Transcript
[silence]
Thank you once again
for agreeing to talk to us.
To begin with, could you please
tell us your name and surname,
date and place of birth?
My name is Srđan Dvornik. I was
born on May 24, 1953 in Šibenik.
Could you tell us something about your
occupation and line of work today?
Formally speaking, I am a
professor of sociology
and philosophy with a degree
in political sciences.
I mostly work as a translator,
but I also engage in different consulting
services, analyses and studies
related to these social,
non-profit topics
as well as problems and activities
related to human rights,
democratic initiatives and the like.
Could you tell us something
about the origin of your family?
A brief outline of their history?
Although I have spent more than
90 percent of my life in Zagreb,
the entire family history
is tied to Dalmatia.
Both of my grandmothers,
my paternal as well as my maternal
grandmother, come from Brač.
One of my grandfathers
comes from Split,
which is where my surname,
Dvornik, comes from.
My other grandfather
comes from Starigrad on Hvar.
In the period between
the two world wars,
due to the economic
circumstances,
they moved a lot, looking for
and following their work,
so they lived in
various places in Dalmatia.
In the 1930s, they somehow
ended up in Šibenik,
which was also where
my parents met later on.
To your knowledge,
was your family in Šibenik
in any way affected by WWII?
Or took part in it?
My father's family was more
actively involved.
I can't recall what my grandfather
was doing there at the time.
But his health significantly deteriorated
due to all the circumstances of the war.
He never recovered, he suffered
from it until his death in 1955.
And my grandmother
was involved in some illegal work.
Once, she told me about carrying some
hand grenades in a shopping bag,
grenades which
some younger boys,
including my father and his brother,
had stolen from the Italians.
These had to be
smuggled to the partisans.
My father and his brother,
as members of the League of Young Communists,
also took part in
illegal work in Šibenik.
Mostly intelligence, but sometimes some
weapon procurement such as this as well.
But, mostly, thanks to their
fluency in Italian and German,
they gathered information, even
through contact with ordinary soldiers,
and passed it on
to the partisans.
Did anyone in your
family get hurt in WWI?
Not through direct
participation in the fighting,
nor was anyone killed in
the battles or the bombings. No.
My mother's brother joined
the partisans when he was quite young.
I'm not sure, he was
a kid, still very young.
He was 16 in 1941, but he
had joined the partisans very early on.
After the war, he even retained
an officer position in the JNA air force.
He was wounded, but not gravely,
nor did it have any lasting aftereffects
such as disability for him.
I would estimate that my family
was affected by the war as much
as any other one, having
an average involvement in the war.
It could hardly happen that somebody
was not at all affected by the war.
After all, Šibenik was targeted
by some heavy bombing as well.
But my family hasn't been
severely affected by the war.
What memories do you
have of your early youth?
Were you still living in Šibenik,
or did you live somewhere else?
I don't really have any memories
of Šibenik from that time of my life.
I was born there, but, for a little
while, when I was still a baby,
I stayed with
my grandmother on Brač.
Then, as my parents went to work
in Lukavac, and later on Tuzla,
that was where I spent
the first 4 years of my life.
That was also where
my brother was born,
when I wasn't even 2 years old.
In Lukavac.
That's close to Tuzla.
And then, in 1957, when I was 4 years old,
my parents found work in Zagreb.
Then they moved here
and have lived here ever since.
I have no particularly prominent
memories from that time.
When you're a very small kid,
it's very difficult to discern
anything as specific to your area.
Everything is new to you when
you're a kid, wherever it happens.
I do remember one thing, and it's quite odd
that I do, since I was so young.
I remember something that would today
be designated a cultural shock.
When I arrived to Zagreb,
I was under the impression that
the people here were speaking
in a completely different language.
That is, that my speech
was foreign to them.
Granted, my combination of
Dalmatian and Bosnian speech
did have some common ground
with this Zagreb kajkavian speech,
but it also had
so many differences
that, for a while,
I had trouble adapting to it,
as well as trouble
with basic communication.
