3 Arrests May Lower Belgrade Trade Status

A bipartisan group of congressmen launched a drive Thursday to strip Yugoslavia of favorable trade status unless the Belgrade government frees from jail three Yugoslav-born American citizens, including two Californians, accused of political offenses.

The cases dramatize a dilemma faced by U.S. policy-makers in dealing with Yugoslavia, a country governed by a Communist Party that has been fiercely independent from Moscow for almost 40 years.

Although Yugoslavia’s human rights record is spotty by U.S. standards, Washington is reluctant to apply the kind of pressure that it exerts on the Soviet Union because it does not want to drive the Yugoslavs back into the arms of the Soviets.

The incidents are the latest episodes of a long-simmering controversy between Washington and Belgrade over the political activities of people each country considers its own citizens. Under Yugoslav law, a person born in that country does not lose his citizenship simply by becoming a naturalized citizen of another country.

Seven-Year Term

One of the Americans, Peter Ivezaj of suburban Detroit, was convicted Tuesday and sentenced to seven years in prison. The other two--Veroljub Radivojevic and Gradimir Hadzic, both from the Los Angeles area--await trial.

Radivojevic’s wife, Jovanka, said the 49-year-old engineer from Thousand Oaks was arrested by Yugoslav secret police Sept. 23 in Belgrade, where he was attending his 30th high school reunion and visiting relatives. Although she was with her husband, she was not arrested.

Hadzic, an architect and a friend of Radivojevic, was arrested about the same time, also in Belgrade, where he had gone to visit his ailing 89-year-old mother, Jovanka Radivojevic said.

A group of 40 members of Congress, led by Rep. William S. Broomfield (R-Mich.), the senior Republican on the House Foreign Relations Committee, and including the committee’s chairman, Rep. Dante B. Fascell (D-Fla.), have introduced legislation to cancel Yugoslavia’s most-favored-nation trade status.

Yugoslavia is one of only four Communist-ruled nations--the others are Romania, Hungary and China--that receive the tariff concessions that go with most-favored-nation status. The concessions are extended to most non-Communist governments.

Ken Nakamura, a spokesman for Broomfield, said Congress would consider other sanctions if the trade measures do not succeed in obtaining the release of the Americans. “That’s for starters,” he said.

In several earlier cases in which Yugoslav-American dual nationals were accused of political crimes by Belgrade, the individuals were expelled from the country rather than being jailed. The U.S. government is urging Yugoslavia to free the three unconditionally or to follow the expulsion precedent.

Charges Unknown

The State Department said the Yugoslav government so far has refused to permit U.S. diplomats to visit Radivojevic or Hadzic. American consular officials were allowed to visit Ivezaj, who was arrested Aug. 19, only after his trial began last week.

The department said it did not know the exact nature of the charges against Radivojevic or Hadzic, although they apparently were political. Jovanka Radivojevic said she understood that her husband was accused of membership in a “subversive organization,” although she said that he has denied the charge and that, as far as she knows, he is not a member of any group that would normally be considered illegal.

“I think we gain a false sense of security living in the United States,” Jovanka Radivojevic, a physician working for the Los Angeles County Public Health Department, said. She came to the United States in 1959, and her husband arrived in 1970, she said in a telephone interview. It is not known how long Hadzic had lived in the United States.

“We were on vacation,” Jovanka Radivojevic said. “Just a couple of days before we were to leave, the secret police took my husband into detention, and I have not seen him since. He is not a political person at all.”

Ivezaj, an ethnic Albanian, was convicted on two counts, citing membership in an Albanian-American student organization and participation in a demonstration in April, 1981, in front of the Yugoslav Embassy in Washington. The demonstration coincided with rioting by ethnic Albanians in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo. Ivezaj was arrested when he returned to Yugoslavia for a visit.