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Video interview with Embiya Çavuş, an artist working with ceramics, painter and Bulgarian dissident. Now he lives in Izmir.

Embiya Çavuş was born in 1926 in the village Todor Ikonomovо (former name Mahmuzlii, Turkish Mahmuzlu), Shumen district in Bulgaria. He and five of his friends established the secret “Organisation of Defending Turkish Existence and Personality”. Accused of creating a secret Turkish organization and espionage in favor of Turkey, Çavuş was sentenced to life imprisonment and spent sixteen years, from 1947 to 1961, in different prisons and in the forced labor camp in Belene (1949–1956). However, in 1961 he was conditionally released. In 1964, after an amnesty law was passed, Çavuş was granted amnesty. In 1965 Çavuş began to work as a porcelain expert in a porcelain factory in the small town of Novi Pazar, Bulgaria. As a porcelain artist, he visited Poland in 1974 and the USSR in the years of 1976, 1977. In 1978, in the framework of an emigration agreement between Bulgaria and Turkey, Embiya Çavuş moved to Turkey and settled in Izmir.

Embiya Çavuş has double citizenship, Bulgarian and Turkish.

The Croatian State Security Service's operational data from the mid-1950s contain descriptions of the connections of Djilas supporters in Zagreb (the group around the banned weekly newspaper Naprijed) to the brothers Stevan and Vladimir Dedijer. Vladimir was editor-in-chief of the newspaper Borba at the time of publication of the Djilas articles. After a suspended year and a half sentence, he withdrew from political life and in 1955 emigrated to the United States. From 1950 to 1957, Stevan was director of the Nuclear Research Institute in Belgrade and the Rudjer Bošković Institute in Zagreb. Because of his public criticism of the Yugoslav nuclear programme, he was expelled from the Rudjer Bošković Institute, and in 1961 managed to emigrate to Sweden.

The documents in the Croatian State Security Service's file on the Djilas case and Djilas supporters in Croatia  include a transcript of Vladimir Dedijer's open letter to Josip Broz Tito. Dedijer protested against the prosecution and arrest of Milovan Djilas due to an interview in which he criticised the neutral position of Yugoslavia on the Soviet army’s intervention in Hungary, which he saw as tacit support for that action. He was arrested on 19 November, and on 12 December 1956 convicted to 3 years of strict imprisonment for “anti-Yugoslav activities.ˮ  Dedijer wrote, inter alia, that he is not defending Milovan Djilas as his personal friend, but rather because he has to stay “consistent in his conviction that they have to promote more democratic and humane forms” in Yugoslav society, that he cannot act against his conscience, defending in this way his personal integrity as a writer and intellectual.

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Jan Vladislav (1923–2009) was a Czech poet, translator and signatory of Charter 77; he was forced to emigrate from Czechoslovakia in 1981 and later lived in France. He was visited there by a film crew from the Literary Archive of the Museum of Czech Literature in the summer of 1992, as part of the Authentic project and the Independent Documentary Centre of Aleš Záboj. On this occasion, a video recording of Jan Vladislav being interviewed by Petr Kotyk in his study was made on 6 August 1992. Jan Vladislav recalled his activities in Czechoslovakia before his emigration and also mentioned the importance of translators, whose work made it possible to “promote both classic and modern authors, whose work was liberatingly defying the official Czech cultural politics through its spirit, content and mission”. He was talking also about the cultural repression in Czechoslovakia after 1948, de-Stalinization, the Prague Spring and role of intellectuals in the twentieth century. Apart from this video recording of the interview between Jan Vladislav and Petr Kotyk, the recordings of Vladislav’s own public appearances as well as conferences concerning him are also deposited in the video and audio library of the Literary Archive of the Museum of Czech Literature.

After Ivan Aralica had been granted the Vjesnik literary Ivan Goran Kovačić Award for literature, members of the Zadar branch of SUBNOR condemned this act. This was first commented by the local weekly Narodni list in a lead under headline “Vigilance fell asleep” written by the editor-in-chief Dane Vučenović. In the article, the frequency of attacks on self-management socialism is mentioned and the attempts of “defeated groups from the era of the so-called ‘massive movement in Croatia’.” Vučenović stressed that in that period the opponents of socialism increasingly came out openly in many centres, and so in Zadar, where the writer Ivan Aralica lives, the winner of the Ivan Goran Kovačić Award for the novel The Souls of Slaves (1984). He agreed with the SUBNOR Zadar branch, which criticized the Vjesnik jury for giving the award to a writer whose profile was inadequate because of his participation in the Croatian Spring in Zadar. “We think that such an attitude of the Zadar veterans has a positive significance, and that in the process of giving awards, the political profiles of candidates should be taken into account, at least when special awards are at stake,” Dane Vučenović concluded, indirectly pleading for interventionism in the assessment of literary works.

Ivan Aralica himself stated in his letter of 26 July 1985 to Zlatko Crnković that this lead was an overture for the attacks on him: “It has been a long time since I wanted to write to you, ever since I came to Zagreb at the beginning of July, because right on the eve of my departure from Zadar the campaign against me started with the lead in Narodni list (Aralica and Crnković 1998, 123).