22 MAY 1976, Page 8

Popovic's trials

David Boulton

No one asked President Tito about his political prisoners when he visited Athens last week on the eve of his eighty-fourth birthday. In contrast, he seems to have been asked about nothing else on his state visit to Sweden last month. 'We only jail Stalinists', he assured the Swedes, apparently unaware that his Minister of the Interior back in Belgrade had put the number of pro-Moscow plotters at no more than thirty out of 200 political prisoners now under trial, and an estimated 800 serving sentence.

The steady, ominous increase iri prosecutions of dissidents—now running at three a day—in what remains by reputation the most liberal and least dogmatic communist country in the world has baffled Yugoslavia watchers.

Take the odd case of Srdja Popovic. He's a thirty-eight-year-old lawyer and a specialist in defending dissidents, a job which keeps him increasingly busy. It began with his defence of student leaders in 1968, continued through scores of major cases including the celebrated affair of the 'Praxis' trials, and looks like having ended abruptly with the Ignjatovic affair.

Dragoljub Ignjatovic is described in Belgrade as 'a good second-class poet'. One February day in 1974 he delivered a lecture on 'Culture and Revolution' which upset one member of his audience, the man from the STB—Yugoslavia's secret police. Ignjatovic was so bold as to say that Yugoslavia had a high rate of inflation, low productivity, a falling standard of living for the working class, and a social system which was 'neither capitalism nor socialism, but a kind of semibarbarism'.

Although the lecture was delivered at a writers' convention, the STB man recognised it as politics. Ignjatovic was accused of 'hostile propaganda' and asked Popovic to defend him. The lawyer took the simple line that,his client's 'propaganda', whether hostile or no, consisted of facts which could be verified by reference to official statistics on the economy. Since the prosecution had failed to produce evidence to refute the accused's statements of fact, Popovic argued, they must be taken to be true. The court decided otherwise and, on 9 April 1974, sentenced Ignjatovic to three and a half years imprisonment. So a poet with the most modest of followings was transformed into a martyr and adopted by Amnesty International.

Then, it seemed, someone in Belgrade caught on to the fact that Ignjatovic's prosecutors had done more harm to Yugoslavia's reputation than the young poet could ever do. Ignjatovic was released after only twenty days on 'compassionate grounds due to ill health', and was formally pardoned the following year in September 1975. Then, just a month later, in a move unprecedented in Yugoslav or probably any other law, Popovic himself was charged with 'spreading false news' in his defence of Ignjatovic.

The International Commission of Jurists attempted to intercede with Tito without success and at the beginning of March the case came to trial in Valjevo, a small town fifty miles from Belgrade. Incredibly, the prosecutor argued that to cliam his client's facts were true amounted to a repetition of his client's drime: so Popovic was as guilty as Ignjatovic. Moreover, said the prosecution, Popovic's offending defence speech had been made 'with malicious intent' (a charge which was only added just before the trial). The district court heard two prosecution witnesses, refused to hear any of the nine witnesses listed for the defence and sentenced Popovic to one year in jail. The sentence, if confirmed on appeal, means he is automatically disbarred from legal practice, ridding the regime of a major nuisance.

Popovic has filed a persuasive appeal, which distinguishes between the verifiable facts which he pleaded in his client's defence and the opinions which lgnjatovic himself expressed. The Serbian appellate court is expected to hear the appeal within a few weeks. Despite the alarming implications of his case for the entire legal profession, the Yugoslav Bar Association has failed to speak out on his behalf. But a group of thirty-two influential writers and intellectuals, led by former Partisan hero and one-time Central Committee member Dobrica Gosic, have shown more courage. Their appeal, addressed to the party presidium but not yet published, is uncompromising. The Popovic verdict is ridiculed as 'logically impossible, legally astonishing and politically harmful'. And, reaching to the nub of the matter, the appeal points out that 'the conviction actually declares illegal the institution.of defence in our system of criminal law'.

The affair raises a host of questions now being hotly debated in Belgrade. At what level are prosecutions like this decided on? Government level or that of the local, perhaps over-zealous, police chief? Does Tito know what's going on? If he does, does he care, or can he stop it ? Is he still the strong man of the Balkans or, two years Mao's senior, is he too old to exercise effective power? What do the trials tell us about the likely shape of Titoism after Tito? And what effect will the suppression of dissent in Yugoslavia have on the political fortunes of the neighbouring communist party in Italy? Popolic awaits the result of his appeal. There may be more at stake than one man's career and freedom.