What was your family's attitude
towards ethnic identity?
And how did it reflect
on your upbringing?
My parents were first and foremost
truly staunch Communists.
They understood Communism
as a historical project
worth advocating, something that
could bring about true equality,
not just formal, but social
and every other kind of equality as well.
Their position was
quite pronounced,
in a way that
consciously departed from
all divisions based on
national or ethnic affiliation.
It didn't adhere to some
surrogate affiliation with a quasi...
It didn't follow
this pattern,
finding surrogate affiliation in
Yugoslavianism or something like that.
They simply maintained
that it was pointless
to acquire this kind
of identification
as something
marking one's identity.
One has many disagreements
with one's parents.
I may have sometimes been
too much of an anarchist,
or too radical a
leftist for them,
but we never disagreed
on this particular point.
Nor was it
an imposing ideology.
I have seen it in people
whose background was in families
that highly valued
their national identity,
that is, nationalist families,
or people
whose families opted for
true Yugoslavianism
as an identification,
an affiliation much like
national identification.
As much as this is forgotten today,
it was also very much present.
I know that my coevals
had many great conflicts
and falling-outs
with their parents
in these kinds of families.
My parents' attitude was
unobtrusive and inclusive,
which made it easier
for us to get along.
Whether I was marked by it
as heritage or as my own choice,
I can't say or know.
In any case,
it has ancient roots.
Just like I was already the third generation
of religionless people in my family.
Your family had
no religious identity?
That's right. Beginning
with my grandmother.
The same grandmother
who took part
in the illegal resistance in the war,
she was completely
indifferent towards it.
It took hold and
continued from her on.
I know that my maternal
grandmother was a believer.
But she belonged to the
best kind of believers.
Those people who believe in God in a way
in which one believes in something good.
In positive values.
She used to say:
"It makes no difference
that you don't go to
church and don't pray.
I pray for you as well."
And she never would have done
what grandmothers used to do
in these intergenerational conflicts,
christening their grandchildren
in secret or things like that.
It was quite similar to the relation towards
national identification in my family.
A kind of very pleasant,
peaceful coexistence
between those who
believe in something
and those who don't believe
in anything otherworldly,
who put their faith in the
values of this world.
Did you notice any
differences between yourself
and your coevals when it
came to national identity?
Were there any
conflicts or disagreements?
Not until1970.
It simply wasn't a
topic of conversation.
And when I reminisced...
In elementary school, for example,
which I attended until 1968,
there were names and surnames that we
would later clearly recognize as Serbian.
Or as Bosniac.
Several Macedonians, etc.
But I only remember it
when thinking back on it.
Ah, yes, this name and surname
is actually connected to it.
It simply wasn't
an issue at the time.
Nor was there an attitude such as:
"I don't care who comes from where."
No, I wasn't even aware
that there was such a thing
as being from here
rather than there.
Or anything similar.
The only difference I noticed
was that as a Dalmatian,
formed in Bosnia through
primary language socialisation,
I arrived to Zagreb and
noticed a difference in speech.
Consequently, I saw that some differences
were based on where you were from.
And later on one notices that,
at the time, in the 1950s,
most of these malicious jokes
based on collective stereotypes
about Dalmatians were in
circulation in Zagreb.
Then, of course, as I somewhat
belonged to that category, I noticed it.
But these national, ethnic,
fratricidal differences from Yugoslavia, no.
I discovered those just
before I came of age.
You said it was 1968.
- 1970.
I mentioned 1968, that was when
I finished elementary school.
Why 1970?
Because that was when
this wave of nationalism,
which was induced
from on high, began.
And then it suddenly
became a big deal.
A year later, at the time of
the census in the spring of 1971,
all of a sudden everyone was very
outspoken in declaring themselves.
The discourse resembled
the one surrounding
political elections nowadays.
