After this they expelled him from the party, and since party was the master of life and death, such "ideological deviation" was to be paid with life. My old man, however, was very resourceful and managed to stay alive. The man who was "in charge" of his life came to seek forgiveness, because "such were the times". My father forgave the "decorated hero", and I was very irritated by all that historical pathos and believed it was a classic case of a victim enjoying a chance to absolve its executor...
Many years later Vlado Gotovac proved to me that there really were people able to sustain the weight of their own painful biographies and the people that influenced their lives, without permanently projecting their own suffering as the only measure of the historical truth.
Unlike Gotovac, two people have been slandering Radovan Ortynski these days, choosing the wrong timing and relying on unverified testimonies. Ortynski was allegedly a "thug" during the students' strike in 1971. Since one of the witnesses was Tudjman's President of the Supreme Court and the secret police chief, his testimony is quite questionable, just as the selective memory of the other one results in different approaches to the participants in the Croatian spring. This is why in this typical Croatian story, besides the question of punishment and forgiveness, we recognize a much more dangerous tendency, that of using the year 1971 as another "historical" split between heroes and traitors. It is the same as Tudjman's recipe according to which people were either "patriots" or "traitors".
But, as in every Croatian patriotic story, the truth has its other face. In 1971 I was a student at the Zadar Faculty of Philosophy, although I officially identified myself as a Croat, I humbly admit I was not interested in the Croatian question within Yugoslavia under the leadership of the Croatian Communist Union, since this was the goal, rather than the destruction of Yugoslavia, as many people claim today.
I didn't take part in the students' strike on either side, but I remember seeing nationally aware [nationalist Croat] colleagues beating up ethnic Serb students, many of whom attended the Zadar university, with chains wrapped around their knuckles.
How many of those who beat up non-Croats - one of them was my friend and a great poet Momcilo Popadic - were at the leading functions during Tudjman's government, and remain there after Ivica Racan's coming to power?
Incidentally, none of the speeches of either the communist leaders or students in 1971 lacked chauvinism, which some of us didn't like, just as we didn't like it in 1990. Should we "nationally unaware" people be permanently excommunicated? Is my view of patriotism simply different from the desirable one? If Ortynski really was an institutional thug, no matter whether he beat up students or football fans, he should go to hell. But - what if he wasn't one? What if his only sin was that he was a political opponent of the indisputable Croatian patriots, who build our future on permanent revisionist splits, the last of which, the one from 1990, has come due?
If Ortynski beat up the "founders of the Croatian state", as one of the opponents of his appointment as the state prosecutor pathetically claims, wasn't then the "youngest Croatian general", "the hero of the defense of Gospic", Mirko Norac, unjustly accused of murdering Serb civilians in the name of the Croatian freedom? The comparison is difficult, but it has been imposed by the people who have every right to dislike the former communist leader Ivica Racan. However, precisely for the sake of Croatia they should be careful about priorities and refrain from public attacks based on suspect recollections. It turns out that the fact that the Justice Minister was a secretary of the Communist Party long time ago is less important for this country than the fact that he failed to arrest Mirko Norac.
The question of who allowed the special treatment of Norac and who let him decide when and if he would come to the court is much more important than who played what role in 1971. Aren't some undisputed patriots from 1971 and 1991 very likely to protect the suspects of war crimes and stir up the hysteria of various nationalist headquarters? Isn't Mate Lausic, a potential or real suspect for war crimes committed in the war port in Split, still the protected chief of the Military Police under jurisdiction of Rados's Defense Ministry? Isn't precisely this Ministry a shelter for "their boys", among others the brigadier Werner Ilic, who was allegedly involved in several terrorist acts, including the explosion at the Zagreb cemetery? And precisely this last act of terrorism is the message about what will follow if we mess with the alleged sacred values of the Homeland War, such as Norac. Dalmatia has already been blocked, like in the best days of the log-revolution [Serb uprising against independence of Croatia], "decorated heroes" have flooded the streets of Norac's native town Sinj, threatening to overthrow the government, the police calls it a "peaceful demonstration", and a rally in Split has been announced. In the line of duty, Norac's attorney came up with an excellent description of the condition of the country, when he said that he would be honored to defend Norac.
Is the Justice Minister, who dared to negotiate with a man accused of war crimes, ripe for resignation? Wasn't the first true test for this government a trial of the first false hero? Instead, Racan's government has demonstrated inability and fear of facing the problem of war crimes, and brought us to the dangerous verge of new, but this time ethnically clean, intra-Croatian conflicts.
And maybe the new state prosecutor, if we had one, would have known how to deal with war criminals, compensating in that way for all the misery of this government?