Srđa Popović

Srđa M. Popović (; 24 February 1937 – 29 October 2013) was a Yugoslav lawyer and political activist.

Early life 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".

Law career and political activism 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 Mihajlov'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 Mihajlov 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".

In the same year Popović led the Independent Commission for Investigating the Exodus of Serbs from Kosovo and published a report that argued there was little to support claims that mass physical abuse and rape against Kosovo Serbs were to blame for their emigration which had at the time been a part of public discourse in Kosovo. It argued that rather a "model of domination" set up by the League of Communists of Yugoslavia was the primary cause.

Also, in the second part of 1990, the Federal Executive Council president (Yugoslav prime minister) Ante Marković offered Popović to lead his newly established Reform party's (SRSJ) branch for SR Serbia, a political post that would entail facing off against Slobodan Milošević and his Socialist party at the upcoming 1990 Serbian general election. Popović turned down the offer of direct political engagement, instead taking the lobbying position as head of the European Movement's Yugoslav branch he helped create in order to promote European integration and the idea of Federal Europe.

In 1991, Popović observed that the human rights of Kosovo Albanians are "systematically and brutally violated" and that "apart from that they are subjected to racist propaganda of a kind that is inconceivable in a state that claims to protect minorities."

Relocation to New York at the start of the Yugoslav Wars In late June 1991, he left Serbia citing that "manhood there is increasingly based on how willing you are to kill another" and pursued legal work in New York City. The day he left the country coincided with the beginning of the Ten-Day War in Slovenia, itself coming two days after Slovenia declared independence from SFR Yugoslavia. In New York, Popović mostly dealt with intellectual property cases involving patents, trademarks, and authors' rights in American law firms that he previously consulted for while practicing law in Yugoslavia. For a while he entertained the idea of studying and taking exams that would eventually allow him to practice law in the United States, but eventually decided not to.

In 1993 and 1994, he served as a member of the Advisory Board of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in New York. In 1993, the American Bar Association awarded him the Rule of Law award.

Discussing his life in New York, Popović said: "I never stopped keeping tabs on things back home. Personally, I felt like my life ended. War, the country disintegrated, I lost the job that I worked for so many years, the only thing I had left was raising my children. There was a newsstand on the 42nd Street that sold Večernje novosti and Vreme and I'd go there every day to get the paper and read it cover to cover. I was well informed. I also had contacts with numerous human rights organizations such as the Human Rights Watch and UN Human Rights Committee that asked for my input on the situation once they found out I'm in New York. In the beginning, the information coming out of the Balkans was unclear, incomplete, and misinterpreted. Yugoslavia was low on their list of priorities. Germany was uniting, USSR was disintegrating, we were the last item on the priority list. I never turned down invitations to speak at meetings and lectures that were being held everywhere from schools, churches and city chambers. People from all over the former Yugoslavia would come and I always used my participation to insist on the establishment of the international war crimes tribunal".

Popović believed that Serbia was primarily responsible for the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia: "The disaster was started by Milošević with the help of the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA). I don't think that all three sides are equally responsible for the beginning or that all three sides are equally guilty of war crimes. I think Milošević and the JNA (which was a formidable force) started the war. And the worst and most numerous war crimes were committed by the Serbian side". He further argued it was not a civil war, but rather "from the start an international conflict, because Serbia, according to its own constitution, became an independent state on 28 September 1990, ie more than a year before Slovenia's and Croatia's own proclamations of independence on 8 October 1991".

During the winter of 1996–97 Popović visited Serbia for the first time since moving to New York City, taking in the months-long protests led by the five-party Zajedno coalition (that included his ex-wife Vesna Pešić's party, the Civic Alliance) over alleged election theft at the November 1996 municipal elections. In July 1997, amid Zajedno's breakup, Popović observed the anti-Milošević energy of a few months earlier slowly petering out, admonishing the opposition as well as the Serb nation in general for not being courageous enough to condemn the Serbs' leading role in the Bosnian War by stating: "The people are sunk in their passivity because they know they are guilty, they know the lies they took in – they know they triumphed when Sarajevo was bombed. As a nation they have lost all self-respect." He also claimed that "when Milošević tried to rule the Communist Party (SKJ), he destroyed it, then by creating the war, he destroyed Yugoslavia. Now he's trying to destroy what is left of Yugoslavia."

