Vasilije Krestić

Vasilije Krestić (Serbian Cyrillic: Василије Крестић) (1932-) is a Serbian nationalist [Mikula, Maja: Nationalism and the Rhetoric of Exclusion. "Southeast European Politics" Vol. III, No. 1 - June 2002, pp. 65-66. Available online at PDFlink| [http://www.seep.ceu.hu/archives/issue31/mikula.pdf "seep.ceu.hu"] |118 KiB Retrieved 21 April 2007.] intellectual and historian, and a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

As a historian, he focuses on the history of the Serbs of the Habsburg Monarchy. In his early career, Krestić wrote about the history of Croatia before and after the Nagodba of 1868, with special reference to the Serbs of Croatia and in Hungary. He has written numerous articles on related subjects.

In the mid-1980s Krestić became involved in the politics of nationalist opposition to communism in Serbia. He became a voice of discontent regarding the status of the Serbs of Croatia and helped to revive Serbian nationalism. [See for example the open letter of nine professors in defence of Dr. Roksandić, who was removed from the University of Belgrade in 1989 by the nationalist professors led by Krestić: Andrzej Walicki, Daniel Chirot, Gale Stokes, Ivan Szelenyi, Ivo Banac, Jan T. Gross, Katherine Verdery, Norman Naimark, Tony Judt: Fired in Belgrade. "The New York Review of Books", Volume 37, Number 5 - March 29, 1990. Available online at [http://www.nybooks.com/articles/3677 nybooks.com] . Retrieved 21 April 2007.] He was one of the leading authors of the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, which was a founding document in the creation of the Serbian nationalist movement of the 1980s. Krestić was responsible for the sections that described the Serbs of Croatia as suffering genocide in that Yugoslav republic. He later (1995) published a defense of the Memorandum, with Kosta Mihailović, another of the Memorandum's original authors. Krestić was also active in the defense of Slobodan Milošević before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

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