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Yugoslavia Djilas, Praxis, and Intellectual Repression
The most celebrated instance of dissident repression in
postwar Yugoslavia was the case of Milovan Djilas. His oftenpublished heretical political views brought Djilas official
denunciation by the LCY and imprisonment in the 1950s and 1960s,
despite his earlier close association with Tito. Djilas was
released from prison after the Rankovic era ended in 1966, but he
was harassed long afterward, and similar cases occurred through
the following decades. The majority of postwar dissident writers
were students and academics whose published material criticized
the Yugoslav political system or advocated regional political
diversity. Mihajlo Mihajlov, for example, was tried and jailed
several times between 1965 and 1975 for propaganda deemed
dangerous to the state. In many instances, established writers
such as the Serb Dobrica Cosic were allowed to criticize the
regime harshly (Cosic called Tito a "spiritual nihilist"), while
less influential figures were prosecuted for expressing the same
ideas.
In 1968 a group of intellectuals connected with the journal
Praxis began conducting an open polemic with the theories
of party ideologist Eduard Kardelj. The group soon gained a
substantial audience for its attacks on censorship, bureaucracy,
and economic planning mistakes. Because the Praxis group used
Marxist argumentation very effectively, many of its ideas were
applied by economic and political reformers in the early 1980s.
Tito finally succeeded in silencing Praxis in 1975, as part of a
crackdown on intellectual dissenters centered in Yugoslav
universities.
The most widely publicized dissident trial of the 1980s
involved the "Belgrade Six," a group of intellectuals arrested in
1984 for planning a meeting with Djilas (whose views remained
officially heretical). The group, which for several years had
official permission to meet, received international publicity
that eventually forced the government to free three members and
reduce the sentences of the others.
Throughout the 1980s, measures to control free speech had a
legal basis in the uneven civil rights provisions of the Yugoslav
Constitution. The Constitution did not specifically protect
privacy of communication from police interference; the illdefined concepts of "hostile propaganda," "fostering national
hatred," and "derogatory statements" were used to silence
troublesome protest voices, most often on the sensitive Kosovo
issue; and the lack of a habeas corpus principle made arbitrary
detention legal. Although criminal trials in Yugoslavia were open
to the public, political trials often were closed in the 1980s.
Such techniques were used irregularly, but their existence
remained a curb on popular expression
(see Dissidence
, ch. 5).
In the 1980s, the majority of known political prisoners in
Yugoslavia were ethnic Albanians involved in the Kosovo
liberation movement. In 1987 nearly all prisoners charged with
"most serious political criminal acts" were in this category.
According to Yugoslav sources, 1,652 people were tried for
political crimes between 1981 and 1985. The Kosovo crisis
generated isolated crackdowns on dissent in Serbia (a political
show trial in 1984), Slovenia (army court proceedings against
government critics in 1988), and Croatia (a blacklist of Croatian
intelligentsia in 1984). But public criticism of the government
continued in spite of such measures.
Data as of December 1990
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