As if it was a matter
of political alternatives.
I was appalled by
the meaning of nationalism
in everyday life, in political life and culture,
actually, wherever you turned.
At the level of
totalitarianism in this ideology.
That was what I experienced.
It was one of my first
encounters with politics.
When you're a teenager,
you hear many things,
but you don't feel
like they concern you.
You were 18 in 1970, 1971?
You were already up to date
with political developments.
That's right. In 1970,
when I was about to turn 17,
I first glimpsed politics as
an arena where something
that affected society, lives,
relations was taking place.
And my first impression
was shockingly negative.
What did you think of the
events centering around MASPOK,
that is, the Croatian Spring?
Yes, this romantic appellation;
the Croatian Spring.
It's one of these lying
formulations such as
the denomination of war
veterans as defenders,
such as the Homeland War,
such as the national liberation struggle,
all these things,
this beautification in reverse.
I experienced it, even nowadays,
when I had the opportunity to think
more critically about it and read many things,
I experienced it as
an incredible compound of
an ideological change induced from on high,
from the highest political echelons,
and a mass mobilisation from below.
This rarely succeeds.
It's probably the biggest fantasy
of every power-wielder.
To start a process which is
actually their own score-settling
of one fraction against another.
And manage to mobilise
mass support for their side.
And I wonder,
at least in our parts,
whether anything other than
nationalism can trigger this.
Can people be mobilised
by any other cause?
Mass movement, that's
another deceptive expression.
That was a mass movement,
but it was induced by the
authoritative Party leadership.
And it began as
a rupture on high,
in the leadership of the
League of Communists of Croatia.
During which a clear signal
was sent out to the public,
indicating that nationalism
was no longer a bogeyman.
And that displays of nationalism
would go unpunished.
This happened 3 years
after the first public event
that brought the problem
of nationalism, so to say,
into the open.
And that was
the Declaration on
the Status and Name of the
Croatian Literary Language.
At the time, all these
authoritative Party entities
had condemned it as nationalism.
And I do believe that was
the motivation behind it.
But there were real problems
regarding the then language policy
which was, unlike the
later separatist, truly unificatory.
No good ever comes out of
politically forcing a process
that is not already at work
in the life of the language.
In 1967 nationalism was
still harshly condemned.
Beginning with the 10th conference
of the Central Commitee of the
League of Communists of Croatia, which
took place in February 1970,
a signal was sent to society,
indicating that the main problem
was no longer nationalism,
but something that they
designated unitarism.
You are referring to the score-settling with Žanko?
- Yes.
And then eveything took off.
There was even
a kind of liberalisation.
It can probably
be interpreted as
the whole Yugoslavian regime
entering a kind of liberalisation.
An attempt to maintain the
system through a kind of reform.
So there was, first and foremost,
the liberalisation of the economy.
Which only led to greater instability.
They were even scared by
its results because a transition to
full market economy
doesn't happen just like that.
It claims victims.
But it also brought about
a struggle for influence between
various republican
Party leaderships.
As well as clashes regarding
the distribution of power and resources
between the League of Communists of Yugoslavia
and the leaderships of the republics.
And the leadership of the
League of Communists of Croatia
with Savka Dapčević Kučar.
Public support came in handy
in this struggle, of course.
For a while, they believed,
and managed to pull it off for almost 2 years,
that they would be
able to restrain it.
That they would be able to keep
this movement from below,
without it ever escalating
into a real movement,
because they would be
heading it all along,
keeping a tight rein on it.
Thanks to this desire to empower
the support from below
many things had to be
released and liberalised,
so the number
of publications
published by Matica hrvatska
and some cultural institutions
increased.
Croatian Weekly (Hrvatski tjednik)
is the best known.
And in these publications
there was an impression
of increased freedom.
But, once again, it was the
freedom of the unison
within this nationalist
politics and ideology.
