Committee for the Defence of Freedom of Thought and Expression: For political democracy

Abstract

The unofficial Committee for the Defence of Freedom of Thought and Expression, whose proposal is published below, was formed in Belgrade on 10 November 1984 on the initiative of Dobrica Cosic, one of the most popular Serbian novelists. The committee represent the whole spectrum of Belgrade opinion from Marxist philosophers of the Praxis group (Mihailo Marković, Ljubomir Tadić, Zagorka Golubović), ‘nationalists’ (Mića Popović, Matija Bećković), pre-war party veterans (Gojko Nikolis, Tanasije Mladenović), advocates of a pluralistic socialist democracy (Kosta Cavoski, Ivan Janković) to public figures affirming the rule of law. Twelve are members of the prestigious Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and all of them are leading figures. The Committee has issued over 50 protests against human rights abuse involving not only Serbs but also Croats, Bosnian Moslems, Slovenes, ethnic Albanians in the province of Kosovo and members of the Hungarian minority in the Vojvodina. In October 1986 the Committee put forward an eleven-point plan for the establishment of the rule of law in Yugoslavia (see Index on Censorship, 2/87) and recommended the abolition of the tenure of monopoly power by any single political party. The next step came in November 1987 when the Committee released a petition for the introduction of political democracy in the SFRY (Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia). The text of the petition, addressed to the Federal Assembly and the Yugoslav public, follows. The translation comes from the London-based South Slav Journal.