Ante Trumbic
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Ante Trumbić (May 17, 1864 - November 17, 1938) was an influential Croatian nationalist leader from the early 20th century.
Trumbić was born in Austro-Hungarian province of Dalmatia and studied law at Zagreb, Vienna and Graz (with doctorate in 1890). He practised as a lawyer, and then, from 1905 as the city mayor of Split. Trumbić was in favor of moderate reforms in Austro-Hungarian Slavic provinces. At the same time separatist and pan-Slavist movements were troubling politics in Serbia.
After the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Trumbić fled to Italy and was the prime mover of the "Yugoslav Committee" that operated out of London trying to convince the Serbian government of Nikola Pasic that an equal union of Croats, Slovenes and Serbs would serve the interest of the South Slavs, discussions that led to the Corfu Declaration, signed in the summer of 1917. Crown Prince Alexander, acting as regent for the claimant King Peter I of Serbia, endorsed the Yugoslav concept.
In 1918 he became foreign minister in the first government of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. At the Versailles conference after World War I, Trumbić had to represent Yugoslav concerns in the face of Italian territorial ambitions in Dalmatia (temporarily settled in 1920, but raised again with Benito Mussolini). Trumbic resigned as Foreign Minister in 1920, as Serbian domination became the policy in the kingdom that was to have represented all the minority interests among South Slavs. He was elected to the Constituent Assembly and, in the final vote, voted against the constitution.
By 1929, when King Alexander of Yugoslavia abrogated the constitution to establish a royal dictatorship, Trumbić was in retirement in Zagreb.
External link
- FirstWorldWar.com biography of Ante Trumbic (http://www.firstworldwar.com/bio/trumbic.htm)bg:Анте Трумбич