Belgrade trials mark setback for the repression As the presiding judge, Zoran Stojkovic, began on February 4 to give the grounds for the verdict of guilty against the film maker Miodrag Milic, the sociologist Milan Nikolie and the journalist Dragomir Olujic, a large part of the public demonstratively walked out of the packed court room in the Belgrade Palace of Justice.
While the sentence of one to two years in prison for "hostile propaganda" represented a compromise in the top circles, as Milan Nikolic explained in response to the decision, it aroused no less indignation among critical intellectuals in Yugoslavia. Branko KRIZMAN
More than 300 friends and sympathizers of the accused had come to hear the verdiet. The crowd was so big that the court was moved from the hall where the trial had been conducted for three months to the biggest available hall in the building. This was something that had been refused before despite appeals from the defense lawyers and the public since the start of the trial.
Deployment of large numbers of police in and around the Palace of Justice showed that the authorities feared that there might be street protests.
Undoubtedly many friends of the accused had been quietly hoping that they would be released. In recent weeks, the course of the trial made it appear possible that the upper hand in the party leadership had been gained by the forces that wanted to repair the harm that this case had done to Yugoslavia internationally.
In mid-January, the state prosecutor, Janilo Nanovie dropped the charges of "forming counterrevolutionary groups" and "attempting to overthrow the social system" that had originally been made against the six defendants in connection with the "Free Universities."
The translator Pavlusko Imsirovic was cleared of all charges. The case against the previous chief defendants, Vladimir Mijanovic and Gordan Jovanovic was separated out. And the three remaining defendants were now "only" to be tried for "hostile propaganda."
All of the nineteen witnesses, except one, who the defendants said was a police spy, entirely absolved the defendants. The court refused to accept the defense witnesses. But over three months, which is a very long time for a political trial in Yugoslavia, the state prosecutor could not produce even a shred of evidence of the purported "conspiratorial" nature of the Free Universities.
The remaining three defendants were sentenced finally for statements made in discussions and in manuscripts seized by
Milan Nikolic (DR) the police from their desk drawers. In the case of Milan Nikolic this involved a three-year-old doctoral treatise in English on "Social Structures and the Overcoming of Conflict in Yugoslav Society" for the well-known Marxist sociologist Ralph Miliband, as well as an article by a British author on the Kosovo problem from the London magazine New Left Review. [Kosovo is where the Albanian minority is concentrated.]
Miodrag Milic was working on a "History of the Yugoslav Revolution." He got his two-year sentence for parts of the text in which he described the Yugoslav Communist Party before 1948 as Stalinist and criticized aspects of its policy in the antifascist liberation struggle.
Olujie's "crime" was that he supposedly talked about the possibility of a wave of strikes in the present crisis in Yugoslavia, and advocated the strongest and freest trade unions.
International Viewpoint 25 February 1985
In tha summary for the dofanatha In the summary for the defense, the defendant's lawyer stressed that the charges had to do strictly with crimes of opinion, that there was no evidence that the accused had conducted any real
"propaganda" based on these views.
The accused themselves rejected all the accusations and defended themselves politically. All three described themselves explicitly during the trial as "soc- selves explicitly during the trial as "socialists and Marxists."
"I thank the state prosecutor," Olujie said ironically in his final statement, "for explaining to us how the power of the working class can be undermined by the idea of free trade unions."
In his one-hour-long final statement, Milan Nikolic outlined a veritable program for socialist democracy. He warned of the danger of a Stalinist or capitalist restoration in Yugoslavia, and pointed to an evolution toward socialist democracy as the only acceptable solution to the present social crisis in the country.
"Socialist democracy," Nikolie said, "must be more developed than bourgeois "must be more developed than bourgeois democracy. The persecution of critical intellectuals must stop. Blue-collar workers, farmers and white-collar workers need freedom for political initiative, freedom to criticize the leadership, freedom to organize themselves and to defend their interests. Genuine self-management in the economy and the state favors the abolition of any sort of organizational or ideological monopoly." Copies of this speech are circulating today throughout Yugoslavia. Committee for the Defense of Freedom of Thought and Opinion
However, it would be false to describe all the intellectuals critical of the regime who have come to the defense of the accused in past months as socialists. On the basis of a defense of human and civil rights, an alliance developed between socialist oppositionists standing in the tradition of the journal Praxis and the 1968 student movement, and personalities of a humanitarian and liberal orientation. The expression of this common front was the formation last fall of a Committee for the Defense of Freedom of Thought and Opinion in Belgrade.
If it was the objective of the "hard" wing of the Yugoslav leadership grouped around the Slovene Stane Dolane and the Bosnian Branko Mikulic to silence the critical intellectuals by means of this trial, then the attempt was a fundamental failure. In fact, there was even a new session of the Free Universities in Belgrade at the end of January.
On the day that the charges against him were dropped, Pavlusko Imsirovic issued an invitation, in front of the state prosecutor and the court, to a series of lectures on "civil liberties, crimes of opinion and the trials underway" in his home. Thirty people came to the session, and the discussion lasted throughout the night. However, this affair is far from ended. The former chief defendants, Vladimir International Viewpoint 25 February 1985
Mijanovic and the student Gordan Jovanic, still formally face the old charges
"organizing counterrevolutionary of groups," and it cannot be excluded that there will be a second trial.
The three defendants sentenced have filed an appeal and they remain free.
But they have declared that if they are jailed, they will immediately go on hunger strike.
1 am a critical Marxist, a communist, a Trotskyist'