Arson, Mistreatment and a Lie
by Dubravko Horvatic
Hrvatsko Slovo, Zagreb, Croatia, 3/15 1996
Those who have, since August 1995 and the operation "Storm", maligned the Croatian Army without a break, slandering it as a gang of out-of-control arsonists, have been finally proven wrong; and in Bosnia of all places: leaving those territories which won't belong to their "entity", the Serbs, in full view of the IFOR members and in front of cameras, burned every piece non-movable property that could be burned, as they had done in Croatia, on the eve of their escape (because of their crimes) in front of the Croatian Army. Various Cicaks [Ivan Zvonimir Cicak, the president of the Croatian Helsinki Committee] and Serb leaders in Croatia, who accused Croatia of "ethnic cleansing" when she was liberating her occupied territories, cannot now, after all, say that the Croatian Army is setting Ilidza on fire, since it is known that the Muslims didn't let Croatian policemen from Kiseljak to enter that Sarajevo suburb; they also did not allow them to enter Hadzici. At the same time the world is discovering Serb crimes in Visegrad and is amazed by the scale of the genocide, as if someone after Borovo Selo, Celije and Banovina in the summer of 1991 can be amazed by anything coming from the Serbs! Nevertheless, the Muslims, who have established themselves as a separate ethnic group in this war, are applying in some places the methods of those who had attacked them in 1992; but instead of applying them on the Serbs they are applying them on the Croats; in that way they are mocking the agreements from Washington and Dayton: we have already mentioned that the Muslims did not allow the Croatian policemen to work together with the Muslim and Serb policemen on the territory of the Bosnian Federation; the Muslims also blocked the return of Croats to Sarajevo, formed a single nation muslim canton in Sarajevo, banned the movement of the HVO [Bosnian Croat militia] vehicles through Bugojno and expelled the Croats from Bugojno; it seems that this partial list of Croatian suffering in the hands of Muslims will in the future grow longer.
Instead of concentrating on these burning problems, a large part of the Croatian media and intellectuals are drawing the public attention away from these topics and confusing our present with the demonization of the past. For example, in a vulgar article ("Don't babble"), published a few days ago in Vjesnik, certain Luka Vincetic, who had, in Babic's Oko celebrated with his ridiculous poems the October Bolsevik Revolution and AVNOJ 1943 [WWII conference which laid foundations of a post-war federal Yugoslav state], actually Yugoslavia, attacked Vinko Nikolic [a former Ustashe (Croatian fascists in WWII) ideologist, today a prominent Croatian patriot; he was appointed to the upper house of the Croatian parliament by the Croatian president], lecturing him and the readers about the NDH [Independent State of Croatia, a fascist puppet Croatian state during the WWII]. It doesn't matter that yugobolsevik Vincetic (who is, to tell the truth, to the shame of the Holy Mother Church and Djakovo bishopric, a Catholic priest) thinks that "the Ustashe regime was ... dark, evil and bloodthirsty"; what matters is what he is, seemingly unintentionally, saying about the contemporary Croatia. Addressing Nikolic, Vincetic says:"...those who are attacking you today are in some ways in a similar situation to that in which you used to be in the past - they hardly get a chance to say anything..." Such a lie can only be written by a die-hard yugobolsevik, who cooperates with all quasi-communist publications and who hurried to that obscure gathering in "Mimara" [museum] in order to bow to the ideologists of Croatocide [murder of Croats?]. At the end of his long article, comrade priest says that "in todays Croatia, the reason will prevail, sooner or later..." I agree that there is no sense when, instead of the healthy criticism, lies and slanders in the attacks on the authorities, like those in Vincetic's article, are allowed to consciously divert attention from real problems.
A version of the above mentioned article by Luka Vincetic was published in the Split weekly Feral Tibune: Fasnicki Fascism.
More information about the arson attacks and crimes which followed the liberation/occupation of Krajina can be found in the following articles:
Translated on 3/27 1996
