Vuk Jeremić (, ; born 3 July 1975) is a Serbian politician and diplomat who served as the president of the United Nations General Assembly from 2012 to 2013 and as the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Serbia from 2007 to 2012.
In the early 1990s, Jeremić and his parents were forced to leave Yugoslavia after falling out with the country's communist government. Jeremić graduated from the University of Cambridge and Harvard University in 1998 and 2003, respectively, and was active in several pro-democracy student movements during the 1990s. In the early 2000s, he joined what The New York Times deemed Serbia's "most westward-leaning government" as an advisor to President Boris Tadić. In May 2007, Jeremić was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs. During his tenure, he spearheaded Serbia's fervent opposition to Kosovo's unilateral secession, the Serbian authorities arrested several war crimes suspects and extradited them to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, and there was a significant improvement in relations between Serbia and the West. In 2009, the European Union lifted all visa restrictions on citizens of Serbia, and in 2012, declared the country a candidate for membership.
Jeremić is the youngest person ever to have served as President of the United Nations General Assembly. His tenure saw Palestine granted non-member observer status in the General Assembly, the General Assembly's adoption of the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), which aimed to regulate international conventional weapons commerce, and the proclamation of 6 April as the International Day of Sport for Development and Peace. Jeremić describes himself as a "fervent, pro-European politician". He is the current president of the Center for International Relations and Sustainable Development (CIRSD) and editor-in-chief of Horizons, an English-language global public policy magazine. Jeremić was a candidate in the race to succeed Ban Ki-moon as United Nations Secretary-General in 2016, finishing second overall, behind eventual winner António Guterres. He unsuccessfully ran in the 2017 Serbian presidential election as an independent candidate. In October 2017, he founded the People's Party. In September 2023 he joined Sciences Po as an Adjunct Professor at the Paris School of International Affairs.
Early life Family Vuk Jeremić was born in Belgrade on 3 July 1975. Jeremić's parents are Sena () and Mihajlo Jeremić. His father is an Orthodox Serb from Belgrade and his mother is a Muslim Bosniak whose ancestors hailed from the northwestern Bosnian town of Cazin. During the 1980s, Jeremić's father was the CEO of Jugopetrol, a large state-owned oil company.
Jeremić's paternal grandfather, Bogoljub, was an officer in the Royal Yugoslav Army. In April 1941, at the height of World War II, he was captured by the Germans during the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia and imprisoned, first at Matthausen and then at Dachau. He returned to Yugoslavia by foot, only to be arrested as a political dissident by the country's new communist authorities and jailed at the Goli Otok prison camp, where he spent the next five years.Bogoljub Jeremić info, noviplamen.files.wordpress.com, December 2013; accessed 28 April 2015. Through his mother, Jeremić stems from the prominent Pozderac family, widely considered the most influential Bosnian Muslim political dynasty in post-war Yugoslavia. Jeremić's maternal great-grandfather, Nurija Pozderac, was a prominent Bosnian Muslim politician in Depression-era Yugoslavia. A staunch anti-fascist, he joined Josip Broz Tito's Partisans in the early 1940s and was killed in action in 1943. Nurija and his wife Devleta were posthumously declared Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem for saving Jews during the Holocaust, and Jeremić accepted a medal and certificate identifying them as such at a ceremony in Belgrade in November 2012. According to survivors, the couple sheltered Jews who snuck out of a train destined for the Jasenovac concentration camp, which was operated by Croatia's fascist ruling party, the Ustashas. Pozderac's nephews Hamdija and Hakija featured prominently in Yugoslav political circles during the 1980s.
Education Jeremić completed his elementary schooling in Belgrade, moving on to the First Belgrade Gymnasium where he began his high school studies. There, he met Boris Tadić, a pro-Western psychology professor and future President of Serbia whom the young Jeremić came to regard as a role model and mentor. Before long, Jeremić's family was blacklisted by the increasingly authoritarian government of Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milošević, and had to flee the country. They settled in the United Kingdom, and Jeremić finished his high school education in London.
Jeremić continued his post-secondary studies at the University of Cambridge (Queens' College), graduating with a bachelor's degree in theoretical physics in 1998. His years there coincided with the Yugoslav Wars, which negatively affected Serbia's reputation abroad. Jeremić's time at Cambridge provided him with insight into how his country was perceived overseas during the war years. "It was hard to explain that you come from Serbia and you’re not a children-eating radical," Jeremić recalled.
