University of Sarajevo In the early 1980s, Šešelj began to associate more with individuals from dissident intellectual circles in Belgrade, some of whom had
Serbian nationalist political leanings. He repeatedly held
Muslim professors at the faculty of political sciences responsible for his situation, openly criticising his former friend Atif Purivatra, as well as Hasan Sušić, and Omer Ibrahimagić, for having harmed his career and denouncing them as
Pan-Islamists. In September 1981, Šešelj joined the faculty of political sciences, as one of its youngest members. The faculty of political sciences, as a breeding ground for future politicians, was closely controlled and overseen by the Communist Party, and outspoken Šešelj quickly drew the attention of party officials. The biggest controversy was raised when Šešelj came up against faculty colleague
Brano Miljuš. A protege of
Hamdija Pozderac and
Branko Mikulić (
SR Bosnia-Herzegovina's highest and most powerful political figures at the time), Miljuš was well positioned within the communist apparatus as the secretary of the
Bosnia-Herzegovina Communist League's Sarajevo branch. Šešelj dissected Miljuš's master's degree thesis and accused him of plagiarising more than 40 pages in it from the published works by
Marx and
Edvard Kardelj. Šešelj criticised the highest political echelons, particularly
Pozderac who was the reviewer of Miljuš's master's degree thesis. A power struggle spilled outside the faculty and into the political institutions and corridors of power. Other faculty members and intellectuals to offer their support to Šešelj included Boro Gojković, Džemal Sokolović, Hidajet Repovac, Momir Zeković and Ina Ovadija-Musafija. By spring 1982, barely six months after being re-hired, his position at the faculty of political sciences was in jeopardy. He ended up being demoted to the Institute for Social Research (Institut za društvena istraživanja), an institution affiliated with the faculty. Belgrade intellectuals, mostly writers and researchers in the social sciences, came to his defence by writing letters of protest to the government of the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, to the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and to the . He began to be spied on by
UDBA agents. Šešelj's first arrest took place on 8 February 1984, the second day of the
Sarajevo Olympics. He was on a train from Sarajevo heading to Belgrade when the secret police burst on board around
Podlugovi station and seized some of his writings that he had in the suitcase. Among the agents handling his arrest that day was Dragan Kijac (later
Republika Srpska state security chief). In
Doboj, Šešelj was taken off the train, transferred into a police Mercedes, and transported to Belgrade where he was questioned for 27 hours before being released and informed that he would be contacted again. After getting back to Sarajevo, UDBA took him in twice more for questionings, which were handled by Rašid Musić and Milan Krnjajić. According to Šešelj, they had the transcripts of the various conversations he had with some of his closest friends in which he and his friends openly criticised subjects ranging from specific political figures and the communist regime in general, and were trying to get him to implicate them as a basis for "a group trial for ethnic balance purposes, [...] a Serbian group to persecute since they just convicted
Izetbegović's Muslim one." On 20 April 1984, he was arrested at a private apartment in Belgrade among the group of 28 individuals during the lecture given by
Milovan Đilas as part of Free University, a semi-clandestine organisation that gathered intellectuals critical of the communist regime. Šešelj spent four days in prison before being released. Two days later, on 15 May 1984, Šešelj was arrested again in Sarajevo. Several days after being jailed at Sarajevo's Central Prison, he began a
hunger strike, which attracted the attention of the foreign press. In jail, he passed the time by reading without devoting much effort to preparing his defence at the impending trial. A few weeks later, his then wife Vesna Mudreša gave birth to their first child – a boy named Nikola, after Šešelj's father – however, Šešelj refused to end the hunger strike even after being told this. Weak, frail, and with rapidly deteriorating overall health, he eventually relented on the last day of the trial, ending the strike after 48 days. Several days later, on 9 July 1984, he was given an eight-year sentence. The verdict delivered by presiding judge Milorad Potparić concluded that Šešelj "acted from the
anarcho-liberal and nationalist platform thereby committing the criminal act of counterrevolutionary endangerment of the social order". The single most incriminating piece of evidence cited by the court was the unpublished manuscript that the secret police found in Šešelj's home. On appeal, the Supreme Court of SFR Yugoslavia reduced the sentence to six years, then to four, and finally two. Šešelj served the first eight months of his sentence in Sarajevo before getting transferred to prison in
Zenica in January 1985, where he was placed in quarantine and isolated from other inmates for three weeks while medical checks and general psychological observation were conducted in order to come up with a rehabilitation plan and program during his prison stay. From the start he informed the prison officials of his refusal to do any labour, reasoning that "since jailed communists didn't have to do prison labour in the pre-
World War II capitalist
Yugoslavia, I too, as someone espousing anti-communist ideology, refuse to do labour in a communist prison". His conduct earned him multiple stays in
solitary confinement that initially lasted two weeks but were later extended to a whole month. During his first solitary confinement stay he went on another hunger strike. A week into his strike, he was beaten by the guards in an effort to force him to stop, but he did not, lasting 16 days without food. In total, out of his fourteen months in Zenica, six and a half were spent in solitary confinement. He was released in March 1986 – two months early due to continuous pressure, protests and petitions by intellectuals throughout Yugoslavia and abroad, many of whom would later become his political opponents. Upon release from prison, Šešelj permanently moved to Belgrade. According to
John Mueller, Šešelj "later seems to have become mentally unbalanced as the result of the torture and beatings he endured while in prison". ==Political career==