by Vladimir MATIJANIC
Why would an independent, sovereign and internationally acclaimed weekly news magazine have to heal the soul of an anonymous gent? Because in September and October of 2001 we published two articles in which we wrote about the strange criteria used by the Ministry for Defenders to distribute apartments at the time when Tomasevic was at the helm of the Apartment Allocation Commission. Interestingly, besides Feral, the same phenomenon was noted by the Legal Service of the Ministry for Croat Defenders, and on September 24, 2001, is filed with the Municipal State Prosecutor’s Office in Zagreb charges against our hero “due to well founded suspicion that he had on several occasions abused his official status and power”.
Furthermore, the charges filed against Tomasevic by the Ministry state that “by inspecting the decisions made by the Apartment Allocation Commission of the Ministry for Croat Defenders it was established that the commission did not observe the criteria set out in the Regulations for Criteria for Accommodation of Disabled Croat Veterans From the Homeland War…,” and that “the illegal decisions were signed by the then assistant minister and president of the Apartment Commission Ilko Tomasevic. Abusing his official status and authority, the suspect on several occasions made decisions by which he illegally created conditions for illegal enrichment of other persons, who were given the right to buy at subsidized prices apartments larger than specified in the Regulation”. By doing so he “significantly unfavorably affected the budget”.
It would be utterly unfair not to mention in this story Anto Bozinovic, president of the judicial panel of the Municipal Court in Split who found Feral Tribune guilty of all charges, because of “inaccurate reporting”. Moreover, he did that with unprecedented speed, at the first hearing, allowing Tomasevic to get close to sought damages in only a few months – the suit was filed on March 6, 2002. At the same time, the charges filed by the Legal Service of the Ministry for Defenders against Tomasevic have been collecting dust in the Municipal State Prosecutor’s Office in Zagreb since September 2001. The Prosecutor’s Office responded to Feral’s enquiry regarding the status of the charges with the statement that “the suit has been filed and we are working on it”.
Naturally, the usual excuse of legal bureaucrats in this case can be that the verdict was reached “because of failure to attend the hearing”, i.e. because “all legal requirements” to accept the charges have been met, because “none of defendants appeared at the pre-trial hearing, even though they were sent summonses on time”. However, we’d like to remind the court that the minimum of legal logic would require that the court wait for the end of the case filed against Tomasevic by the Ministry for Defenders before deciding whether the “information” published in Feral was accurate of not.
In the end, it would be unjust not to mention the person who bears major responsibility for the current state of the Croatian judiciary – Ivica Racan, the Prime Minister and a “reformer”, who knows very well that laws reflect the value system of the authorities and that by accepting the acceptance of astronomical damages for spiritual pain in the Croat judiciary and legal practice he has clearly indicated that the spirit of repression still rules over Croatia. And that in the land of fake democrats and reformers, false spiritual pain and suffering and purportedly just judges, the only reality are astronomical fines that this weekly news magazine has to pay to heal suffering souls.