From New York Times, Monday, December 3, 1984

ABROAD AT HOME: Kafka Up To Date
By ANTHONY LEWIS
c.1984 N.Y. Times News Service
    BOSTON - In 1981 a Yugoslav named Milan Nikolic was a graduate
student here at Brandeis University. For one course he did a paper on
the structure of Yugoslav society. Writing from a democratic
socialist perspective, he criticized what he called the privileged
position of managers and bureaucrats.
    Today Nikolic is a criminal defendant in Yugoslavia, charged with
taking part in ''activities aimed at the weakening of the
socio-political system and at the overthrow of the existing
authorities.'' He faces a prison sentence of up to 15 years. And a
principal item of evidence against him is the paper he wrote for
Brandeis.
    Nikolic is one of six defendants in a strange and significant
political trial. It is the first show trial in Eastern Europe in
years - and it is taking place not in Prague or Warsaw but in
Belgrade. Its significance lies just there: as a test of the belief
that Yugoslavia has a different, less repressive brand of communism.
    The hopeful Western image of Yugoslavia is mocked by everything in
this prosecution. The charges, the procedure, the public atmosphere:
All are throwbacks to crude repression.
    The charges relate to meetings held over the last seven years by
eight professors expelled from Belgrade University for political
unorthodoxy. Every two weeks they held discussions in someone's home,
not only on economics and politics but on such subjects as Zen
Buddhism, feminism, and the effect of cartoons on children.
    Last April 20 Milovan Djilas, the grand old Yugoslav dissident,
attended one of those sessions for the first time. Police broke up
the meeting and arrested the 28 persons there. Several were
reportedly badly beaten, and one subsequently died under mysterious
circumstances. Six men who attended the meetings from time to time -
four were there April 20 - were then indicted.
    The charges could have been written by Kafka, so vague are they. The
indictment says, for example, that the six ''read texts in front of
large numbers of persons'' and ''gave these texts to each other,''
without indicating what was wrong with them. It describes the
professors' discussions as ''illegal meetings'' although they were
open to anyone, were not secret, and went on for seven years without
interference.
    In the two weeks of the trial that have been held so far the big
prosecution witness was a woman who was supposedly present when the
counterrevolutionary conspiracy started in 1977. But she testified
that she was asked only to give a lecture in her field: extrasensory
perception.
    Milan Nikolic's Brandeis paper, seized by the police in a search of
his flat, was a major item of evidence. His professor at Brandeis,
Ralph Milliband, a British socialist, says of the paper: ''It is
nothing more than a critical survey of Yugoslavia. The notion that it
is 'counterrevolutionary' or anti-socialist or any such is degrading
nonsense.''
    Most of the defendants chose as their lawyer Srdja Popovic, who has
served in other political cases and is well known in the West. But
the prosecutor then listed him as a potential witness, without
explanation, and under Yugoslav law that disqualified him. He was
also questioned by the secret police for 12 hours.
    The defendants are themselves an oddity in the case. They are
little-known intellectuals with no personal following. It is almost
as if they were chosen to make a point - to warn Yugoslavs against
letting their minds range too freely - without arousing much adverse
reaction in the world.
    Most unusual is the indication that the Yugoslav party leadership is
divided about the case. In September, before the trial started, a
member of the collective presidency of Slovenia, Janz Stanovnik, told
a New York Times correspondent that he would be ''very, very
unhappy'' if it went ahead. Those who were pressing the prosecution,
he said, wanted to ''prevent further critical analysis of social and
political concepts that have been taboo.''
    But the trial did go ahead last month. And as it did, the Yugoslav
press mounted a crude campaign to depict the accused - who have been
charged with no violence at all - as ''dangerous terrorists.''
Western observers at the trial, including one from the American
Embassy, took the campaign as a sign that the defendants are headed
for heavy sentences.
    The trial, which has been in recess, is scheduled to resume this
Thursday. The Yugoslav government has the power to go ahead and crush
these six individuals. But if it does, it will pay the real price -
in the disappointment, the criticism it will evoke among people of
all political views in the West.