Srđa M. Popović
| Srđa Popović | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
24 February 1937 Belgrade, Kingdom of Yugoslavia |
| Died | 29 October 2013 (aged 76) Belgrade, Serbia |
| Nationality | Serbian |
| Occupation | Lawyer, activist |
| Spouse(s) |
Vesna Pešić Natalija Arežina Lana Budimlić |
Srđa M. Popović (pronounced [sr̩̂d͜ʑa pǒpoʋit͜ɕ]; 24 February 1937 – 29 October 2013) was a Yugoslav lawyer and political activist.
Srđa Popović was born on 24 February 1937 in Belgrade to his mother Dana and father Miodrag (1907-1987), a lawyer who represented repressed communists in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia during the interwar period and later continued his practice in the communist Yugoslavia. Popović has an older sister Gordana who also became a lawyer.
Popović self-identified as a Yugoslav from an early age: "During World War II, my parents sent me away to a village near Mladenovac to stay with their friends because there was no electricity and running water in Belgrade. One night we huddled around a burning stove when a group of Chetniks barged in. One of them I guess had kids of his own so he sat me down on his lap and asked me if I'm a Serb. I answered 'no, I'm a Yugoslav'. I've always been a Yugoslav. First things I learned in life were my own name, the name of the street I live in, and that I'm a Yugoslav".
In 1961, following in his father's footsteps, Popović got his law degree from the University of Belgrade's Faculty of Law and immediately began working in his father's law office that had been in operation since 1933. The Belgrade-based law office eventually got renamed Popović, Popović, Samardžija & Popović once Srđa and his sister Gordana joined their father as partners; the fourth partner was Petar Samardžija.
Srđa Popović began his career representing commercial clients and later writers, artists and politicians that criticized the government of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. One of the first political clients he defended was Predrag Ristić a.k.a. Peđa Isus who together with painter Leonid Šejka started a magazine and then attempted to establish a political party under Mihajlo Mihailov's guidance. Though such course of action wasn't explicitly prohibited in the recently promulgated 1963 Yugoslav Constitution, any such attempts were swiftly cut down in the rigid one-party system of SFR Yugoslavia under the Communist League (SKJ) rule. Furthermore, the individuals behind such attempts at challenging the SKJ monopoly on political activity were immediately taken to court on trumped up charges. On this particular occasion, Ristić, Šejka, and Mihailov were fortunate since not long after their sentencing the so-called Ranković affair exploded, and after Ranković got cleared of all charges against him, the prison term for the three of them was also abolished by president Tito. In Popović's own words: "Tito very much tried to keep up appearances to the West that his Yugoslavia was not like those people's democracy countries so the act of founding a political party was not constitutionally forbidden nor was it punishable by the criminal code. Of course, anyone who actually dared to do that, and there were some over the years, was quickly silenced through repression and the political activity for their newly established party was rendered impossible. It wasn't until the 1974 Constitution that founding a political party was made explicitly forbidden".
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