Sinan Hasani

Sinan Hasani (Serbian Cyrillic: Синан Хасани; 14 May 1922 – 28 August 2010) was a Yugoslav novelist, statesman, diplomat and a former President of Presidency Yugoslavia, a revolving form of executive leadership which rendered him the President of Yugoslavia at the time as well. He was of Albanian ethnicity.

Early life and career

Hasani finished primary school and Gazi Isa-bey madrasah (high school) in Skopje. He became a writer and wrote his first Albanian language novel "The Grape Starts to Ripen" in 1957.

Hasani joined the Yugoslav Partisan resistance movement in 1941, during the war, and the Yugoslav Communist Party in 1942. He found himself in Nazi German captivity in 1944, and spent time in a POW camp near Vienna until the end of World War II. After the war, he attended the Đuro Đaković party school in Belgrade (1950–52). Later, he became leader of the Socialist Union of the Working People mass organization in Kosovo, and was from 1965 to 1967 manager of the Kosovar publishing house Rilindja. From 1971 to 1974, he was the Yugoslav ambassador to Denmark. In 1975 he was elected Deputy Speaker of the Yugoslav Federal Assembly, and remained in that position until he became the leader of the League of Communists of Kosovo in 1982.