Mate Meštrović

Mate Meštrović (born 13 September 1930, Zagreb, Sava Banovina, Kingdom of Yugoslavia), also known as Matthew Mestrovic (or Matthew Meštrović), is an American journalist and academic, Croatian lobbyist, politician and ambassador. He is the son of the renowned Croatian-American sculptor Ivan Meštrović.

He attended grade school in Zagreb before his family moved to Italy in 1942. The family lived in Switzerland from 1943 to 1946 where he finished 'Ecole Internationale de Genève'. The family moved to the United States of America the following year where his father continued his work as an artist and where Mate would spend most of his life.

He graduated from university in 1951 and the following year received a master's degree in history at the University of Syracuse. From 1954 to 1956 Dr. Meštrović served as a lieutenant in the US Army PsyWar in the Pacific and is also a Korean War veteran. He earned a PhD from Columbia University in 1957. He worked as a Contributing Editor of TIME and wrote many articles for American and European newspapers and magazines, including Commonweal, The New Leader, “The Intelligence Report" of The Economist, etc. He taught as professor of Modern European history at New Jersey's Fairleigh Dickinson University and other US universities from 1967 to 1991. In 1986, he was awarded the prestigious Ellis Island Medal of Honor.

Mate (Matthew) Meštrović was active for the cause of Croatian independence during its time in Communist Yugoslavia. Meštrović led the Croatian National Congress. He visited Communist Yugoslavia for the first time in 1969. During this visit he made contacts with members of Hrvatski književni list and Matica hrvatska. From 1982 to 1990 he served as president of the Croatian National Council, an umbrella group of Croatian emigrant organizations which lobbied for Croatian independence. He lobbied on behalf of Croatian self-determination in Washington, Western Europe and Australia . In this capacity he was received by and Germany’s President Dr. Richard von Weizsäcker, the State Department, Quai d’Orsay, European Parliament, the British Foreign Office, etc.

Matthew Meštrović is the author of several books in English and Croatian, notably What you should know about Communism and why, The struggle for Croatia and In the whirlpool of Croatian Politics. He published in the US Dr. Franjo Tudjman’s book Nationalism in Contemporary Europe and Venko Markovski’s Goli Otok – The Island of Death, etc. He authored several political tracts, notably Violations of Human and National Rights of the Croatian People in Yugoslavia and Croatian Response to the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Science and Art.

Meštrović returned to Croatia in the early 1990s. Dr. Meštrović was a deputy in the Croatian Parliament (1993–1997), member of Croatia’s delegation to the Council of Europe and the Inter-Parliamentary Union and ambassador in Bulgaria (1997–2000). He is the recipient of several Croatian and Bulgarian decorations. Because of his father's, and his own political anticommunist beliefs and commitment to freedom, he was declared Enemy Number One of the Yugoslav State and a top CIA agent.

References

• What you should know about communism and why by Matthew Mestrovic
• Letter to a friend in blue mountains, Zlatko Tomičić
• http://assembly.coe.int/ASP/AssemblyList/ALMemberDetails.asp?MemberID=3874
• http://www.nybooks.com/articles/6208
• http://www.hungarian-history.hu/lib/bors/bors25.htm
• http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-6779(197212)31:4%3C930:HISDSR%3E2.0.CO;2-U
• http://www.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/xindex.pl?keyword=Mestrovic
• http://www.neco.org/awards/recipients/index2.html#m
• http://www.studiacroatica.org/revistas/101/1010801.htm
• http://www.knjiga.hr/04.asp?ID=13390&param=u
• http://hrvatska.poslovniforum.hr/nn-arhiva/00016/016ee.asp
• http://www.croatians.com/BIOGRAPHY-AMERICA-K-R.htm

Diplomatic posts
Preceded by Neven Jurica	0Ambassador of Croatia to Bulgaria0 1997–1999	Succeeded by Tonči Staničić