Darko Bekić

Darko Bekić (born January 18, 1946) is a Croatian historian, author, diplomat and foreign policy advisor to the first President of the Republic of Croatia Franjo Tuđman. He served, inter alia, as the Croatian Ambassador to the OSCE in Vienna (1992–1996) and as Permanent Representative of Croatia to the United Nations in Geneva (1996–1998). He authored the first-ever History of Croatian Diplomacy published in 2016 by Skolska Knjiga, Zagreb.

Early life and education

Darko Bekić was born on January 18, 1946, in Zagreb. and was purged from the League of Communists of Croatia, along with hundreds of other movement members by the president of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, Marshal Tito. Darko Bekić was removed from the position of editor-in-chief, fired from the Editing House Vjesnik, expelled from the League of Communists and deprived of his passport. According to Nacional, in the aftermath of the Croatian Spring, Darko Bekić was put under Yugoslav secret service UDBA surveillance.

By the end of 1971, Darko Bekić was employed as a research assistant at the Economic Institute in Zagreb. In 1976, he moved to the Institute for Developing Countries, where he continued his career as a research fellow. He led missions to a number of African and Asian countries, serving as a consultant and speaker at numerous congresses and seminars and as an expert member to various national and UN agencies. In the 1984–1986 period he was a post-doctoral Rockefeller Fellow at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies of the Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington D.C. At the same time, he served as a guest professor at the Foreign Service Institute in Roslyn, Virginia. At the founding convention, on May 20, 1989, he was elected a member of the executive committee. However, Bekic and Lerotic left the party soon after due to internal political disputes with Goldstein. In this capacity, he co-authored the proposal for the confederal transformation of Yugoslavia along with Prof. Dr. Vladimir Đuro Degan. This proposal was rejected by the Bush administration as unacceptable. In 1992, he was appointed Ambassador/Permanent Representative of the now independent and internationally recognized Republic of Croatia to the OSCE in Vienna, where he was particularly engaged in the peace negotiations during the 1994 First Chechen War. He was a member of the Croatian delegation in the Bosnia-Herzegowina peace negotiations in 1994. In 1996, he was appointed Ambassador of Croatia to the Organisation of the United Nations in Geneva. In 1998, he was posted as Ambassador to the Republic of Portugal. From 2002 to 2004 he was Assistant Foreign Minister in the Cabinet of Prime Minister Ivica Račan. From 2006 to 2011, he was Ambassador of Croatia to the Kingdom of Morocco. Darko Bekić retired from diplomatic service in 2012 and is currently engaged as a free-lance political analyst, consultant, author and columnist.

Personal life

Darko Bekić is married with four children. He is fluent in Croatian, English and French and has a working knowledge of Italian.