While the day of the final return arrives, a day in which the Pokuplje burns returns to my consciousness. Our little houses in flames, to this day have more significance for me than all the famous historical fires. Those tears, that death and that universal pain. I admit, for days I did not believe in forgiveness. How could have I when those beasts are still day and night attacking everything we hold sacred. First our language, then our soil, our bodies and our soul. They intended to desecrate us, humiliate, exterminate, wipe out for ever from the face of the earth, from humanity and especially from the political map of Europe and the world. How could one think in the middle of that fire about forgiveness? Even when through the bloody flames, that very same day, got through to us a gentle word of his excellency, the archbishop of Zagreb and a cardinal, a voice of the Church, the voice of the faith: if my neighbor sets my house on fire I will not set his on fire! If my neighbor kills my father, my brother ... I will not return with the same measure! Terribly, through the flames, echoed those gentle words, and although said in my mother tongue, they seemed foreign, unintelligible, distant. That evening, on a crowded city square, in a crowd of desperate and bitter people, a good friend a [isusovac (believer or jesuit?)], was shocked by those words. I understood him, because everything around us burned with that Pokupski flame, so that it was hard to comprehend gentle words, even a word of God.
Today, even as I write this text, they are trying to push us into that Pokupsko state. They intend to do it in their always the same way - by killing! With Sows. A supreme symbol of their pig raising herd. With Sows on Zagreb: on the Cathedral, on the Croatian Academy of Arts and Sciences, on the Croatian National Theater, on the Artistic pavilion, on the Mimara Museum, on the Botanical Garden, on the State Archive, on the Children's Hospital... As if this white city will turn into a pigsty because of their burrowing?! As they couldn't do it in other Croatian regions. Especially in Vukovar and Pakrac... Of course, those to whom a sow is an ideal will never understand our essence, our fundamental values; therefore all their future sows will lack a real target.
Six sows fell on Zagreb today as well. Non stop news bulletins on the radio. From Zagreb hospitals details about the condition of the wounded. From one of the hospitals we heard the Croatian Minister for Culture accompanied by a famous Croatian General. Just before Serbian bombs started grunting through Zagreb, the two of them had been discussing the return of orthodox icons, saved by the members of HVO [ Bosnian Croat Army] in Bosnia. In parallel, yesterdays picture of the Croatian policemen entering liberated Western Slavonian lands. Undamaged Orthodox church. Untouched monument, symbol of the serbocommunist failed regime. Houses .. of those who stayed as well as those who left, regardless, will not experience the fate of thousands and thousands Croatian houses.
If the Croatian cardinal's home were hit yesterday or, God forbid, today, the gentle godly voice which cautions us from the Pokupski flames, would remain. The voice which cautions us from the centuries old layers of our faith and kindness. The voice which cautions us in a dignified manner, after years in exile, after being brought to the end of hope and returns us to our houses, burned homes, overgrown farms, destroyed sacred places, plowed-over cemeteries...