For example,
at the University,
where there was an active
minority struggling against this,
it was violently shoved
aside when necessary.
Friends of mine who were already
studying at various faculties,
who saw and experienced it themselves
told me about some of these events.
I even saw some of them.
Not the violent ones.
But, for example, the beginning of
the student strike late in 1971.
You were already in Zagreb?
I was in Zagreb since 1957.
- You were a student?
No, not yet, but everyone
was talking about it.
And anyone could come
to various happenings.
I was in the hall of
the Student Centre
when the Student Alliance
of Croatia made the decision
to extend the strike
from Zagreb to all of Croatia.
And it was plain to see that
there was practically no space,
that there was no pluralism
and no democracy there.
It was an unisonous expression of
support to one and the same thing.
The only friction appeared
because the student leaders
believed that the Party
leadership might betray them
by not going the distance
in a radical manner.
The symbol of the dispute was the
matter of the foreign bills of exchange.
A part of Yugoslavia's economy
was capable of export.
Perhaps not ready to
withstand full competition.
But they could do business
in the half-sheltered
markets of eastern Europe or
the nonaligned countries.
There was some
income from foreign trade.
From export.
And the main apple of discord
was the matter of where
these foreign bills of
exchange would wind up.
And, rather indicatively,
the issue was only whether
they would end up in Belgrade
or Zagreb, or Ljubljana,
depending on the viewpoint
of the speakers.
But the issue wasn't whether
they would end up in
the companies that had
actually produced them.
No, it was clear that they were at
the disposal of a political unit.
The only issue revolved
around whether it was
going to be a federal
or republic unit.
In this radicality of
the struggle for our
foreign exchange bills,
the students believed that
the Party leadership would stop
upon reaching a certain point.
Which was, of course,
a very realistic assessment.
Did you witness the clash
of the student strike?
I saw some of it on the TV.
Granted, there was
no live coverage.
And people talked
about it. I saw.
As I lived in the vicinity
of Cvjetno naselje,
then I saw all these police units
surrounding the student dorm
in Cvjetno naselje.
I went to school there up
until 3 years before that.
It was my neighbourhood,
where I had many friends.
I didn't witness the melees
on the Republic Square.
My friends told
me about it.
Some of them took
part in it as well.
All of a sudden you discover
differences in these coeval groups.
Some of them were into this student
nationalist movement heart and soul.
So they joined it even though
they were still in high school.
Later on, it became
clear that some
vulnerable points of the regime
had been encroached upon.
Because the clash was brutal.
Of course, my claim that there
wasn't even a shred of democracy
in this nationalist movement
doesn't rule out the contention
that there was no trace of democracy
nor respect for political freedom
in the way the movement was dealt with.
A repression much like the one
in Belgrade 1968 ensued.
Very many people ended up
in prison, many lost their jobs, etc.
When did you enrol
in the University?
Right after that.
In 1972.
It was immediately after the
student strike had been crushed.
What was the atmosphere
at the faculty like?
Personally, at the time
I wasn't aware of the level
of this horrible repression.
That sort of repression
belongs to the arena of
the persecution of the so
called delict of thought.
Personally, as I saw this
nationalist movement as
very repressive and exclusive.
My girlfriend's friend
was beaten up in late 1971.
Because some students,
strangers she was passing
by in the street,
told her: "Merry Christmas."
She replied: "I don't celebrate that."
And they beat her up.
And that wasn't
an isolated case.
So I was quite pleased that
all these nationalists
were removed from
the public eye.
Afterwards, I learned how many
people had ended up in prison
just because of their political standpoint
or some words that they said.
And how unjust this was.
But, since I came to study at the
Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences,
where a specific
atmosphere prevailed,
the politics that I saw
in action there were
the very lively activities
of a leftist group
that was very critical
towards the regime,
but from a completely
different standpoint,
a group that was equally critical
towards nationalism,
and believed that the
kind of political system
that was created under the
designation of socialism
was still reproducing
the class system.
