Bogoljub Kočović
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Bogoljub Kočović (1920) is a Serbian statistician.
Kočović was born in Sarajevo. He obtained an MA in economy at the Roosevelt University in Chicago, and a Ph. D. in law in Paris. Kočović was an assistant in the French National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS) from 1947 to 1952 and worked on mathematics and statistics in the USA for ten years. In the 1960s, he returned to France, where he lives today.
His best known work is perhaps the book WWII Victims in Yugoslavia, published in London in 1985. Kočović compared the censuses from 1931 and 1948, assuming the possible population growth at 1.1% and emigration in that period, to obtain the demographic and actual losses of Yugoslavia in World War II. He has clearly stated that his estimates depend on these assumptions, and that assuming other growth would give different results.
He calculated that the actual losses were around 1,014,000 and the demographic losses around 1,925,000. He allowed for a margin of error of 250,000. However, the official number upheld by the Yugoslav communist regime was 1,706,000. Though Kocovic's estimate was rough, it indicated that the official figure is possibly too high. Kočović's book was ignored in his homeland until the breakup of Yugoslavia, when it was reprinted in Sarajevo in 1990. In the 1980s, independently from Kočović, Vladimir Žerjavić in Zagreb used a similar method and obtained similar results. However, Žerjavić did give much more detailed account of numbers and nationalities of dead, and has not expressed caution in interpretation of the results that Kočović did. Even Kočović has cast doubt on Žerjavić's motivation and professional honesty [citation needed]. He has called Žerjavić a Croatian nationalist because of his stance toward ex-Yugoslav wars in the 90s [citation needed]. However, Kočović has, upon the translation of his book into Serbian , expressly confirmed that he considered his work in the field scientifically valid and, ultimately, accurate. He went so far as to write a new book, published in 1997, with the aim of refuting the Serbian statistician Đorđević's efforts to "reinstate" the "great numbers" victims figures dominant during Communist Yugoslavia period[1]
Kočović was one of the founders of the Oslobođenje union in Geneva and Paris, and a contributor and editor of Naša reč. He is a member of the Association of Serbian Writers and Artists, as well as the Action Committee for the Democratic Alternative.
[edit] Works
- Žrtve drugog svetskog rata u Jugoslaviji (WWII Victims in Yugoslavia; London, 1985)
- Nauka, nacionalizam i propaganda (Science, Nationalism and Propaganda; Paris, 1998)
