Slaven Letica

Slaven Letica (born 28 June 1947) is a Croatian author, economist, commentator and politician.

A native of Podgora, Letica graduated from the University of Zagreb Faculty of Economics in 1971. In the 1980s, Letica was a professor of sociology of medicine at the School of Medicine, University of Zagreb and a consultant for the World Health Organization, working on health service management projects in a number of countries in Europe, Asia and Africa.

In late 1980s, as the Communist grip on public discourse weakened, Letica began to use new freedoms to advocate various reforms. In doing so, he wrote many articles and columns and he began to appear in television talk shows and town hall meetings, quickly becoming one of the most popular and the most recognisable intellectuals in Yugoslavia.

In May 1990, after the first democratic elections, Franjo Tuđman made him his personal advisor. During negotiations which Tuđman pursued with the leader of the Serbs in Croatia, Jovan Rašković, Letica secretly recorded tapes of some of the conversations. Subsequently, he leaked these tapes to the Croatian media, hoping that some of Rašković's remarks would give offense to his fellow Croatian Serbs and turn them away from Rašković's secessionist policies. The effort spectacularly backfired and contributed to the escalation of conflict into war. As he left, Letica publicly stated that he would have served as a political advisor to Slobodan Milošević if compensated. Letica and Tuđman parted ways in March 1993 due to disagreement about Croatian politics towards Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In the following years Letica continued to appear in the Croatian media as a commentator, and became a regular columnist for Globus, a popular news magazine. During his time at Globus he gained some notoriety due to an unsigned 1992 opinion piece (which he eventually admitted to have written), titled "Croatian Feminists are Raping Croatia", in which he attacked five Croatian feminist writers (Slavenka Drakulić, Vesna Kesić, Jelena Lovrić, Dubravka Ugrešić and Rada Iveković), accusing them of betraying Croatia. The article was a source of significant controversy which ultimately resulted in a successful defamation lawsuit against the magazine.

...
Wikipedia