yugoslavias implosion

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ChApter 1
watched by the police. On one occasion in 1984, police raided a flat
where Milovan Đilas, a leading dissident, was giving a lecture entitled
“On the National Question in Yugoslavia.”
Twenty-eight people were arrested on flimsy charges; six were
sentenced to two years imprisonment (in the event, they were
released early). The way in which the case was handled highlighted
the disintegration and illegitimacy of the country’s legal system.
Furthermore, at that time the charges raised in this political show
trial just wouldn’t wash. The issue of free speech brought together
intellectuals from all over Yugoslavia.
Around the same time, the “Šeselj affair” unfolded. Accused in
Sarajevo of plagiarizing the work of a Muslim intellectual, Vojislav
Šešelj moved to Belgrade, where he was feted as a Serbian victim of
Muslim persecution in Sarajevo. He joined the Belgrade dissident
circle and in 1984 published “Essay on Socialism and Intellectuals,”
in which he alleged that by restricting freedom of speech, Socialism
had betrayed its ideals. 59 He was tried and convicted over the essay,
in which he had called the party undemocratic, had insisted that
the Serbs and Serbia had been discriminated against in Communist
Yugoslavia, and had suggested that the federation should comprise
only four republics: Slovenia, a reduced Croatia, Serbia, and Macedonia.
His eight-year prison sentence was reduced to two years on
appeal, and he later incorporated his intellectual recomposition of
Yugoslavia into the programmatic declaration of his Serbian Radical
Party (srs).
These affairs, which attracted international attention, provoked
protests and led to the establishment of the Committee to Protect
Freedom of Thought and Expression, made up of twenty-three
intellectuals, including Ćosić (the committee was often referred to
as the “Ćosić Committee”). In a 1991 interview with Politika, Ćosić
described the committee as a failure, though the struggle for political
59 Savremenik, 30/3–4, 1984 .