But, this is not the right country for profitable business ventures. Here people fight for survival and any sort of work, so that it is more likely that a reaction to the number revealed by Minister Lucin will actually come from trade unionists. Just like recently trade union members from the Split shipyard warned their management to refrain from bringing foreign workers to the docks as our class and nationally aware workers would prevent them from entering the shipyard by force, with clubs and fists. Therefore, I do not understand why native Croat criminals do not start their own trade union and expel the unfair competition from abroad. 'Cos there can't be enough racket for everyone in this country. As I have been informed, lately the business has been going so bad that it is easier to cut out a tongue from the mouth of an owner of a street food cart than pull $250 from his pocket.
But, it can hardly be expected that Croat criminals will come together. That is at least as unlikely as the illusion that ministers of internal affairs and their companions from the defense ministry, ministry of internal affairs and president's office, who signed recommendations that Vekic, Jarnjak, and Penic continue naturalizing foreign criminals, could end up in the place where these 253 naturalized Croats should already be. Instead of being given citizenship certificates and passports.
A pink citizenship certificate and a blue passport... Let us recall how many of our compatriots had a harder time getting those two documents in the nineties than for example NASA's astronaut training certificate. Let us recall the humiliation many of them had to go through to in the end, by the same ministerial discretionary right that presented Mogilyevich and the company with Croatian passports, instead of a pink citizenship certificate and a blue passport they would only get a rejection notice, black on white, with a registration number and a proud stamp of the ministry.
Let us recall the case of Dragan Jankovic from Rijeka, the man who was left paralyzed after a horrendous traffic accident, but the accident did not destroy his will to live. Later he completed both the Medical School in Rijeka and the Higher Acupuncture School in Belgrade, founded in 1990 by the European Peace Center under the auspices of the United Nations. You recall the story from somewhere? Yes, Feral Tribune wrote about Jankovic in 1994, but it won't hurt to summarize it here, so that sometimes, when you hold the pink citizenship certificate and the blue passport, you recall the Calvary that Dragan Jankovic and thousands of others who could not obtain those documents because of two defects - they were neither ethnically pure Croats nor criminals - had to go through. Thus their birth sin, the horrendous crimen in Tudman's Croatia, was exacerbated by their bad choice of profession!
Therefore, Dragan Jankovic, due to inability to commute from Rijeka to Belgrade, tried to reduce the expenses of his education by temporarily registering as a resident of Belgrade, the capital of the then shaky Yugoslavia, and canceling his residence in Rijeka. Exactly at that time, Serb and Montenegrin paramilitary formations, assisted by the remnants of the Yugoslav People's Army started war expeditions in Croatia, so that Jankovic did not establish an official residence in Belgrade and instead returned to Rijeka immediately after the graduation. However, in his birthplace he was greeted by the brutal administrative and police denial of the right to be a citizen. To Jankovic's request for the Croatian citizenship, the minister reacted using his discretionary right and sent back a rejection without a justification.
"Dragan Jankovic fulfills the conditions for obtaining Croatian citizenship, but there are reasons of interest for the Republic of Croatia why his citizenship request should be rejected," said the response of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. After the Constitutional Court annulled that response as unconstitutional and as a violation of basic human and civic rights, Dragan Jankovic's case reentered the police-bureaucratic procedure. The result was the same as the first time round. His request for citizenship was again rejected. The only difference was that this time the rejection was based on the fact that Dragan Jankovic had not been officially registered as a resident of Croatia for five years. What is the catch? Those four months spent in Belgrade, the period during which Jankovic officially canceled his residency in Rijeka, even though he had hitherto spent almost thirty years in the city. Therefore, a police-bureaucratic perversion transformed those four months to five years.
Since a person without a pink citizenship certificate and a blue passport was not treated in the early nineties in the land of Croatia as a human being but rather as a large clay pigeon suitable for target practice and unpunished persecution, someone shot on three occasion on Jankovic's home at night. Fortunately, he survived and lived long enough to finally become a citizen of Croatia. This happened at the time when the individuals enjoying the discretionary right to fuck up human lives realized that the pink citizenship certificate and the blue passport were rapidly loosing their value and that it could happen that if they were thrown like fliers from airplanes people would not even bother to pick them up from the patriotic soil. Let us recall, this was the time when many Croats had only one use for their passports - to leave the country for good.
If Croatia, by some miracle, were a state created for the sake of people rather than for the sake of being an independent state, Dragan Jankovic should, besides a pink citizenship certificate and a blue passport also get a third document - an apology from the Republic of Croatia. And not only Dragan Jankovic. The same document should be issued to all Croatian citizens who have to put up with border guards all over the world who treat their blue passports as if they were HIV positive status certificates. That document would say the following: "The Republic of Croatia apologizes to its citizen (name and surname goes here) for sending him or her to the world with the same passport as the one used by Semyon Mogilyevich and hundreds of other registered criminals."
"But how can one apologize to people who do not seek an apology?", a sly bureaucrat may ask.
Well, that is where your turn, Sime Lucin, comes. Because it depends on you whether you will use your discretionary right for disgust over those who by persecuting Dragan Jankovic and treating Semyon Mogilyevich actually humiliated all of us.