Slobodan Uzelac, Ph.D., is the current Vice Prime Minister

Government of Croatia

The Government of the Republic of Croatia , commonly abbreviated to Croatian Government , is the main element of the executive branch of government in Croatia. It is led by the President of the Government , commonly abbreviated to premier...

 of Croatia for Regional Development, Reconstruction and Return. He is the member of Serbian minority

Serbs of Croatia

Višeslav of Serbia, a contemporary of Charlemagne , ruled the Županias of Neretva, Tara, Piva, Lim, his ancestral lands. According to the Royal Frankish Annals , Duke of Pannonia Ljudevit Posavski fled, during the Frankish invasion, from his seat in Sisak to the Serbs in western Bosnia, who...

 in Croatia

Croatia

Croatia , officially the Republic of Croatia , is a unitary democratic parliamentary republic in Europe at the crossroads of the Mitteleuropa, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean. Its capital and largest city is Zagreb. The country is divided into 20 counties and the city of Zagreb. Croatia covers ...

.

He offered his resignation in March 2008, after Croatian Government made a decision to recognize unilateral declaration of independence by Kosovo

Kosovo

Kosovo is a region in southeastern Europe. Part of the Ottoman Empire for more than five centuries, later the Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija within Serbia...

. However, Prime Minister Ivo Sanader

Ivo Sanader

Ivo Sanader |Split]]) is a Croatian politician who served as the Prime Minister of Croatia from 2003 to 2009.Sanader obtained his education in comparative literature in Austria, where he also later worked in the 1980s. He worked as a journalist, in marketing, publishing and also as a private...

 did not accept his resignation, and the Independent Democratic Serb Party subsequently decided against withdrawing its member from the government.

Slobodan Uzelac received his Ph.D. in medicine from the University of Belgrade

University of Belgrade

The University of Belgrade is the oldest and largest university of Serbia.Founded in 1808 as the Belgrade Higher School in revolutionary Serbia, by 1838 it merged with the Kragujevac-based departments into a single university...

 (Belgrade Medical School

University of Belgrade School of Medicine

The Belgrade Medical School is a constituent institution of the University of Belgrade, which offers a wide range of academic courses in Serbian and English, including specialist practice within a network of hospitals, institutes and medical clinics...

) in 1981. He was a guest lecturer at the Penn State University in 2001.

Uzelac is the president of Serbian Cultural Society «Prosvjeta».

In addition to Serbo-Croatian

Serbo-Croatian language

Serbo-Croatian or Serbo-Croat, less commonly Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian , is a South Slavic language with multiple standards and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro...

, Uzelac also speaks English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

 and Russian

Russian language

Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...

. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the democratic left magazine Novi Plamen

Novi Plamen

Novi Plamen is a left-wing magazine for political, social and cultural issues primarily aimed at intellectual audiences on the territory of the former Yugoslavia and the related diaspora. It is a leading publication of its kind in the region, published by the Demokratska misao publishing company...

.