Before the panel on Non Alignment, Tvrtko Jakovina, Tenured professor, Department of History, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, gave a Commemorative lecture about Budimir Lončar, Yugoslavia’s last secretary for foreign affairs.
The Professor opened by referencing his first meeting with Mr. Loncar in 2005, after which he started working closely with him, leading to a book about Mr. Loncar’s life. The nickname for Mr. Loncar was Mr. Non aligned, which he got in 1970 at the third conference in Zambia, when the movement was in a crisis. He worked to create the documents for the conference through difficult diplomatic work and earned the respect of his international colleagues.
His diplomatic life started in 1949, in a country that was in a difficult situation after the Tito-Stalin split, starting work in New York in the Yugoslavian mission in the UN. The long fifties were a period of Yugoslavian foreign policy changes, during which Yugoslavia went from having few friends to having a new cosmopolitan identity, becoming open and interesting to both western and third world partners.
Mr Loncar had an excellent memory, and Koca Popovic, the head of Yugoslavian diplomacy, took him under his wing after being impressed by it. He became one of his closest associates and travelled the world, helping to build the non aligned movement and establishing friendships with the world’s leading diplomats and politicians. He served in Bonn when Willy Brandt became chancellor, and was ambassador to the USA during the administration of George Bush. In the nineties he was in his nineties and from a country that ceased to exist, but was still a valued diplomat.
He was a permanent number two in the foreign affairs secretariate, eventually being the last secretary, where he struggled to internationalise the conflict in Yugoslavia and to prevent war. The summit of the non aligned in 1989 was an attempt to show that Yugoslavia still matters and that it still had friends, and which allowed it to internationalise its crisis. He remained active until his death, advising Croatian presidents.