Jeremić began his Ph.D studies in quantitative finance at the University of London (Imperial College), and worked for Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Kleinwort and AstraZeneca in the British capital. Beginning in 2001, he studied under Jeffrey Sachs at Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University as a fellow in the Kokkalis Foundation's Program on Southeastern and East-Central Europe, graduating in 2003 with a master's degree in public administration and international development.
Career Formative years
In July 1997, Jeremić co-founded and became the financial manager of the Organization of Serbian Students Abroad (OSSA),Organization of Serbian Students Abroad website ; accessed 28 April 2015. the first international Serbian student association, which at the time had several thousand members. He was an active supporter of Otpor! ("Resistance!"), the Serbian civic youth movement that employed non-violent civil disobedience tactics against Milošević's government in the hope of spurning democratic reforms. He became even more determined to see Milošević toppled during and after NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia in the spring and summer of 1999. "This guy ... Milošević," Jeremić recalled thinking, "he has to be removed, because he’s going to get us all buried. If he stays, he’s going to get us all buried."
Following Milošević's resignation in October 2000, largely due to the efforts of groups such as Otpor!, Jeremić worked as an advisor to Tadić, then Yugoslavia's Minister of Telecommunications. In September 2002, Jeremić helped organise the first international investment conference for the Serbian government in New York City, which was held in cooperation with JPMorgan Chase and former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, who served as the head of the International Council for Supporting Reforms in Serbia.International Council for Supporting Reforms in Serbia website , invest-in-serbia.com; accessed 28 April 2015. In early 2003, Yugoslavia was abolished and replaced by the state union of Serbia and Montenegro. That June, Jeremić joined the Ministry of Defense and was appointed Special Envoy for Euro-Atlantic Affairs. In February 2004, he was appointed chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Democratic Party, and in February 2006 to the Main Board of the Democratic Party. From July 2004 to May 2007, during which Serbia and Montenegro ceased to exist and the two countries became separate states, Jeremić served as a senior foreign policy advisor to Tadić, who by that time had become President of Serbia, leading what The New York Times described as "the most westward-leaning government Serbia has ever had".
Foreign Ministry
Jeremić was sworn in as Foreign Minister of Serbia on 15 May 2007. Under Tadić, pundit Šaša Dragojlo notes, the Foreign Ministry's sole task was ensuring that Kosovo remained part of Serbia, and that if it did declare its independence, that it attained only partial recognition. At first, many in Serbia and abroad were sceptical that the 32-year-old Jeremić would make for an effective Foreign Minister. "When you’re young and when ... they see you for the first time," Jeremić remarked, "a lot of them are just kind of surprised. [...] That’s actually a good thing because it opens up their minds. [...] They want to hear what you have to say to them because you’re different."
Following Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence in February 2008, Jeremić began campaigning against the self-proclaimed state's integration into the international community. In his five years in office, Jeremić boarded 1,000 flights and visited over 100 countries, remarking that he "pretty much knew 90% of the world's foreign ministers". In 2009 alone, he spent over 700 hours—roughly 29 days—in flight. The Economist described Serbian diplomacy under Jeremić as being "on steroids". "His indefatigable travelling," one reporter from the newspaper remarked, "has made most foreign ministers, especially from smaller countries like Serbia, look like sleepy laggards." Jeremić reiterated that his country would not use military force to retake Kosovo, and stressed that Serbia would resort to dialogue and diplomacy to "defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity". He argued that Kosovo has every right to wide-ranging autonomy, but that the Government of Serbia would never accept full-fledged independence. In an address before Israel's Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy, he explained:We have no interest in ruling over the Kosovo Albanian community. We do not want to tax them, nor to police them, nor to have their judicial or ... educational systems reintegrated into ours. Our currency does not have to have a presence in Kosovo. Our military would not have to be there, either. And we would not interfere with their relationship with international financial organizations; with them having separate membership in international sporting federations; or with them having some sort of representation abroad. In 2009, Jeremić asked the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for a non-binding advisory opinion on the declaration. The court ruled that the declaration of independence was legal in July 2010. Jeremić responded by pushing for a draft resolution at the United Nations which discouraged unilateral secession as a way of resolving territorial disputes. In late July 2010, he met with Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon to discuss the draft resolution. In September 2010, the UN General Assembly adopted the resolution, calling for the dispute to be resolved bilaterally. Jeremić welcomed the General Assembly's decision, as did the European Union's High Commissioner, Catherine Ashton. Jeremić said that he hoped the resolution "would help create an atmosphere conducive to the creation of a comprehensive compact of peace between Serbs and Albanians achieved through good faith dialogue."