In 1999, Popović expressed support of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia to stop the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.

Return to Serbia Popović returned to Belgrade in 2001 after the overthrow of Milošević. Explaining why he decided to come back rather than remain living in New York, he said: "My children had grown, completed their schooling, I saw they no longer needed me. I spent my entire life here, this is what I know. I communicate with these people much easier as similar things interest us. No one in America cares about Tuđman and Milošević".

Legal involvement in the Đinđić assassination case In November 2010, Popović, acting as the legal representative of Mila Đinđić and Gordana Đinđić-Filipović, assassinated Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić's mother and sister, respectively, filed a criminal complaint against former Special Operations Unit (JSO) members Milorad Ulemek, Dušan "Gumar" Maričić, Zvezdan Jovanović, Veselin Lečić, Mića Petraković, Dragoslav "Dragan" Krsmanović, and Dragoš Radić, as well as former Yugoslav president Vojislav Koštunica and former Security Administration head Aco Tomić. Popović's criminal complaint accuses the four JSO members of "organizing the November 2001 JSO rebellion against the Serbian government in cooperation with the late Dušan Spasojević, head of the Zemun Clan". Popović's criminal complaint further accuses then president of FR Yugoslavia, Vojislav Koštunica, of "failing to use the constitutional powers in order to quell the rebellion" while then Military Security Admin head Aco Tomić is accused of "providing the JSO commander with guarantees that the Yugoslav Army (VJ) won't do anything about the rebellion". Asked why Đinđić's widow Ružica isn't a party to or signatory of the criminal complaint, Popović said Đinđić's mother and sister contacted him for legal action, while his wife didn't: "I asked my two clients, Đinđić's mother and sister, if I should make the text of the criminal complaint available to his wife to sign, but from their answer I understood there are issues between them that I don't want to go into".

In September 2011, following the leak of Miloš Simović's (a Zemun Clan member sentenced to 30 years for his role in the assassination of Zoran Đinđić before later getting a retrial due to being tried in absentia the first time) summer 2010 written testimony in front of the Serbian Prosecutor's Office for Organized Crime in which Simović names an individual nicknamed "Ćoki" and "Ćoravi" as the person who ordered Đinđić's murder, Popović told Podgorica's Radio Antena M that "it's clear that nicknames Ćoki and Ćoravi refer to Nebojša Čović", former politician and current Red Star Belgrade basketball club president. Čović rubbished Popović's claims. The same day, 20 September 2011, Serbian police took three former JSO members in for questioning — Veselin Lečić, Mića Petraković, and Vladimir Potić (two of them were named in Popović's November 2010 criminal complaint) — as part of its investigation on the 2001 JSO rebellion. Serbian Minister of Justice at the time, Snezana Malovic, said she "hoped that this is the beginning of the process of providing answers about the open questions in regards to the assassination of Zoran Đinđić".

Several months later in mid December 2011, Popović went further, filing, as the legal representative of Đinđić's mother and sister, a criminal complaint against Nebojša Čović and Velimir Ilić for the "criminal act of encouraging a criminal act of murder of the representative of the highest state institutions".

Talking about his motivation to get involved in the legal proceedings stemming from the assassination of Zoran Đinđić, Popović said in 2013: "First off, I defended Đinđić before. Client always remains a client. To me he symbolizes the 1968 protests, which I see as emancipatory and freeing. I thought him to be a pleasant person, not to mention being intelligent and trying to do something for this country from a minority position with Prometheusesque awareness he probably won't succeed. That's what killed him. The position that the state took was both shameful and scandalous, and I'm not saying I've proven the guilt of Koštunica, Čović, and Aco Tomić, but I think that many facts warrant at least their investigative questioning". She would go on to become a prominent public figure in Serbia with a political career that included several MP terms as well as a seven-year GSS party leadership and an early 2000s ambassadorial stint in Mexico.

By the mid 1970s, Popović married architect Natalija Arežina, having three daughters, Dunja, Višnja, and Cveta, and a son Luka with her.