Nikola Koljevic's Attempted Suicide

The president of the Association of Writers of the Serbian Republic and a pre-war professor at the University of Sarajevo has attempted suicide in his cabinet at the RS government headquarters in Pale.

As one of the two RS vice-presidents, Nikola Koljevic was one of the top ranking officials in RS during the war in Bosnia, yet in all truth he was a very important man behind the scenes. He joined the Serbian Democratic Party (SDA) as a longtime close friend of the party's leader and later RS President Radovan Karadzic.

In the Serbian Republic people cannot recall a single important decision made by Koljevic; the journalists fail to remember that any of his optimistic prognosis came true. Simply, he wasn't in charge of making important decisions. Friends from Banjaluka (where he was born) believe that the former vice-president of RS was a man who did not know how to decisively say "yes" or "no" to anything.

This is in keeping with the impression Warren Zimermann, the last American ambassador in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, had. Describing on one occasion his meeting with Radovan Karadzic and professor Koljevic, he says that throughout their conversation Koljevic had supported his leader, only to appear in front of the ambassador later on his own, saying that he and Karadzic didn't see eye to eye. Whenever he was in a dilemma whether to support Karadzic's political practices, the RS vice-president would finally opt for Karadzic. Up until the end of the war, he supported Slobodan Milosevic's endeavors to convince the leadership of the Bosnian Serbs to accept the Dayton Agreement. According to one collocutor, Koljevic's friend from his early days, he believed that with the Dayton Agreement RS acquired as much as it could get. Up to that point, he had refused the offer to side with the President of Serbia at least twice and to become Milosevic's man. As a politician, he showed the greatest amount of consistency in agreeing to never express his own opinion.

As the first post-war elections in Bosnia were drawing near, Koljevic's presence on the political scene grew scarcer. Another close friend of his says that he exited the world of politics when he was sickened by the moral deviation of RS top officials. He tried to join the Democratic Patriotic Bloc (DPB), which was headed by the then mayor of Banjaluka Predrag Radic, yet people in this coalition were not prepared to offer him one of the top seats and he didn't overly insist on it. He retired.

In the company of his old friends and amongst the top ranking officials of SDS, Nikola Koljevic, former vice-president of RS and prior to the war -a member of the BIH Presidency- was seen at Kocic's rally at Zmijanje. At the ceremony, when he was to accept Kocic's life achievement award, he refused to get up on the stage on which Biljana Plavsic, the then SDS candidate for RS President, was already standing. He said: "I don't belong with all of you", yet someone from security had literally pushed him onto the guest of honor spot.

Banjaluka citizens, those people he had grown up with and who he paid visits to upon his arrival from Sarajevo, say that he had planned to go back to his job teaching Shakespeare and English literature at the University of Banjaluka. A few friends testify that on January 16, a couple of hours before he had attempted to commit suicide, he had called them in order to talk about a meeting of the RS Association of Writers which was to be held on January 23 in Bijeljina.

Unofficially, he is alive thanks to the fact that he had used a small-caliber gun.