American dreams may have been distant for most young men who grew up in Belgrade, more than 5,000 miles away from the United States. But as a boy, former Yugoslavian Prime Minister Milan Panic forged an early relationship with a land he saw rife with opportunity by carefully thumbing books he borrowed from an overseas American library in his hometown.
“My first education came in American libraries,” he remembered. “That’s where I found everything I needed.”
The pages of Mr. Panic’s beloved books held colorful maps of America’s expansive states. The funny oblong shape of California stretching across the country’s West Coast intrigued him most of all. He would dive into books and read about places like Pasadena—an interest that seemed almost prophetic in the late 1950s, when Mr. Panic moved to that very city and used $200 to start a pharmaceutical company out of his garage.
The company would grow into an international enterprise worth millions, but that’s only one of the many lives of Mr. Panic. As a teenager, he was a soldier in the resistance against Nazi rule in Yugoslavia. Later, he became a champion cyclist and member of Yugoslavia’s Olympic team. Once he came to the United States, his company developed drugs that have saved the lives of newborns too small to be incubated, including the son of former U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Henry Cisneros, Ph.D. ’76. His proudest accomplishment came in 1992, when Mr. Panic was appointed as prime minister of Yugoslavia and later helped broker peace negotiations in the war-torn Balkans.
On Monday, Mr. Panic brought his stories of armistices and achievements to the George Washington University community. He joined Professor Peter Rollberg, director of the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, in a discussion orbited around Mr. Panic’s new memoir, “Prime Minister for Peace: My Struggle for Serbian Democracy.”
The book chronicles the remarkable episodes of Mr. Panic’s storied past, from his adolescence fighting against the Nazis in Yugoslavia to his tenure leading the country’s government. Today, Mr. Panic uses his boundless energy to ardently promote peace throughout the world and champion what’s become something of a mantra for him: “No idea is worth killing for.”
“When I decided to make attempts to make peace in the Balkans, I was told the odds were a million to one. That didn’t stop me,” he said. “We don’t need strength or military to make the world better. We don’t need bombs. For every bomb, there has to be a better solution.”
Mr. Panic proudly calls himself an American citizen and sees the United States as the ultimate example and “cradle of the democratic concept and thinking.” He noted the powerful way in which people of various ethnic roots and communities coexist together on American soil.
But that also positions the United States to be a paragon for peace and pragmatic solutions and to avoid resolving problems with military solutions.
“The United States as the strongest leader of the world should be the leader of peace—not the leader of war. We need a Pentagon of peace,” Mr. Panic said.
Mr. Panic is passionate when he talks about the United States and explains it has to do with how the country has fostered his own goals and career aspirations. He expounded on this when freshman Leana Sherman, captivated by the trajectory of Mr. Panic’s company, asked what inspired him to overcome challenges while starting a business in the United States.
“ ‘What makes America work?’ she is asking,” Mr. Panic said. “I’ll be honest with you because this is a very nice question: I saw the opportunities when I came to the United States everywhere I turned around… It’s an unbelievable place of possibility, and for me, it was just a question of ‘Where do I go?’ ”
Ironically, when Mr. Panic came to the United States, his education background was in nuclear chemistry, a subject he studied in college. He easily could have secured a job that would have led to more weapons and warfare. However, he had seen conflict rip through Yugoslavia for too long and had begun to imagine a different way of life while dreaming of America over his borrowed childhood books.
“We should use our democratic concepts of life, which are so much better than anything else,” he said. “Less bombs, more American libraries.”