1917-2001
In Brussels on the 12th of July, in the 84th year of his life died a Revolutionary, Vladimir – Vlado Dapčević.
Vlado Dapčević was born in 1917 in Montenegro. He was accepted into the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in 1933. Because of distributing propaganda material, joining demonstrations and taking part in clashes with the police, he was arrested several times. Together with a large group of volunteers, he tried to get into Spain to take a part in defending the Spanish Republic, but he was arrested and convicted.
He continued his political work at the University of Belgrade, where he was seriously injured during a clash with fascist youth.
In 1941 Vlado Dapčević took part in the people’s uprising in Montenegro against the fascist occupiers. He took part in all the great battles of the Partisan Army for the liberation of Yugoslavia. During these battles he was wounded several times and was twice expelled from the CPY because of criticism of certain decisions of the Party. By the end of the war he had become a lieutenant colonel.
After the war he worked at the Higher Party School, and then he was appointed Chief of Administration of the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) for agitation and propaganda.
In 1948, after the Resolution of the Communist Information Bureau opposing Tito’s revisionism, Vlado Dapčević tried to escape the country, but he was caught and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
From 1948 until 1956 he experienced the worst torture at Goli Otok and other concentration camps of Tito’s Yugoslavia.
In 1958, because of the possibility of a new arrest, he fled the country to Albania, and then to the Soviet Union. Because of opposition to the policy of Khrushchev and the CPSU, it was made impossible for him to work politically. He tried to organize a trip of political emigrants to Cuba, and then to Vietnam, but that was made impossible for him by the authorities. Under threat of arrest, in 1967 he was forced to flee the Soviet Union and to go to Western Europe. In Western Europe, until settling in Belgium, he was arrested a few times.
In Western Europe he was engaged in the work of the Marxist-Leninist parties.
In 1975, Yugoslav police kidnapped Vlado Dapčević.
In Yugoslavia he was sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to 20 years in prison.
In 1989 after release from prison he was expelled from the country.
In 1990 he was permitted to return to Yugoslavia.
From 1992 he was President of Partija Rada.
During that period, Vlado Dapčević directed all his activities to the fight against war, and for peace among the peoples of Yugoslavia, while the struggle against Great-Serb nationalism and Milosevic’s regime was the main aim of his political activity.
He was an example of how one consistent revolutionary can defend the basic principles of proletarian internationalism. In his brave struggle for the rights of the exploited and oppressed, Vlado Dapčević with his life and work wrote some of the best pages of the revolutionary anti-imperialist movement of the world.
Information Department of Partija Rada.
The Espresso Stalinist 