Raif Dizdarevic, the last president of Yugoslavia, has died: one year in office, exactly as the state began to crack

02 September 2026 1 min read

Raif Dizdarevic, the last surviving president of the Presidency of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, has died in his hundredth year. The news was announced by the historian Husnija Kamberovic.

With him goes the last man to sit at the top of the federation before it fell apart. Born on 9 December 1926 in Fojnica, he joined the National Liberation War in 1943 and the Party in 1945. He began his career in the security services - first the OZNA, then the UDBA. From 1951 he was in diplomacy: embassies in Bulgaria, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia.

From 1972 he was assistant federal secretary for foreign affairs. From April 1978 to April 1982 he was president of the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. From 1982 to 1984 he chaired the Assembly of Yugoslavia, from 1984 to 1987 he was federal secretary for foreign affairs, and from 15 May 1988 to 15 May 1989 he was president of the SFRY Presidency.

The year he held in his hands

Those exact 365 days were not an ordinary shift. That is the year the federation began splitting at the seams, when the political forces that would blow the whole construction apart within two years were already forming in the republics. Dizdarevic held the office that formally represented the entire state - at the moment when that state no longer existed as a shared decision, only as a procedure.

The rotation was a mechanism designed to stop any one man from holding power. At that, it worked flawlessly - and that is precisely why nobody could take responsibility when it was needed most. Each president had one year: too little to fix anything, enough to write a book about it later.

Which he did. After politics he returned to Sarajevo and wrote his memoirs - among them "From the Death of Tito to the Death of Yugoslavia" and "A Time to Remember." Titles that tell the whole story before you open the book.

With Dizdarevic goes the last witness from the very top of that state. What remains are the archives, the memoirs, and six countries that still cannot agree even on when exactly the end began.