by Predrag LUCIC
"I am smarter and better looking!" screams the Croat and point his finger at the neighbor on the other side of the fence.
"I am more civilized!" the Croat turns toward the West and shouts as loudly as he can, offended that no one registered his previous remark.
"I am more cooperative!" he screams and by now he is hurting his voice cords and bursting capillaries in his face.
"I have been cheated!" bleats the Croat with broken voice, failing to understand why that wimp over there, far in the West, has covered his ears when all of this sweet sounding noise has been produced for his benefit.
And exactly he, that freckled and pale wimp, degenerated by liberalism, consumerism and other decadent ailments, exactly he used to explain to our Croat that it is better to maintain good personal hygiene and be smart, civilized and cooperative, unlike the surrounded and isolated savage on the other side of the fence. But look, what is that degenerated Westerner doing now? With a bundle full of money, he is winking at the hitherto pariah from the East, all because of some half-boiled coup with which the mean neighbor superficially washed his bloody hands.
And the Croat, who has immersed his far less bloody tentacles to the shoulders in Coca-Cola, is watching all of that, his skin sticky because of the evaporated American liquid, and a taste of piss in his mouth as if the downed liquid had come from a red can opened two days ago.
The Croat is looking over the eastern fence and he sees that he was cheated and screams that he feels cheated like and idiot and a cretin, and still refuses to look at his reflection in a real mirror. Because, there, he would see his donkey ears and a long nose of a liar which grows to every wooden puppet that lies to others that it is behaving like an adult responsible for himself and the world around him.
All the bile pouring out of Croatian democrats after the international community announced that it intended to release a big loan for the democratization of Serbia, indicates that the coat put on by Croatia some ten months ago was cut from lousy material. The acid intensively secreted by "cheated" democrats because of Euros and Dollars promised to Serbia is quickly destroying the new coat, to the great joy of the local half-world who hated Serbs exactly because they were Serbs but all along envied them the guts to stay away from the world and independently plunge forward to their destruction.
One should not celebrate with the local half-world, nor shed tears with its part that has stopped behaving like the half-world because it calculated that the world would copiously reward its transformation, no matter how superficial and insincere it may be. Now, it has turned out that that calculation was wrong, because a declarative acceptance of civilized rules of the game hasn't been rewarded with the expected money.
Thus, we reach the devastating conclusion that on January 3 many did not reject Tudman and his ideology because they realized its ugliness but merely because they calculated that they did not pay off any more. In that, it should not be forgotten that in the eyes of reformed Tudman's supporters, the testimony of Ankica Lepej about foreign currency accounts of Tudman's wife contributed more to Tudman's fall than all the testimonies of people who survived Dretelj [Croat prison camp for Bosnian Muslims in Hercegovina] or people who did not survived Pakracka Poljana [Croat prison camp for Serbs] or Ahmici [massacre of Bosnian Muslim civilians by Bosnian Croats]. And exactly that is the central Croatian moral problem: unfortunately, people are more sensitive to opulence than to crime.
That problem will burden this country for a long time to come, as long as some Croats pretend that it does not exist, and others are unable to notice its existence. The third kind, the one that does not see that as a problem, but rather a cause for national pride will always be around. Exactly representatives of that third kind, encouraged by the rage of the "cheated" ones, are an obvious indication of the direction in which Tudman's Croatia was headed. These days they cried their hearts out because of the defeat of Slobodan Milosevic, because his face was exactly what they wanted to see every time they peeked over the eastern fence. And, as we know, in Slobodan Milosevic there was a lot that Croatian nationalists envied. Even Tudman himself, in attacks of honesty was known to slam his fist on the table and squeeze through his teeth that "that Milosevic has guts, definitely has guts". The same Croatian kind today envies Kostunica who, unlike the servile Racan and Mesic, also "has guts" and not only loudly tells the Hague to fuck off, but is also not ashamed to say that he is a nationalist.
"And for all that he ends up being rewarded by Euros and Dollars," add the "cheated" ones from the start of this story. The atrophied insides of their heads sporting civilized haircuts are obsessed by the thought that Croatia, after loosing its Milosevic, should get its Kostunica. They forget, in their greed, stupidity and moral depravity that even if money can buy anything, anything bought in such a way is bound to exude damp darkness.
In the end, the international bureaucracy can choose where it will launder its money, whether in Croatia, Bosnia or Serbia. It can not clean its conscience anywhere. But it also cannot cleanse the conscience of those it will credit with its money. Nor can it, on the other hand, soil those who can always without fear look at their own reflection in the mirror and their clean hands. Hands that are truly clean, and not simply less dirty or less bloody than those on the other side of the fence.