SWAMP

Feral Tribune, Split, Croatia, November 1 1999

That grotesque scene seemed to have put an end to a ten-year cycle of a sombre rule, but it also brought the story back to its beginning. To those days when eagerly awaited, the so-called "fighters for our cause" started arriving to Zagreb airport to throw themselves in the arms of their comrades and fellow-fighters. These people were, however, false heroes, primitive quasi-patriots who lived their dreams of the Independent State of Croatia in the suburbs of European cities, in various criminal ways: from denouncing, harassing and kidnapping, to providing services for the Yugoslav state security service. The worst part of that "flower of Croatiandom", the so-called political emigration, was built, like a cement block, into the very grounds of the Croatian state, in order to create a country for the one who gathered them, by manipulating violence and extremism as their only values.

Ten years later, a fairy tale has become a fable, bloody as most of them, and the worst among all characters, a member of Parliament, the founder of the Commission for manipulations with the victims of WWII, and a judge of the Constitutional Court has become its metaphor and connective tissue. A short part of his autobiography that is known to us is only a draft for a dreadful story, in which hatred toward other - Serbs, Bosnian Muslims and those who oppose Tudjman - dominates, along with dangerous bloody-mindedness strengthened by powerful state aparatus positions, as well as the ideology of Ustashe legitimized by legal authorities placed at his disposal, and finally, contempt for all social values.

Political power, the original ideology of Ustashe, the dark experience of the emigrant political underworld, and complete absence of all moral values are inalienable characteristics of this high political official, as well as of the whole regime of Franjo Tudjman, to whom this character devotedly served, charging his services in different ways-from material to various other "small" pleasures. Everything the ruler ever dreamt of, this man patiently, loyally and fully carried out. However, the story of ominous exaltation and the unusual psyche of a man born in a village near Ljubuski, should be only a subject for a psychiatric evaluation, and a polite person shouldn't even think about it. And it would really be like that, if the man weren't the most convincing part of an evil state power, which maltreated, humiliated and, if circumstances required, killed their own citizens, and those from the neighbouring country, the power which established concentration camps in the territory of a foreign country, and which was legitimated by this person, sitting in the Croatian parliament, dressed in a Croatian Defence Council [HVO, Bosnian Croat militia] uniform.

He was always at the right place at the right time - either as an assistant to the Minister of Internal Affairs, or taking over UDBA [Yugoslav state security service in the former Yugoslavia] files and using them to physically destroy certain people, or working on the establishment of Herceg-Bosna, or digging out skulls and bones, and counting good Ustashe killed by bad Partisans, or attacking his political opponents, especially women, using the most brutal words. In this context, his message to a female MP - "Bear more children, and speak less" - was a succinct, vulgar expression of Tudjman's idea of demographic revival, but it was also a public disclosure of an aggressive attitude towards "the weaker and inferior species".

It was a verbal, hidden, rapist's attack on a person of another sex and different political orientation. But, how do verbal rapists act in a situation when they have complete control over their victim, who doesn't have parliamentary, national, nor human immunity? If rape is a kind of rule, isn't every abuse legitimate?

Especially if we're dealing, and we are, with a perverted state power, who has fed and maintained itself only on hatred. And everyone has been the object of hatred- Serbs, Bosnian Muslims, those 20 percent Croats who, according to President want to destroy Croatia, and everything that is different - from minorities and intellectual groups to women.

From that hatred a swamp-state was created, and its staleness can make us only throw up. But, although we do have the right to be disgusted, we don't have the right to be astonished. In other words, no one can pretend to be stupid, and persuade themselves they didn't know they lived in a state divided only into victims and rapists. If it weren't like that, our ominous hero would be only an extreme phenomenon, and he couldn't even dream of the post of a Constitutional Court judge. In this case, his election to the most important judicial institution is only a metaphor of a threatening message sent by the ill, withered Tudjman - that he would be here even after his departure.