The phrase "a daily newspaper" is not used here as is customary in our local vulture-journalism, but because in similar occasions in this region, "a daily newspaper" applies to - every daily newspaper. The habit to include in the report of a rape and brutal murder of a seventy-year-old woman the "fact" that her village used to be a Chetnik lair, from where the Croat environment was systematically bombarded by misery, is a typical self-mitigating method used by local journalists.
The blunt object used to end a life is thereby turned into public property, its handle is supposed to come to collective hands, while the so far unidentified rapist and murderer is in advance fashioned by the media into a "vengeful angel": the one who takes a piece of deserved misfortune to the very source of evil, so that his crime - even though legally and morally unacceptable - is supposed to be experienced in some sort of mythical vision, as a realization of higher justice and unspoken desire of the rest of his compatriots.
The only reason for that lies in the "Serb" ethnicity of the victim, which burdens her apparent innocence - that of a raped and murdered victim - with a pile of aggravating circumstances. Yes, it is not nice to rape and murder, the newspaper article seems to say, but isn't it true that the murdered woman lived in the "stronghold of Serb rebels, from where Otocac, Prozor and the rest of the Gacko valley [had been] bombed"? Isn't it true that tens of Croats had experienced the fate of Bosiljka Puhar?
If by chance, the circumstances were different, the ethical potential of the newspaper article would have been different. "Bosiljka Puhar, a Croat, lived alone in a house...". Such a sentence in a newspaper article would have enough power to provoke tribal solidarity of unprecedented extent. However, this way, the disturbance is of local, limited character, controlled, so to speak non-existent, as the murder "disturbed deserted Podum", although it not exactly clear how it is possible to gauge "disturbance" in a "deserted" village, even though that inability to gauge "disturbance" hides the depressing question that Croat newspapers avoid in a wide circle. Namely, why is Podum deserted? Why was the revenge glorified as the highest patriotic, state and public value, even though it simply serves as an excuse for the worst criminal scum? The reporter, naturally, has no definite evidence proving that the murderer is a Croat, but suspects that precisely that could be the case...
We would rather not refer to such practice as pulling a straight jacket on the weak back of the nation, because the jacket has been pulled on a long time ago, and now we are in the phase of adjustment, seeking a more-or-less cozy pose in that type of clothes. The straight jacket should have been pulled off when the time for that was right, but since that did not happen, with time it seems more and more appropriate and natural. I you'll allow me, even the older irritation disappears from the skin.
The process in which membership in a tribe results in appropriate nobility of a crime - by creating a stereotypical bastard mixture of a butcher and righteous avenger - is by now so technically advanced that at first glance we do not even notice anything strange about it, but is simply accepted as natural context, subcutaneous news about ethnic doom of an individual, and is also transmitted reflexively, even without the deep foreboding that used to affect professional propagandists. The unimportant newspaper reporter who in advance paroles the unknown murderer, probably does not see himself as an extremist, and most likely is not an extremist, but - based on well worn nationalist mechanism - feels responsible and guilty for the acts of his assumed compatriot, and takes the necessary protective measures.
In that sense, he is only a reflection of the huge general emotion. If a member of my ethnic group raped and murdered someone, he must have had a good reason to do something like that, as "we", that butcher and righteous avenger and myself, that is "we", butchers and righteous, one and the same - simply are not ordinary rapists and murderers. If the collective identity becomes predominant, if it is tailored so that it destroys every trace of individuality, then - just like in every group story - the so-called national qualities are "measured" based on the worst among us, and the only way out of morally unbearable situations is to artificially raise the level of the social bottom.
Today, full eight years after the end of the war and three and a half years after the purported end of the dictatorship of Croat nationalism, the nationalist mold has not only survived, but has been intertwined with our daily practices in such a routine manner that today it does not provoke outrage or foreboding even in the minority that found the nationalism unacceptable. "A daily newspaper" that spices up a rape and murder of an old woman with "mitigating" ethnic context, is everything but an excess, and its information is "current" to the extent it functions as a drop in the ocean that deprives us even of a memory of firm soil. Some swim in that ocean, others are drowning, but all of them are reliably wet and do not count on "dry facts" as a measure of respect for individuality. Voluntary and forced slaves of the nation feel that the time of possible innocence is gone and cannot be brought back. In such an environment, newspapers only seemingly address readers. Actually, they serve - blunt objects!