Adam Pribićević

Adam Pribićević

Adam Pribićević in the 1920s
Born (1880-12-24)24 December 1880
Kostajnica, Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia, Austria-Hungary
Died 7 February 1957(1957-02-07) (aged 76)
Windsor, Ontario, Canada

Adam Pribićević (Serbian Cyrillic: Адам Прибићевић; 24 December 1880 – 7 February 1957) was a Serbian publisher, writer, and politician. He had three brothers: Milan, Valerijan and Svetozar.

Life

Pribićević was born in Kostajnica, to a family of Serbs of Croatia.[1] The annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908 caused furor among the Serbs of Austria-Hungary. It became a major factor in the high-treason trial of Zagreb in 1909 against the Serb leaders of the Croat-Serb Coalition, which opposed the annexation.[2] Adam and his brother Valerijan Pribićević, a Serbian Orthodox bishop, figured prominently among the defendants. On 9 October 1909, the court in Zagreb passed its sentence: twelve years penal servitude for the brothers and severe terms of imprisonment of between five and eight years for thirty other defendants. Following a subsequent libel suit in Vienna, they were all fully exonerated in a legal sense a year later (1910), and it became apparent that the evidence in the earlier trial had been fabricated with the foreknowledge of the Austro-Hungarian authorities.[2]

When the Great War broke out, Adam was arrested by the Austrians and in 1915 sent to Galicia as an Austrian soldier to fight the Russians. There he used the opportunity to defect to the Russian side. From there he joined the Serbian volunteers fighting within the Serbian army on the Salonika Front.

After the war, Pribićević, a student of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, met up with his brother Svetozar Pribičević and joined the Democratic Party.

Between the two world wars, he held many important posts in Yugoslavia. He was a jurist and journalist who, with his brother Milan Pribićević, became "the voice of return to the virtues of rural life."

When Nazi Germany occupied the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Pribićević joined the Chetnik forces of General Dragoljub Mihailović at Ravna Gora fighting both the Nazi and Communist forces. The political and socioeconomic platform for the Chetnik congress was drafted by Pribićević. When George Musulin organized the 1944 final rescue of 500 American airmen called Operation Halyard, Mihailović sent a political mission to Bari, Italy aboard an American plane. Pribićević, now former President of the Independent Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and his team met with Ivan Šubašić, but were not informed of the Tito-Šubašić Agreement. Pribićević remained in the West after the war ended, like thousands of other soldiers who managed to escape.

Among the Serbian Canadians, Adam Pribićević was among the most important, eminent, and well-known post-World War II Serbian political émigrés who came from Yugoslavia to Canada.

With two other authors, Dr. Vladimir Belajčić and Dr. Branko Miljuš, Adam Pribićević sent "The Memorandum of Crimes of Genocide Committed against the Serbian People by the Government of the 'Independent State of Croatia' during World War II," addressed to the Fifth General Assembly of the United Nations, 1950.

He committed suicide on 7 February 1957 in Windsor, Ontario. From 2008, the new 16th street in Busije, a part of Belgrade, carries his name.[3]

Works

References

  1. ↑ Adam Pribićević. "Naseljavanje Srba po Hrvatskoj i Dalmaciji" (PDF) (in Serbian). Retrieved 15 July 2012. Adam Pribićević Srbin iz Hrvatske – preface by Čedomir Višnjić (p. 5)
  2. 1 2 Robert A. Kann (1980). A History of the Habsburg Empire, 1526–1918. University of California Press. p. 448.
  3. ↑ ("Službeni list“ 02/2008)

External links

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