Society of Dead Organizations

by Zoran Daskalovic

Feral Tribune, Split, Croatia, January 19, 1998

Croatian citizens are a priori suspicious, especially if they act together in large organized groups. At least that appears to be the attitude of the majority in the Parliament, which in mid June of last year accepted government's proposal for the Law about Organizations. With this law, the state is given authority to do with the civic organizations as she pleases. If the citizens who have decided to found an organization manage to break through the first half of the law and fulfill detailed conditions for the establishment and registration of civic organizations, the state is given the authority to control their work, to punish them, and finally ban their work whenever they violate one of numerous articles which proscribe what citizens are allowed and what they are not allowed to do.

Those associations which fail to assemble a list of their members will be punished by a fine of 3,000 to 20,000 kunas. The same fine will be assigned to those organizations which to not report to the authorities within 15 days the founding of a new branch or some other sister organization. A fine of 100,000 kunas will be imposed on those organizations which fail to timely report the change of address of their headquarters. Also, the legal representative of the organization will be fined 20,000 kunas if he or she fails to report the new address of the organization within two months after the change.

Stick for Human Rights

The state is authorized to temporarily ban any organization if "there is reasonable doubt that the organization is acting against the Constitution or the Law". Therefore, if any state official, or someone above him, has a "reasonable" doubt that some organization is breaking the law, he can temporarily ban its work. And it isn't all that hard to break the law which imposes so many limitations: even the lack of information or an omission can easily be a reason for an offense. Additionally, the punishment for organizations and their members are much stiffer than those prescribed for those who break the law about trading societies, even when they endanger the health and lives of the people. True, some authors of the law about organizations have responded to the objections regarding the strict nature of the law by stating that the harshest penalties will not be applied; that can only mean that those penalties were included in the law in order to provide the state with a stick which can be used to destroy an organization which through its activities reveals the dark side of the ruling authorities. Naturally, the organizations concerned with human rights are most often in conflict with certain state bodies and their officials.

In practice, the parliament representatives gave the state apparatus the authority to classify all civic organizations as the suitable ones or the unsuitable ones and to stifle the latter ones using all available means. Along the way, with the article which stipulates that all existing social organizations and associations of citizens and any newly founded organizations have an obligation to adjust all their documents in accordance with the new law within six months and apply for re-registration, the authorities have in practice slaughtered a large number of non-profit and non-governmental organizations. Namely, January 15, 1998 was the deadline for the re-registration of all civic organizations, despite the fact that the Ministry of Administration has come up with the rules for the implementation of the law with a two month delay.

Although no one, not even the state authorities and non-governmental organizations which follow the activities of various organizations, knows how many organizations are active in Croatia, a realistic estimate is that at least two thirds of them haven't applied for re-registration in time to meet the deadline. Thus, in practice they have become illegal and exposed to draconian fines and a ban. In the Ministry of Administration, in charge of registration of organizations at the national level, they have completed the re-registration of about 70 organizations, while another 600 had applied for the re-registrations before the deadline. In Zagreb, 278 organizations have applied for the re-registration, out of roughly 3,000 which had been registered until now. The ratio of applicants and previously registered organizations is similar, if not worse, in other regional centers, which indicates that out of 25,000 various organizations currently active in Croatia, according to the estimate of the Center for the Development of Non-governmental Organizations, thousands of them will have to, if they want to continue with their activities, start from scratch in order to avoid experiencing the "care" of the authorities on their skin.

Registration of Filth

Having in mind that most organizations are active in the fields of culture, arts, sports, education and research, health care, social care, environment, community development and other similar fields, the motive for the enactment of a rigid and restrictive Law about Organizations was obviously to provide means for suppression of a small number of organizations active in the fields of human rights, general politics and the representation of public interests. Most of them were founded after 1990 and, inspired by democratic changes, carefully followed and registered all mistakes of the new authorities and their failures to respect newly proclaimed principles which were supposed to bring Croatia in the circle of developed democratic countries. Since all other, less politicized, organizations have been founded to assist in fields which no one else, not even the state, is covering, the current authorities were obviously of the opinion that the citizens organized in various organizations must be above all controlled and overseen and even persecuted whenever they, through their activities, as much as hint that the state is not ideal and cannot solve all the problems of its citizens, and that it even endangers many of their interests and rights.

