Ante Lešaja

Ante Lešaja was born in 1931 on the island of Korčula. He spent the period of the Second World War on Korčula and lived under first the Italian and later the German occupation. In 1944 he became a member of SKOJ [Young Communist League of Yugoslavia]. After the Second World War, in 1946, thanks to an offer by the Czechoslovakian Government for the education of a certain number of young people from Yugoslavia as qualified workers or artisans, he went to study in Prague. Following the Informbiro Resolution in 1948, he returned to Yugoslavia and started working at the shipyard in Korčula. He continued his higher education in the field of economic science and became an economic expert; he worked at the Economic Institute in Zagreb, and later at the University of Zagreb and the University of Mostar. After retiring, he returned to Korčula and became involved with the establishment of the People's Library for the Municipality of Korčula. During the war in the 1990s he considered that a form of a 'culturocide' had been committed in Croatia. Because of that, and the manifest nationalism that appeared in Croatia, he opposed the governing structures. He is the author of several books.