Tomislav Jakić

Tomislav Jakić (born 23 March 1943, Zagreb) is a Croatian journalist, TV reporter and former advisor to the 2nd Croatian president Stjepan Mesić.

Early years

Tomislav Jakić was born on 23 March 1943 in Zagreb, Independent State of Croatia during World War II. His father was a state clerk and his mother was a teacher of German language. He spent his early life in Zagreb and graduated from the Faculty of Law, University of Zagreb.

Before graduating from his faculty, he decided to enter TV journalism and in 1966 he joined the Yugoslav Radio Television (JRT). At first, he worked as a small-time reporter but gradually he became a TV anchor and later a foreign policy reporter. One of his first assignments was a report about the Yom Kippur War in 1973 when he travelled to Egypt and was amongst the first foreign TV news crews to enter Sinai.

In the 1980s he went on a journalist seminar in the United States and was the first foreign TV reporter to enter a NORAD underground base in the Rocky Mountains. In 1979, he managed to negotiate in Vienna the opportunity of closely reporting the signing of the SALT II agreement which was supposed to be reserved only for American and Soviet TV crews but Jakić managed to include the Yugoslav crew as well. Due to his excellent knowledge of the German language, he was a regular reporter from Austria, West Germany and East Germany.

After his return from the tour, Jakić started witnessing the deterioration of his TV station which came under the rule of the new government and later renamed HRT. At first, all ethnic Serb or mixed-marriage employees were fired and banned from entering the station. After that, any employees who didn't support Tuđman and the new regime were also fired and banned. Jakić was critical of the new right-wing regime. In 1992, he quit his job at HRT. He was instrumental in Mesić's decision not to send Croatian troops to Iraq without UN approval.

Jakić gave his resignation to president Mesić in 2003 and became a columnist for Slobodna Dalmacija, in which he wrote in a column called Parallels. He wrote about foreign policy and the column lasted for about a year. He gave advice to Mesić for his 2005 campaign, and after Mesić won the elections for his second term, Jakić returned to his old advisory job.

Jakić was an organiser of the 2007 energy summit in Zagreb, where one of the guests was Vladimir Putin. The plan was to bring the South Stream through Croatia but it was never realised.

In 2010, president Mesić ended his second and final term as president. Jakić followed the president's footsteps and retired from politics. As of 2016, he is a columnist for Novosti and deals primarily with foreign policy. He published an autobiography in 2010 titled Nisam zavijao s vukovima (I didn't howl with the wolves).

In 2017, Jakić signed the Declaration on the Common Language of the Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks and Montenegrins.