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.

[citation needed] 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".

After some time there, I very much grew to like the family that hosted me -- they were very liberal and progressive -- but despite all that, I remember still holding them in contempt to a certain extent, and thinking: 'Gee, what nice people, it really is such a shame they're such collaborators in all those horrific war crimes in Vietnam'.

[citation needed] 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 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.

[3] 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.

On 21 January 2006, she wrote an opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times criticizing both the NATO and the Serbian government for failing to arrest Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić, respectively.