Meaning, a part
of society was still
doing most of the production,
they were the exploited.
And the working class still existed.
The only difference was that pure capitalists
were replaced by, as we called them,
the red bourgeoisie.
That was a section
of politically active students.
Even organised.
However, not autonomously, because
that wasn't possible at the time,
but through the
Student Alliance.
Until they broke us up.
It partly relied on
the heritage of what
the student movement of
1968 had argued for.
Did you join this group?
- Yes, of course.
What were your activities?
What did you do?
We organised some panels.
The nice thing
about the faculty
was that it enabled you to bypass
many technical and legal obstacles
that you were normally
surrounded by in such a regime.
To organise a public panel on a political topic,
which is nowadays so easy to do
that probably nobody
is going to show up
unless the subject is
particularly stormy,
sensitive and controversial.
At the time you couldn't do it at all
unless you already had an institution.
Since the second half of the 1960s,
a recognised public discussion always
took place at the Student Centre,
at 5 minutes past 8 pm,
when the halls would be
overflowing with people,
a discussion with
an amazing turnout
because it was the only place that
the Party didn't completely control,
neither in topic nor in
the choice of speakers,
and other matters
were discussed.
Which topics were
covered in these panels?
Right now,
I can only think of
one where our late philosophy
professor Branko Bošnjak
spoke to Mijo Škvorc,
forming a dialogue between
a Marxist and a Christian.
Without any censorship, the man
who was in the Marxist position
was one of the
Praxis dissidents.
And the man in the Christian position
was not a dissident within the Church,
but he didn't have to censor
himself out of fear from the regime.
That was the liberalisation
of the late 1960s.
We organised panels
on all kinds of topics.
I can't even
think of them now.
We organised some culture days,
as alternative as anything could get then.
It was a storm in
a teacup, really,
if the whole society is
taken into consideration.
But it was very important to us.
At the Faculty, we had fervent
disagreements with the Party organisation.
We leaned towards
social liberalisations.
Truth be told, in all fairness,
none of the nationalists or the leftists
ever mentioned some basic
hallmarks of liberal democracy
such as the freedom
of political organisation,
direct elections, political pluralism
or anything of the kind. No.
We advocated
social justice.
And the nationalists advocated national
independence and autonomy, etc.
What did you think of the
political system of Yugoslavia?
Of SFRJ?
I thought it was utterly
wrong to control
the social life, intellectual
and cultural activities
and exchange, the
expression of ideas, etc.
through the Party
power centre,
regardless of whether this centre
was Yugoslavian or Croatian.
But I have to admit that I was
a bit slow in this matter.
Until 1990 I didn't believe
that a multiparty system
was the solution.
I thought that no-party
democracy might work.
Meaning that people would choose their
political representatives according to
their options, the views and
beliefs of the representatives, etc.
In the framework of a party, or?
- No.
Without any frameworks.
However, I just anticipated the
sceptic attitude towards political parties
that everyone has today.
At the time, I had read enough of
what was written within the realm of
political sciences to have
no illusions about parties
truly representing any
social groups or their interests,
not even in countries with
longstanding democratic tradition.
Those were newcomers.
The Green Party in Germany
was still a very new arrival.
Other than these
exceptions of parties
that really grew out of
grass roots social movements,
there were no illusions
about parties.
Even then, in the political
disputes of the 1970s,
we believed that
a desirable alternative to
this sclerotic political system
could be found in a radical
interpretation of self-management.
As a kind of grass roots democracy
in the production sphere.
That it could be extended to
a system used in all social relations.
In any case, the authority
of the Party was something that...
Granted, our concepts were not very
well-thought-out and elaborated at the time,
but they were a response.
We reacted, assumed
a reactive position.
The reign of the Party enabling
narrow-minded mediocrities
who cared only about staying
in power and controlling everything,
the system that gave them
the opportunity to function
in the only way they knew how,
by controlling whatever they could
and smothering
what they could not,
that needed to be
brought down at any rate.
