Ljiljana Smajlović (née Ugrica; born 22 January 1956, Sarajevo, PR Bosnia-Herzegovina, FPR Yugoslavia) is a Serbian journalist and the former editor of Politika, the oldest daily newspaper in the Balkans. From 2009 to 2017, she was the president of the Serbian Journalists' Association (UNS). Early life and education Ljiljana Ugrica was born into a middle-class family of Bosnian Serbs. Her mother Danica, a native of Bihać, was involved in the People's Liberation Struggle on the Partisan side during World War II before remaining in the sanitary service after the war, reaching the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA); her father Mirko, from Serbia, was a member of the JNA's civil service. She said that "as a small girl, I found discussing the Cuban Missile Crisis and the relations between great powers much more interesting than playing with dolls". At the age of nine, with her mother and sister, she went to Algeria to attend a French boarding school. Upon returning home to Sarajevo, she began her secondary education at the First Sarajevo Gymnasium. In 1972, for the final year of secondary school, she received a scholarship from the American Field Service and moved to San Rafael, California, where she lived with an American host family for about a year. In 2013, looking back on her first experience in the United States, as a 16-year-old in the early 1970s, she said: After graduating secondary school, Ugrica began journalism studies at the University of Sarajevo's Faculty of Political Science. She received a scholarship for additional studies in Cleveland, Ohio. Journalism career Smajlović's first job was at Sarajevo's Oslobođenje daily in 1978 where she gradually advanced to the post of political section editor and later correspondent from Brussels. In 1992, after Bosnian War broke out, she moved to Belgrade where she got a job at Vreme weekly magazine. In 1994, she received a fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and moved to United States for a year, continuing to write for Vreme as a foreign correspondent. She specialized in international relations topics, developing an esteemed reputation, which led to Slavko Ćuruvija offering her a job as foreign editor at his upstart bi-weekly magazine Evropljanin in 1998. Following the tragic end to Ćuruvija's life, Evropljanin ceased publication forcing Smajlović and other journalist to look for work. She got a job at NIN initially as the Hague Tribunal