Miladin Zivotic, 66, Serb Foe of Nationalism

By CHRIS HEDGES

SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina, March 5 - Miladin Zivotic, a leading dissident during the Communist era in Yugoslavia and one of the most prominent domestic critics of Serbian involvement in the Balkan wars, died at his home in Belgrade on Feb.26. He was 66.

The cause of death was a heart attack, his family said.

Mr. Zivotic was the leader of the Belgrade Circle, a small group or intellectuals and artists who con-demned the Serbian role in the wars in Bosnia and Croatia. The group, which he helped found in 1992 and which included Yugoslavia's best-known dissident, Milovan Djilas, tried to reach out to Muslims and Croats to create a common front against nationalist movements in the Balkans. It was often denounced by the authorities as being a tool of Serbia's enemies.

To register his disapproval of the siege of Sarajevo by the' Bosnian Serbs, Mr. Zivotic visited the city in 1993, slipping through Bosnian Serb lines.

He was also an outspoken critic of Serbia's treatment of non-Serbs within its borders, especially the some two million Albanians in the Kosovo region. And when national-ists began to threaten Muslims in the Sanjak region of Serbia early in the Bosnian war he went to live with Mus-lim familles. "This is not just the death of an individual, but the death of an intel-lectual tradition," said Obrad Savic, the editor of the Belgrade Circle journal. ̉He was rejected all his life. He lived on the margins. But he never gave up his engagement in the world He believed passionately in the common humanity of all people and endured great hardship and loneliness in his battle for human decency."

Despite his stature he was ignored by the Serbian press, even the opposition press, and was never invited to speak at the anti-Government protests that gripped Belgrade for the last three months.

The decision by student and opposition leaders to keep him away came because of his firm belief that Serbian society could only renew it-self by accepting the blame for the Balkan wars and ridding itself of Serbian nationalist invective that he denounced as racist. "The first act any new president of this country must do is travel to Sarajevo and beg for forgiveness, just as Willy Brandt did when "he traveled to Warsaw," he said in an interview shortly before his death, referring to the West German Chan-cellor who pursued a policy of reconciliation with the enemies of German Nazism. "This is the only way we can begin to heal ourselves."

Such language still angers many Serbs who insist that they are "The victims in the war and attack The Serbian President, Slobodan Milosevic, not for starting the war but for withdrawing Belgrade's support for the Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia.

Mr. Zivotic first came to promi-nence in 1968, when Yugoslav university students staged anti-Communist protests at the time of the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. For their support of the students he and seven other philosophy professors were dismissed. He started the Free-Belgrade University, which met secret-ly in houses and whose classes were often broken up by the police.

Mr. Zivotic did not return to his University of Belgrade post until 1987, seven years after the death of Tito.

Soon after he regained his old position, he found himself ostracized again becuase of his condemnation of growing Serbian nationalism. As the wave of nationalism swept through the educational system he was denounced by students and professors as a traitor to the Serbian cause, and he retired in 1994.

Although a searing critic of his own society, Mr. Zivotic was reluctant to criticize Serbia's opponents. After a lengthy critique of the Serbi-an Orthodox Church, which he con-demned as "the cradle of Serbian a-tionalism and an enemy of modernity," he was asked to assess the role of the Roman Catholic Church, the dominant religion in Croatia, in the conflict between Serbia and Croatia.

"My role is to examine and criti-cize myself and my society," he said. "It is up to the Croatians to examine themselves. I am not competent to be their critic. Ask them." He is survived by a son, Aleksan-dar, and a daughter, Dragana Jovi-cevic, as well as his former wife, Milica, and two grandchildren.