Milorad Ekmečić (; 4 October 1928 – 29 August 2015) was a Yugoslav and čićSerbian historian. During World War II he became a member of the Yugoslav Partisans after the fascist Ustaše perpetrated the Prebilovci massacre, in which 78 members of his family were killed, including his father. He studied at the University of Zagreb and went on to be a professor at the University of Sarajevo, and later at the University of Belgrade. He was a member of several Yugoslav academies of sciences and arts, the author of more than a dozen historical books, and received several significant national awards. Ekmečić authored several important works in socialist Yugoslavia, including his contribution to the acclaimed History of Yugoslavia published in English in 1974, and Stvaranje Jugoslavije 1790–1918 [Creation of Yugoslavia 1790–1918] in 1989. According to his obituary in Vreme news magazine, Ekmečić was considered "a prominent representative of Serbian critical historiography".
He adopted Serbian nationalist views significantly during the breakup of Yugoslavia, served as an advisor to Radovan Karadžićlater convicted as a war criminalwhen Karadžić was president of Republika Srpska during the 1992–1995 Bosnian War, and was a founder of Karadžić's radical nationalist Serb Democratic Party in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He was active in the revisionist wave of Serbian historiography from 1991. This involved local historians eschewing the standards of international scholarship and concentrating exclusively on sectarian myths, resulting in the production of what has been described in historiographical assessment of the period as "pseudohistory". Ekmečić added a religious flavour to this by claiming that the Vatican was an enemy of the Serbian nation, and also that it posed the biggest obstacle to Yugoslav unification in 1918. An analysis of Serbian historiography since 1991 concluded that Ekmečić was "complicit in the weaponisation of history, in particular that of the mass atrocities of the Second World War".
Early life
Milorad Ekmečić was born on 4 October 1928 in Prebilovci near Čapljina in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina) to Ilija and Kristina Ekmečić. He attended elementary school in Čapljina, and high school in Mostar.
When the Kingdom of Yugoslavia entered World War II due to the Axis invasion of the country in April 1941, Ekmečić remained in the Čapljina area until 1943. During the invasion, the Independent State of Croatia, a fascist puppet state, was established; the new state encompassed Čapljina. On 6 August 1941, the ruling Ustaše perpetrated the Prebilovci massacre, in which Ekmečić lost 78 members of his family, including his father and uncle. The surviving members of his family formed a unit of the Yugoslav Partisans resistance movement in Prebilovci. From October 1944 until July 1945, Ekmečić was a member of the Yugoslav Partisans.
Career
After completing high school in 1947, Ekmečić enrolled in general history undergraduate study at the University of Zagreb, from which he graduated in 1952. In the same year he took up an assistant position at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Sarajevo. Ekmečić conducted research in archives in Zagreb, Belgrade, Zadar, and Vienna in Austria. He received his doctorate in history from the University of Zagreb in 1958 upon defending his dissertation entitled The uprising in Bosnia from 1875 to 1878, which has been published in three editions and translated into German. He visited Princeton University, New Jersey, in 1961, and then continued his academic career as a professor of history at the University of Sarajevo where he worked as a full professor from 1968 until 1992 teaching "General History of the New Age" and "Introduction to the Science of History" courses. During this time he also spent some time as a visiting professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan.