BELGRADE, May 18 — Dobrica Cosic, a nationalist Serb writer and former politician considered by admirers as the "father of the nation", has died, his family said Sunday. He was 92.

Cosic, born in 1921 in the central Serbian village of Velika Drenova, was the first president of the rump Yugoslavia after Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia and Bosnia broke away. He was in office for a year from June 1992.

Once a top official of the Yugoslav Communist party who split with the leader Josip Broz Tito in the mid-1960s, he was considered the main ideologist of Serbian hardline nationalism during the wars that tore Yugoslavia apart in the 1990s.

He wrote a number of books about Serb suffering through the ages. — AFP