Belgrade trials mark setback stant conflicts with the trade-union bureaucracy despite rank and file support.
Supporters of the Dutch section of the for the repression
Fourth International, the SAP, explained that they had two main aims in the campaign of solidarity; firstly to centralise all existing committees round the coun
As the presiding judge, Zoran Stojkovic, began on February 4 to give the try and establish solidarity a national grounds for the verdict of guilty against the film maker Miodrag Milic, paper and, secondly, to try to campaign the sociologist Milan Nikolie and the journalist Dragomir Olujic, a large for a coal boycott.
part of the public demonstratively walked out of the packed court room
Dutch trade-union officials have stated that they are willing to boycott but in
While the sentence of one to two years in prison for "hostile propapractice have done nothing about it. In ganda" represented a compromise in the top circles, fact, two weeks ago the national headexplained in response to the decision, it aroused no less indignation among quarters of the FNV (the general trade- union confederation) was occupied by more than 100 angry trade unionists demanding a boycott. In West Germany trade-union leaders met with the TUC
(British trade-union confederation) and signed a public statement pledging boycott but have since declared that it was only to give support to the NUM and could not be done in practice. Still some dock workers have been picketing the Rhein port of Duisburg in particular to try to stop the coal.
supporters outlined plans for organising a specific women's tour which had been so successfully achieved in West Germany and the Dutch representative remarked upon the fact that it was the women's union in the
Netherlands which had first taken up solidarity with the miners and forced the tradeunion bureaucracy into action. The speakers noted that the strike had also attracted young people and in particular the squatters' movement in Amsterdam.
There is no doubt that despite the hostility of many trade-union sections of the European workers' movement indentify very strongly with the
British miners and understand what is in store for them if the miners lose. Everyone agreed that international solidarity was paramount.
suggestions from the
Spanish and Danish representatives in particular that tours and solidarity actions be organised to coincide with the anniversary of the strike on March 12. In Dena day of action is being proposed and this could become a day of international action. In Britain activities will be organised on March 6 to commemorate a year of the strike which will also coincide with demonstrations wives for International Women's Day.
Another proposal was that an international appeal be launched to fight the which the miners and families are enduring and will continue to endure long after the strike is over.
The miners' strike has united sections of the European workers' movement behind it and the Fourth International pledged itself to continue the international solidarity campaign.
in the Belgrade Palace of Justice. critical intellectuals in Yugoslavia.
More than 300 friends and sympathizers of the accused had come to hear the verdict. 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 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 internation-
In mid-January, the state prosecutor, Janilo Nanovic dropped the charges of "forming counterrevolutionary groups" and "attempting to overthrow the social 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 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 as Milan Nikolic 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
"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 "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 strug.
Olujie's "crime" was that he supposedly talked about the possibility of a wave of strikes in the present crisis in Yugo slavia, and advocated the strongest and freest trade unions.
International Viewpoint 25 February 1985
----- pull-quotes on this page -----
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
Mijanovic and the student Gordan Jovanic, still formally face the old charges
"organizing counterrevolutionary 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.
politically.
All three described them-
'1 am a critical Marxist, selves explicitly during the trial as "socialists and Marxists."
a communist, a Trotskyist'
"I thank the state prosecutor," Olujic said ironically statement, in his final
"for explaining to us how the power of
Interview with Pavlusko Imsirovic the working class can be undermined by the idea of free trade unions."
In his one-hour-long final statement,
We publish below an interview with Pavlusko Imsirovic, one of the original
Milan Nikolic outlined a veritable program for socialist democracy. He warned
In a surprise announcement on January 23, shortly after Imsirovic had of the danger of a Stalinist or capitalist announced his intention of going on hunger strike in protest at the conrestoration in Yugoslavia, and pointed to duct of the trial, all charges against the author and translator were dropan evolution toward socialist democracy as the only acceptable solution to the pre-
This interview was conducted in late 1984 when the charges against sent social crisis in the country.
him were still pending. It is taken from the winter issue of Gegenstimmen,
"Socialist democracy,
" Nikolie said,
"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 dropped, Pavlusko Imsirovic were issued an invitation, in front of the state prosecutor and the court, to a series of
"civil liberties, crimes of lectures on 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 six accused in the Belgrade trial. published in Vienna.
Question. You are one of the six in the trial of intellectuals in Belgrade who participated in the 'free universities' movement. At the beginning of the trial the defence was mainly raising issues of proc-
You challenged jury members Can you explain your
Answer. It was important to know whether the jury members were going to be guided solely by the law or whether they felt bound by other considerations coming from the decisions and discipline of the party.
My question on this issue got no response with the judge announcing that such questions were not allowed. I demanded the exclusion of all judges and members of the jury who did not want to reply to this question. They did not follow up my demand and told me that we would have to give the names of all those who we were demanding be excluded for bias.
Q. You also raised a question concerning all those in the jury who could have been members of the political police?
A. Yes, I did. I asked whether there in the jury anybody who had been was a member of the security section of the state apparatus. The reply was that the judge did not know of any-
Q. Have you or your defence council had any information on people serving on
A. No, there is no way you can get information of this kind. I do not know any of the jury members. When we asked for information, the judge refused to give it to us.
Q. In other words you just get to know their names and that is it?
A. Exactly, nothing more.
Q. You have already before a tribunal, ten years ago?
Paulusko Imsirovic (DR) before the same tribunal and on the same charge in the penal code of "setting up an association against the people and the state'. This was also a trial for crimes of opinion and expres sion. I was active in the student movement, with my companion and other colleagues. Those accused alongside me were my future wife, Jelka and the sociologist Milan Nikolic, who is also with me at the tribunal today.
Q. Were you found guilty at that time?
A. Yes, of course. Yugoslav tribunals always find you guilty, at least in political trials. I was sentenced to two years in prison, which is what I served
Q. How would you compare the way in which this trial is being conducted with the previous one. Are there any differences? There must have been some changes in the last ten years?
A. You can't see much fundamental difference that point of view. In fact the judge at the time was also very
7