Bogoljub Kočović

Who is Bogoljub Kočović?

Bogoljub Kočović is a Bosnian jurist and statistician, Yugoslav by ethnic affiliation.

Kočović was born in Sarajevo; his father was a Serb and mother French by origin. He obtained a MA in economy at the Roosevelt University in Chicago, and a Ph. D. in law in Paris. Kočović was a research assistant in the French National Center of Scientific Research from 1947 to 1952 and worked 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 in Sebo-Croatian. Kočović compared the censuses from 1921, 1931 and 1948, and, assuming the possible population growth at 1.1% and emigration in that period, obtained the demographic and actual losses of Yugoslavia during the World War II. He clearly stated that his estimates depended on these assumptions, and that if other population growth were assumed, different results would have been obtained.

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.