Vladimir Dedijer

Origins and Family

Vladimir Dedijer was born in Belgrade, in the Kingdom of Serbia. His family originated from Čepelica, Bileća in Bosnia and Herzegovina. His father Jevto was a professor of geography at Belgrade University and his mother Milica a social worker. They had three sons: Borivoje (Boro), Vladimir, and Stevan. Before World War II, Vladimir married Olga Popovic. Their daughter Milica was born in the eve of the war. After Olga's death in 1943, Vladimir married Vera Krizman, an actress, in 1944. He and Vera had four children: daughter Bojana and three sons, Borivoje (Boro), Branimir (Branko), and Marko. Branko committed suicide at 13, after being interrogated about his father's activities, then sent home where he hanged himself. Boro committed suicide by jumping off a cliff just over his father's house in 1966. His father Vladimir believes that Boro was killed by Slovenian police.

Political and Revolutionary Activity

In his youth he attended the Conference for Reconciliation in Poland in 1929 as a delegate of Yugoslav high school youth. after, in 1931, he attended the XX World Congress of the Young Men's Christian Association in Cleveland, Ohio. After finishing high school, Dedijer worked for the daily newspaper Politika while studying law. As a journalist he was a foreign correspondent in Poland, Denmark, Norway (1935), England (1935-1936), and Spain (1936). For his support of the Republican government in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, he was fired from Politika in 1937 by order of the Yugoslav government.

During the 1930s Dedijer collaborated with the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY). Dedijer, as a journalist before and after the war, was, in the spirit of his Serbian ancestors, an independent thinker himself. "It is hard to be a Serb," he said once, "But how beautiful!"

Dedijer joined Yugoslav partisans in 1941 in their struggle against the Nazi Germany occupiers and served as Lieutenant Colonel in Tito's headquarters. During the war he was a political commissar with the rank of lieutenant colonel. In that capacity he carried out torture and murder of prisoners, including disillusioned former Communists like Živojin Pavlović.

His wife, Olga, a medical student who had become a partisan surgeon, was killed during the battle of Sutjeska in Bosnia in 1943. He was wounded then and on two other occasions after. The day after Olga Dedijer funeral he was seriously injured. Tito partisans promoted him to colonel and sent him to recover to Cairo and Naples. In 1944 Dedijer returned to Tito's Adriatic base Vis.

After the war he was a member of Yugoslav delegation on 1946 Paris peace conference and on several sessions of United Nations General Assembly (1945–1952). In 1952 he became a member of the Party's Central Committee and the following year he was appointed to the Federal Assembly. He was the sole member of the Communist Party to side in 1954 with Milovan Djilas when Djilas was deposed by Tito for criticizing a "New Class" of party bureaucrats and advocating the rule of law in socialism. Dedijer defended Djilas' freedom of expression before the Central Committee of the CPY in January 1954, and thus was expelled from the CPY, removed from his political offices, and dismissed from his teaching position in the History Department at the University of Belgrade. Djilas was jailed and Dedijer received a suspended prison sentence of six months.

University career

He was granted a passport by Yugoslav authorities in 1959 and was allowed to leave the country with his family. From then on, he devoted himself to writing history and teaching. He taught at University of Belgrade and was visiting professor of history at Michigan, Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Yale, Paris (Sorbonne), Manchester and Stockholm Universities.

He was a full member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts since 1978.

One of his most famous books is The Yugoslav Auschwitz and the Vatican: The Croatian Massacre of the Serbs During World War II which was translated in several languages. The editor preface of the 1992 book edition reads,

Another book, The Road to Sarajevo, discusses the origins of World War I. His book "Tito: a biography" was translated into twenty languages and all money he got from the book publishers ($ 530,000) Dedijer donated to charities. Dedijer wrote two important accounts of Partisan history: Diary and Tito, both of which have been published in English.

Human Rights Activity

He was considered a leading authority on genocide in the twentieth century. Together with Jean-Paul Sartre, chaired the Bertrand Russell International Tribune on War Crimes in the role of the first vice-president. The First International Russell Tribunal was set up in 1967 to adjudicate the war crimes committed by the US in Vietnam.The Tribunal was due to sit in Paris, but the French authorities refused to grant an entry visa to Dedijer. For that reason, the Tribunal held its first session in Stockholm, Sweden (May 2–10, 1967) and the second session in Roskilde, Denmark (Nov 20 - Dec 1 1967). Both sessions were presided by Dedijer. The sessions condemned the US for war crimes, aggression and genocide in the Vietnam war. Dedijer presided the Third International Russell Tribunal was constituted in Darmstadt, held on October 16, 1977. The Tribunal dealt with the denial of the right to practice their chosen profession because of their political convictions in West Germany.

In 1982 Dedijer launched a lawsuit against Kosta Nađ and Ivica Račan.

Dedijer died in Rhineback, New York on 30 November 1990. He was subsequently cremated and his ashes interred in Ljubljana, Slovenia.