise the Greek-Serbian Alliance of 1913. He was already learning what it meant to belong to a nation that larger nations treated as a pawn.

Hardly had he begun his diplomatic career under hopeful circumstances than the World War I intervened. Military service took precedence over diplomatic service. Jevtić, an infantry captain, did not spend his time sitting in comfortable headquarters. Prince Regent Alexander Karadjordjević (later to become Alexander I of Yugoslavia) was informed of his bravery. They met on the battlefield, surrounded by the devastating effects of war, and surveyed the shambles left from Big Bertha (howitzer). No one wanted to capitulate as long as even a handful of soldiers could be found to defend the last remnants of the fatherland. In 1917, summoned from the front, he returned to diplomacy as an attaché in the Serbian Legation at . Then, he was needed at home in the Cabinet. The next step was the Serbian Legation in London, and during the peace negotiations at Paris, where so many new faces of the new Europe appeared, the overworked and very energetic secretary from the Serbian Legation in London was very much in evidence. Edvard Beneš, the leading delegate of the newly-proposed Czechoslovakia, held few important conversations with Jevtić, and they became friends, though not intimates. He was an adviser to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes legation in Paris and Brussels in 1924.

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