Four Democrats Whom Tho Jailed
DRAGNICH, ALEX N.
Aging Socialists, scholars victims of Belgrade frameup Four Democrats Whom Tito Jailed By Alex N. Dragnich Lost in the outcries over the polemics between Tito and the Soviet bloc was the fate of...
...Alex N. Dragnich is professor of political science at Vanderbilt U...
...The regime charges that Zuj ovich smuggled these out of the country on a trip to Paris last year...
...He received a seven-year sentence...
...Bogdan Krekich, 65, head of the Yugoslav trade unions between the wars, a well known Social Democrat who was active in the labor movement and the People's Front after the war...
...He has now been sentenced to a new 8%-year term...
...It has been speculated that they were jailed as a means of appeasing Stalinists in the Soviet Union...
...Krekich, presumably with assistance from Pavlovich, had written a book, Profile of Tito's Yugoslavia, as well as the draft of a Social Democratic program...
...A prisoner of the Nazis for two years, he was sentenced to ten years in jail by Tito's regime after the war, but released after eight years as a result of Socialist and trade-union pressure from abroad...
...This was denied by all the defendants, as well as by the prosecution's chief witness, who in open court withdrew his pre-trial statements...
...But this railroad was one of Tito's own projects, conceived and planned while Pavlovich was in jail...
...Embassy to finance the building of a railroad from Belgrade to the Montenegrin port of Bar...
...aid was helping to build it...
...At the trial, Krekich openly asserted that he was "not a supporter of the one-party system," that he was opposed to "all dictatorships," and that he believed in "Social Democracy...
...As a result of the flimsiness of the evidence, the state prosecutor insisted that the court take into account the attitude of the four men throughout their entire lifetime: in other words, their non-Communist views...
...The prisoners are: • Alexander Pavlovich, 73, a member of the executive committee of the Serbian Social Democratic party before 1914, its deputy leader in the interwar years, and its representative in the Mikhailovich movement after 1943...
...Presumably, it has never been finished...
...When I was in Yugoslavia in the summer of 1952, U.S...
...University professors Dragoslav Stranjakovich (history) and Milan Zujovich (law), both near 60, who received six- and four-year sentences...
...Another charge was that Pavlovich had tried to persuade the U.S...
...Aging Socialists, scholars victims of Belgrade frameup Four Democrats Whom Tito Jailed By Alex N. Dragnich Lost in the outcries over the polemics between Tito and the Soviet bloc was the fate of four aging Yugoslav democrats, sentenced to harsh jail terms in Belgrade earlier this spring...
...Quite apart from the light this trial cast on Tito's judicial system (already illuminated by the trials of Milovan Djilas), the sentencing of these elderly men demonstrates anew the insecurity of Tito's regime...
...One of the defendants also repudiated a confession he had signed, which had been the basis of the indictment...
...But, now that Moscow has refused to be appeased, should not the innocent victims of Communist intrigue be released...
Vol. 41 • June 1958 • No. 22
