by Viktor IVANCIC
Until today, not one of the competent or incompetent individuals or institutions in Croatia has reacted to this shameful public call for lynching that imitates the best traditions of the Croat journalism in the early 90’s or, if you prefer, German journalism in the late 30’s. The black list simply rolled off the presses into the Zadar public without a peep, as something that is totally natural and reasonable, just like it totally made sense to declare a war crimes suspect for a citizen of honor without a single local councilor casting, including those that belong to Racan’s party, a no vote.
If Croatia were a country that upholds at least minimal democratic standards, the journalistic endeavor of Zadarski list would have been suppressed with highly undemocratic methods. For example, the newspaper would have been banned, the remaining copies confiscated and destroyed, while the editor-in-chief would have been banned from working in the media long enough to make sure he gets plenty of time to write righteous protests against “suppression of free speech”. However, Croatia is not such a country. Here democratic conventions are respected mostly when it comes to those who advocate “dialogue” regarding freedom of execution and similar modes of plural killing fields.
In that sense the black list with 450 names, addresses and criminal demands, is only a logical consequence of the cry of Ms Zeljka Antunovic, deputy prime minister, about how the executive authorities would never restitute denied tenancy rights to “Serbs from Zadar”, or any Serbs for that matter. Naturally, Ms Antunovic is not a person who would stoop to compiling lists for execution or differentiating between people based on ethnicity, God forbid – she only cares about ideas, she does not care about people and numbers. Tomorrow, if there are physical assaults on “Serbs from Zadar” – or any other Serbs – who, look, screw it, keep demanding restitution of their tenancy rights, Ms Antunovic would be the first one to demand that Police be sent to the location of the incident “to separate warring sides”. That is the true position that the ruling political elite has reserved for itself: that of a cheap hypocritical buffer-zone. On duty 24 hours a day.
Last Monday, on the Day of Human Rights about ten activists headed for Slunj wanting to appeal for the removal of a monument commemorating Ustashe warrior Jure Francetic – standing on Franjo Tudman Square. They were greeted by about two hundred rabid local “Jure-fans” with curses, baseball bats, and fists. The Croatian authorities made an appearance embodied as a police cordon which, at the last moment, prevented the hosts from festively massacring the guests.
It was an explicit realization of Racan’s political mission. On the one side a handful of fringe elements who are uncritically aghast that a democratic country allows building of monuments commemorating Ustashe butchers, on the other side another handful of fringe elements that uncritically adulates Ustashe and plastic arts, and in between these two groups – people’s government! Concerned expression of the political will that with corrective baton in the right hand and rubber bullets held in reserve, prevents social “extremes” from killing each other.
If we can talk about ideology as far as Racan’s administration is concerned – or at least a retarded form of missionary zeal – then its “common thread” is symbolically represented as a role of a savior that separates two warring sides in a staged civil war. In order to cement that position, it is necessary to place the two opposing “extremist” groups at the same level, and that is usually done with a regular portion of ideological slaps for the “left”, and a pile of practical compromise and para-patriotic understanding for the “right”. An honest Croat intellectual, after receiving a salary from the state, put together the phrase “leftists terrorists”. Thus, stage is being set (namely, a front line is being prepared) for the appearance of a defective party Messiah whose self-image, unfortunately, is that of a hygienic tampon for the nation that keeps bleeding.
One of the public supporters of the government on duty – otherwise a prosecution witness in the trial of the student leaders in 1971, who now ejaculates euphoric outbursts of repentance daily – has for months been systematically developing a model of “balance of power” that equates outbursts of fascist violence with struggle against it. “Is there any difference between arrest warrants printed in Feral and those plastered on walls in Karlovac?” he wandered at a time. Let us remind our readers that “posters plastered on walls in Karlovac” included photographs of 130 Serbs in uniforms of former Krajina police with the headline “Our neighbors”. The posters were made, printed and distributed by the man who organized ritual pissing in Veljun on the monument commemorating Serbs shot by Ustashe in 1941 and revealed that he was behind both endeavors at the ceremony marking the setting up of a monument commemorating warrior Jure Francetic in Slunj.
The technique, practiced for decades in Communist and ideological commissions, is always the same. For example, our government supporter does not react to the publishing of a shameful execution list in Zadarski List, but will only pipe up after someone else criticizes the list (as Feral is yet again doing), only to righteously and wisely slap on the wrist both “warring sides”. He is the comrade-institution, with police baton in his right hand, who always watches over us preventing the looming bloodbath while secretly hoping it actually happens.
However, the ejaculator from Slobodna Dalmacija, who is here mentioned only as an illustration that is supposed to make the article more amusing – is only a loudspeaker for Racan’s ideological muddle. The real truth is that the current Croat authorities did not compile lists of “Serbs from Zadar” – or any other Serbs – nor did they build monuments commemorating Ustashe officers. They only did nothing to prevent, or appropriately sanction both. They only preventively stopped application of the existing law and emptied the tanks of bulldozers that were supposed to demolish illegally constructed objects, even though these objects are merely monuments commemorating achievements of notorious fascists. In that diligent inaction the authorities found the saving formula for their efficiency and self-preservation. Hyperactive inaction is the only way to occupy the space of its imaginary purpose, namely the illusion that it is continuously “bringing to order” those that it has indirectly set on each other.
This planned recklessness, planned excommunication of its own political role from the creation of the current Croat nightmare and its boiling down to the purported “fixing” of the effect of the incited reality – besides being contrary to all the achievements and principles of the civilization – is pushing the ruling elite in the trap of a grotesque paradox. “We cannot be responsible for somebody else’s crap,” Racan’s administration tells us, “because we act only when we have to”.