"My children have been taking me to see numerous doctors, my back hurts a lot; I've been ruined psychologically, my body has been damaged, I walk with a cane..."
These are the words of Split resident Djordje Katic, who today lives in Australia. He is one of many who went through the horror of the military prison in Lora in Split, the place where they ended up because of "political incorrectness", i.e. wrong ethnicity. Katic was tortured, beaten, forced to bark by military policemen who were finally arrested a few days ago. Moreover, in the city where he was born, Djordje Katic was denied medical assistance by the staff of Firule hospital after being released from captivity. Today, Djordje Katic, about whom this magazine wrote centuries ago, prefers not to think or talk about torture experienced in the hands of a handful of scum who never even saw the frontline or fighting and were scornfully described by their fellow soldiers as "Lora special forces". Similar to "special journalistic forces" which, like good party soldiers, forged reports about crimes, thanks to which we only today are discovering that it was not only normal but also desirable, in the name of purported patriotism, to shut one's neighbors in dog houses, to torture them with electric shocks, cut off parts of their bodies... Only because they were Serbs.
The Croatian TV was especially diligent on that job, so that the feigned disbelief of the public and the vulgar reaction of the HDZ provoked by the documentary film "Storm over Krajina", recently shown on Latinica TV program, is not surprising. However, would the public be also purportedly shocked if that TV station, instead of openly stuffing its viewers for years with blatant propaganda, reported that Dubrovnik was denied arms and ammunition and abandoned based on the Leader's orders, that its residents suffered because of crazy agreements between Tudman and Milosevic? Or if the HTV reported the truth about the crimes that took place after the operation "Storm"? Instead, after a bloody crime in the village of Grubor, for example, an HTV employee, Nada Surjak, today also omnipresent on our TV screens, in patriotic cooperation with the commander of the Knin region, Ivan Cermak, consciously lied about the crime, forging the facts about the true event, multiple murder of Serb elderly men and women by the members of the Croatian Army.
If it wasn't for the long lasting media conspiracy of lies, in which only a few were innocent, perhaps today we would not be exposed to the additional shame while watching the candles lit in front of the building of the Split Municipal Court, with the horrendous realization that ten years after Djordje Katic and many other citizens of Split were taken from their apartments to the military prison Lora, so that there they could be used of objects for beastly torture by all sorts of mentally ill individuals, but also two years after the departure of the criminal Tudman's coterie from power, those candles are not lit in commemoration of innocent civilian victims of torture, civilians who were mostly abducted with only one goal - to steal their apartments. No, the candles have been burning for days to glorify their torturers, those "residents" of Split who were finally arrested after ten years of implementation of Tudman's doctrine of evil.
Those who would today like to do to the members of the Serb minority the same their buddies did to Djordje Katic are lighting candles that are not only an expression of pathologically eerie understanding of patriotism but also speak volumes about the troubling reality of this city, and this state. The other Split, if such still exists, namely, hasn't even considered putting out the candles whose message is that all of us participated together in a crime, let alone to light some other candles in honor of its beastly murdered neighbors, our fellow residents, former friends. That indifference, the same as when their neighbors were taken from their apartments to dog houses in Lora, is the horrendous illustration of banality of evil that always happens to someone else, so that consequently shame is also reserved for someone else, those who are even today a minority in the state in which the production of hatred with other means is still totally legitimate. As a purported democratic right of lively pro-Ustashe [Croat fascists from WWII] groups to announce street disturbances and showdowns with the authorities and those who for a whole decade claimed that to torture Djordje Katic is not a courageous deed, that it was actually a crime.
However, the authorities are unwilling to sanction those street performances, organized by always the same madly angry cowards, just as they are unwilling to put out the candles lit in solidarity with the murderers. But, can it be any different it, as many as 18 months after the arrival of the so-called new authorities, Mate Lausevic is still the head of the Military Police, even though, just like his supreme commander, Tudman (Lausevic started his career as Tudman's bodyguard), he knew everything about the events in Lora at the time they were taking place? Lausevic later cashed in his "credits" for approval or hiding of crime by obtaining numerous decorations, benefits, acquiring influence...
I am convinced that in the country of consciously suppressed information about crimes and the attempt to make it into a collective crime, it makes no sense to ask the question about the morality and consciousness of Tudman's "general" Mate Lausic. But what about morality and responsibility of his current mentor, HSLS's minister Jozo Rados? Why does Rados, if because of suspicious political deals and despite very clear demands of president Mesic he does not want to fire Lausic, does not resign himself? Because Racan's government, only because of pressure from abroad, and in no way because of its own views about war crimes, was actually forced to prosecute at least some crimes, so that it does that, just as everything else, apathetically, arresting only small fry, direct perpetrators of crimes, prison guards, and avoids in a wide circle those who issued orders or ignored those crimes, such as Mate Lausic. They also partly do that because ten years ago they also knew everything about the torture chambers in Lora, in Kuline, or about crimes after the operation "Storm"... And they kept quiet.
"Everyone else knew what was going on. They literally ran away from us in the street..." Djordje Katic today testifies about his colleagues and fellow citizens of Split. He says he will never return to the city in which he was born. And really, why would he come back to the city in which even today, ten years after his torture, candles are lit in honor of his torturers?