No, these statements weren't made by Zlatko Vitez or Bozo Biskupic. The ordinary citizen Antun Vujic also didn't say this, so that we could only sadly shrug our shoulders. The new Minister of Culture, Antun Vujic, said this to Globus, which makes these statements more than merely sad. What he said is undoubtedly a tactless and dangerous re-evaluation of the already seen state of mind, which cherished intolerance for everything different, and which resulted in the persecution of artists and independent intellectuals. To remind mister Minister, it happened not so long ago, in 1992, when the persecution of the misfit artists and intellectuals by HDZ began, garnished with dismissals, spitting (literally), slander etc. Those that couldn't endure - left. So, that certainly wasn't their choice (as the Minister suggested), but it was the choice of the Croatian regime that successfully cleansed the Croatian theater from, for example, Mira Furlan and Rade Serbedjija, with the direct help of the pro-regime intellectual establishment, sometimes with direct physical threats.
Which state power does the new Minister legitimize with his claim that the departure of those artists doesn't "presuppose a serious sin by the government"? Does this mean that the Minister agrees with the regime that recognized in these artists, as well as in its other critics, "enemies of the state", "suspicious Croats" which made it normal to force them go away? Vujic's claim that "Croatia didn't do as much wrong to any of those people as France did to Celine" is a dangerous combination of cynicism and untruth. Because, since France put her poet in prison for his anti-Semitic work during the Vichy France, is the Minister trying to say that Croatia was more that generous with its "traitors of croatiandom" and dangerous Yugo-nostalgists, since it didn't put them in prison, but elegantly enabled their emigration, internal or external, it's all the same?
Vujic with irony relativizes one dark and shameful period of Croatian history, in which everything, including blood cells and the amount of lace on underwear of the "misfit" artists and public workers, was counted. He admitted that "there was a small media campaign against Mira Furlan, for example", but later he compared this vulgar fascist media lynch to the troubles of social democrats. Precisely that is the basic difference between the party workers in culture and real artists. Vujic also said that members of his political party (SDP) had also been exposed to lynch, similarly to Rade Serbedjija or Mira Furlan, but they hadn't betrayed their country by leaving. This, however, shows to be untrue already at the example of the Minister, since no one ever counted his lovers or blood cells, moreover, precisely in 1992 he was "banished" to the place of the editor of "Croatian Encyclopedia" and the editor-in-chief of the "Croatian Lexicon", as a prominent critic of Tudjman's regime I guess.
By putting a sign of equality between the suffering of this group of artists and the alleged sufferings of himself and his party comrades, Vujic proved to be much more like a zealous servant of some pre-historic Communist party organization in charge of "deviations in culture", than the Minister of Culture of a civic state. Because, the real difference between the destinies of those whom Croatia "didn't drive away", but only lynched here and there, and the members of Vujic's SDP who were also "threatened", is that SDP fought for power which they eventually gained, while the group of artists, also with social-democratic beliefs, but without party membership cards and ambitions, was and is deprived of their basic means of work - the language in which they write or act. The Minister's reaction to the possibility of their return and the undoubted enrichment of our culture was also a dangerous welcome: "We shouldn't make the burden on their own conscience any heavier!". Translated to a normal language, this horrible tudjmanistic rebuke is actually a cynical message that all of them should apologize for betraying Croatia before they return. Whose Croatia? Tudjman's or Vujic's? Or is it the one and the same Croatia to Mister Minister Vujic? The indisputable, collective, unanimous - above everything and every individual.
And finally, instead of an apology for the behavior of his predecessors and a simple human invitation to return to the country in which they were born, the Minister makes a pedagogic appeal to "make their contribution to the Croatian society", as if he were a rigid official of the past Socialist Union. As if they haven't been making it with their books and plays. If the Minister really thinks that the latest prominent German prize "Heinrich Mann" to the Croatian writer Dubravka Ugresic isn't a true contribution to the Croatian culture, why did he send her a letter with congratulations? Why does actually the Minister think that the literary success of Slavenka Drakulic, as well as the movie success of Rade Serbedjija, isn't at the same time a success of the devastated and claustrophobic Croatian culture? Is it because of his conviction (equal to that of his predecessors) that every creative work is valuable only if it appears within one's own national state? Something like former Communist volunteer work camps! Or the "Croatian Lexicon" by Antun Vujic, a citizen whom we don't remember seeing at the demonstrations at Victims of Fascism Square, but we do remember him for a lexicographical unit on the concentration camp Jasenovac which, in opposition to the long text about Bleiburg, spread over full two lines? Isn't than this tactless reaction of the Minister actually an inalienable part of the eternal banality of the "Croatian intellectual", always ready to calm his own conscience with euthanasia of memory? And finally, in good faith, let us nevertheless imagine the impossible- that the Minister reacts to this text with a "correction of a wrong statement". His own, of course!