From the attitude that the citizens gathered in non-governmental and non-profit organizations are a priori suspicious and that they should be incessantly controlled and suppressed in their activities, the creators of the Law from the government were not dissuaded even by the experts of the Council of Europe and other experts from all over the world who had delivered many warnings and objections during the procedure of the enactment of the Law about Organizations. In Croatia, the state has been promoted into a sacred cow and the citizens and their organizations can touch its "holiness" only if the state allows them to do so. Increased expectations from the early 90's and the development of the civil society will have to wait for better times. The fact that Croatia has formally accepted the principle [of subsidiarity] used in the developed democratic world that "those matters which can be handled by the individuals and the local community on their own must not be taken out of their jurisdiction and transferred to the wider community," has so far been useless to the citizens and their organizations. In this country the state still determines what its citizens are allowed and what they are not allowed to do, even if they die from so much "care" for their civilized living.

Vesna Terselic, the president of the Anti-War Campaign

Macho Statutes

The new law about organizations is such that because of it we are forced to write a Statute which doesn't fully reflect our most important activities, in order to fulfill the criteria listed in the law. Nevertheless, out Statute doesn't follow some articles of the law, so we will have to wait for the reaction from the "above". We don't want to lie to ourselves nor to others about who we are and what we want to do. This law is in general restrictive, it limits the possibility for autonomous actions and allows unhindered control of non-governmental organizations. Let me also mention that the Women's organization ZAR from Rijeka had its proposal for the Statute rejected because it was written in female person.

G.K.

Mirjana Galo, president of the Human Rights organization from Pula, Homo

Monopoly of the Central Committee [of the League of Communists]

We submitted the request for re-registration to the Ministry of Administration before the final deadline. However, now they demand from us to further "clarify" certain statements and categories in our Statute in connection with our activities, such as the category of human rights etc. All in all, the Law about Organizations was written in such a way to allow the state absolute control of the activities of non-governmental organizations, which means that they can very effectively hinder their work. The same follows for the Law about Humanitarian Organizations and Humanitarian Assistance, which is currently at the second reading in the Parliament and which ensures absolute monopoly of the state-controlled red Cross in the field of humanitarian activities.

G.K.

Dr. Gojko Bezovan, Director of the Center for the Development of Non-Profit Organizations

Idle State Organ

The basic objection is that the executive governmental bodies are given too much authority in the procedure of the founding and overall activity and management of organizations. If a group of citizens, based on their constitutional rights, specifically human rights, has founded an organization, one has to wonder what the executive state bodies have to do with that. Here, people still can not understand the fact that these organizations are independent and run by their members. If they do have problems, these problems should be resolved by their members. If in that process they break financial laws, this should be controlled by the financial police which oversees this type of activity and that is the limit of the state authority in these matters; similarly, the executive state bodies have nothing to do with the stock-holding societies or companies.

Why are the authorities trying so hard to get involved in the activities on non-governmental organizations?

The problem is that in our country there is not enough serious information about what non-governmental organizations do in developed countries and why they are important. In my opinion, here, based on the volume of recent activities, there is a tendency to significantly limit the activities in which non-governmental organizations can be involved. Almost no one is aware that abroad NGOs employ people, that they are active in very important fields, that they make contracts with the state or certain state agencies and funds, that their activities in some ways overlap with those of the state. The idea behind NGOs and their mission is to promote the individual responsibility; the state should not take care of everything. Simply, the citizens should organize on their own and try to satisfy a part of their needs and needs of their local community through their own efforts.

Isn't it true that the goal of the Law about Organizations is to transfer the concept of "social organizations" from the previous system into the new conditions in which the state dominates the whole society?

With this law, we still haven't overcome that inherited way of thinking. By definition, NGOs are private and non-profit organizations. As such, they have nothing to do with "social organizations". With this law, we have returned NGOs to the level of "social organizations"; they are still not private organizations. By clinging to the concept of social organizations the state can maintain various means of control which do not exist in the developed world.

To which extent is the rigid attitude of the authorities with respect to NGOs a reaction to the activities of human rights organizations, especially those who have revealed drastic violations of human rights inspired by and committed under the protection of the state authorities?

It is difficult to guess what guided the authorities in the preparation of this law. Obviously the general idea, which is clearly expressed in the text of the law, is to gain more control over the NGOs. It is clear that those NGOs which are more active in that sense will be under tighter scrutiny; those which have significant financial resources; those which are active in current political matters. Today, in our country, if you get politically involved in one of the NGOs and have the audacity to receive funding from Soros or someone else, you will immediately receive a political label, without any valid reason. The divisions in our country along those lines are responsible for a very bad image of Croatia in the world. And it should be the other way round. The development of NGOs and civil society should be one of our strategic goals, because it is a condition for Croatia's entry into the top tier of the former communist countries which are currently going through economic transition.

Translated on 2/26/98