Darkness

Feral Tribune, Split, Croatia, July 19, 1999

"I see that our opposition in Croatia is either not aware or they are so perverted that they are trying to overthrow president Tudman following the orders given by Great Masonic Lodges from London and Paris, which also provide their funding."

If there was a contest to guess who among the high HDZ officials (naturally, the president cannot be excluded) treated us with these two fascistoid pearls, there would be very few winners. By chance, these are the words of Dinko Sakic published, not on some private TV station, CNN for example, but in a newspaper financed by the Croatian government, called Narod, which is also edited by a distinguished HDZ official don Anto Bakovic. And that is a totally natural state of the dirty Croatian swamp in which a regime with its media assistance has been wallowing happily for years. Until the moment when an external enemy, together with domestic traitors, dared to call the swamp with its real name, exactly as Christiane Amanpour did these days in her 30 minute program about the growing influence of fascism in Croatia, focusing on the trial of Dinko Sakic.

A simple TV creation, with shots of contemporary Croatia, much more tempered than those we can see daily in cafes, pubs, and even offices where the photo of Ante Pavelic is proudly displayed next to that of Franjo Tudman, has again brought to all of their four feet devoted patriotic media "commentators". This sad journalistic species among Croats, carried away by the just national goal, which without doubt includes the proclamation of Dinko Sakic for a saint, with time has totally lost the feel for timing and consequently simply cannot understand that no lies can save their "homeland", which they have been identifying through banalities and lies for years only with the regime of Franjo Tudman. Consequently they will continue, in spite of the accelerating fall of a dictatorial regime in an abyss, to attack CNN's program about street and institutional neo-Ustashism [i.e. neo-fascism] in Croatia, where Dinko Sakic is prosecuted as a comrade in arms, rather than as an infamous criminal, with all to them characteristic, silly, unconvincing commentaries. Above all, in the HDZ journalistic headquarters: Croatian TV.

Unable to disprove statements of several distinguished Croatian journalists and intellectuals about the shameful nature of the trial to the commander of the Jasenovac concentration camp with any kind of arguments (since there are not any), lacking any better argument to prove to the CNN journalist that it is not true that at the Victims of Fascism square primitive fascists are beating civilized people (CNN's footage clearly showed this incident) or that any fool can regularly hold a mass for Ante Pavelic, the commentator of HTV in only one sentence summarized the essence, sorrow and poverty of the attitude of Tudman's regime towards Sakic as a paradigm of the former and present Croatian fascism. With his sentence (and there is no doubt that it was written in Tudman's office) he criticized Christiane Amanpour because, while shooting a program about Sakic, she "did not ask the other side for comment, as was confirmed by both the state prosecutor and Sakic's attorney" (Dnevnik and Motrista [two prime time news programs], July 13). That sentence is the most damning evidence about the state of consciousness of Tudman's media clerks to whom, exactly as to Franjo Tudman himself, "the other side" in the case Sakic is made up from both the prosecutor and defense.

Because of that, it could happen that the State prosecutor's office, which acts at the same time as a prosecutor and defense, i.e. that "other side", does not accuse Sakic of genocide but only for individual murders. Because of that, it is possible that CNN's program includes statements of "the other side", defense attorney Branko Seric, the man who only a year ago enthusiastically participated in a high profile case: Tudman against Feral's journalists Invancic and Culic. Then, defending the journalists, he claimed that Tudman publicly identifies with dictator Franco and is trying to mix the remains of victims and their butchers exactly at the location of the concentration camp where genocide was committed under the command of his present defendant Dinko Sakic. Today, the mentioned lawyer mockingly interrupts testimonies of former terrified Sakic's victims from Belgrade with questions of the following type: "Could you please explain the meaning of the word 'voz'?"[voz is a "Serb" word for train. Its equivalent in "Croatian" is vlak. The translator is not aware of any Croat, Serb or Muslim who does not know the meaning of both words]

Hence, the above mentioned sentence of the HTV's commentator finally raised the Croatian judicial farce, in which both the prosecutor and defense council are sharing the task of the defense of a commander of a WWII concentration camp, to the level of total absurdity. In that case, what mistake did Christiane Amanpour make, apart from describing Croatia with the color that does not make the majority of Croats happy, but unfortunately is prevalent in our country: black? However, that blackness was released in the manner of a squid by exactly by the regime of Franjo Tudman - blackness of Ustashe and political violence that He resuscitated with his stupidities about fake reconciliation - to finally as a final straw stage an ignominious trial to an aging and arrogant criminal, whom majority of audience in the courtroom greets with a fascist salute. That is a sad fact that cannot any more be denied even by a pack of Tudman's mercenaries, in spite of several years of lies "in the interest of the homeland", which still implies tearing into pieces of every bearer of bad news. The introductory sentence of Dunja Ujevic, a journalist of Vecernji List and HTV, in her article under the headline "Messanger Called Amanpour" (Vecernji List, July 15) is remarkably revealing in this sense: "Wherever Christiane Amanpour shows up, something has already happened or is bound to happen soon". A missed irony has been turned into silliness which is supposed to prove that an appearance of American journalists has provoked Ustashe to turn up in Croatia, pronounced the commander of the WWII concentration camp in Jasenovac guilty before the end of his trial, and that CNN's program about the Croatian fascism is a suitable introduction of imperialist powers to the overthrow of the otherwise democratic regime in Croatia. To be honest, Franjo Tudman does not have it easy with such journalists, whose cute behinds cover at least two pro-regime chairs (one in HTV and the other in Vecernji List; or alternatively in HTV and Vjesnik), so that their intellect has naturally split in two to the extent that they do not any more know what they want to say. What they do know, at any time of night and day, and what has turned into a natural reflex after nine years of loyal service to a dictator, is that a bearer of bad news should be executed, either because of what has already happened, or because of what is likely to happen in the future.