VLADIMIR MIJANOVIĆ: PRILOZI ZA BIOGRAFIJU
VLADIMIR MIJANOVIĆ: CONTRIBUTIONS FOR A BIOGRAPHY

Summary/Abstract: Vladimir Mijanović (1946-2021) was one of the leaders of the student movement in SFR Yugoslavia who became prominent during the student strike in Belgrade in June 1968. He was one of the principal organizers of the strike action at the Philosophy Faculty in June 1968 and as the president of the Association of Students of that Faculty he continued to organize various political activities at the Faculty after June 1968 (such as a satirical student journal, a hunger strike in solidiarity with the miners in the Kakanj mine in Bosnia etc). In 1970 he was put on trial for enemy propaganda and served a year in prison. In 1973 he was also imprisoned for one year, while being conscript in the Yugoslav People's army, for (allegedly) harming the reputation of the state and its organs (that is, its lifelong president Tito). Having come out of prison and military service in 1974, he was engaged in circulating dissident petitions and from 1980 on in organizing the dissident Open university. In the later stage of the tumultous 1984 trial of six dissidents in Belgrade, the prosecution dropped the case against him. He lived in the USA from 1988 until 2006; upon his return to Belgrade he participated in various public protests — against the degradation of the environment and against forced evictions of tenants — and also helped to care for asylum seekers passing through Serbia. For these post-2010 public protests he made his own protest banners some of which suggest that he still upheld the ideals of his youth, in particular his rejection of capitalism. In 2021, a few months before his death, the Higher Court in Belgrade quashed all his previous convictions and fully rehabilitated him as a victim of ideologically and politically motivated repression.

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