Did you see any exceptions
within this Party system,
anything you thought of differently?
- No.
Not party hacks, but...
- No.
The very few exceptions
were some intellectuals
who believed that they could,
through taking the Party at its word,
holding it to its program, holding
it to its highest declared objectives,
accomplish something through it.
All the Praxis dissidents
were once members of the Party,
but they were all thrown out.
There were some others who were
not involved in such radical conflicts.
But expecting someone enlightened
within the Party itself was perhaps
a naive illusion one could have
harboured in the very beginning.
But it wasn't a belief,
it was story you could buy
until you had a closer look.
But things were
more or less clear.
Especially in light of the reaction
that the mid-1970s saw
in response to the danger
brought about by the early 1970s
and these nationalist movements.
That is, no, there was a nationalist
movement only in Croatia.
But the leadership of the Leagues of
Communists of Serbia and Slovenia,
without any mass movements,
also tried to gain more independence.
Were they replaced as well?
Those in Serbia were condemned
as liberals and replaced.
In Croatia and Slovenia they were
condemned as nationalists and replaced.
But, at the time, I didn't know much
about this liberal Serbian leadership.
But there were some really
decent people there.
Which was exactly why
they couldn't hold out.
Then, during the 1970s, some
changes were made in the Constitution.
Changes formally marked by
introduction of the
Law on Associated Work
and the creation of the
delegate system.
Through which the regime
itself tried to undergo a reform
including the inauguration of
an important element of liberalisation,
decentralisation.
And the establishment of a formal
mechanism which indicated that
the so called working people and the
citizens below were actually the ones
making the decisions on everything,
choosing the people to decide, etc.
But so many complications
and so many levels were involved
that it wasn't immediately clear,
except to several critical thinkers,
I remember Žarko Puhovski
immediately saying that this
was going to be the
meaning of these changes.
But, gradually, anyone
who eyed it critically and
at all meticulously realised
that the endless
complications of the system
allowed more maneuver space
for the Communist Party,
which could then control everything
through bypassing the system,
and decide on everything in the end.
As for the decentralisation
that the 1974 Constitution brought
by giving the republics
more autonomy...
By the way, the districts
had much more autonomy.
Districts were little countries.
I don't know how many
people remember it today,
but the districts had
their own police.
It wasn't called 'policija',
but 'milicija'.
But it wasn't directly under the jurisdiction
of the republic, it was tied to the district.
A great decentralisation
took place.
But excuse me, I
interrupted you when
you were about to
pose a question.
Do you believe that the 1974 Constitution
sufficiently weakened the Federation
by giving greater autonomy to the republics,
which, in the end, through different
interpretations of the Constitution,
led to the breakup
of Yugoslavia?
It didn't.
Of course, it would be too neat,
too simple, and too easy to interpret
if changes in normative
acts would lead to
in-depth social
and political changes.
But it expressed and
created these options.
A joke from a much later time in the 1980s
describes this excellently.
When we began
to go through
increasing economic difficulties,
and even went into regression,
which was then erroneously
designated a crisis.
The system wasn't based
on economic efficacy,
so the loss of economic efficacy
didn't bring it into a crisis.
But it did create hardships
and dissatisfaction.
Here's the joke:
How come everything is going so badly
and the nationalists are quiet?
In the 1980s the system
was developing cracks on all sides.
And its enemies, the nationalists,
weren't taking the opportunity to speak.
The answer was:
They're confused.
All they had ever asked for was introduced,
and still everything was going wrong.
The leadership,
the then still unified
leadership of the Party,
in which the most active man
was not Tito but Edvard Kardelj,
drew a lesson
from seeing
that the effective, successful
nationalist mobilisation
was possible and strong.
And employing the good
old corporate paradigm,
rather than trying to suppress the differences,
it decided to incorporate them.
They introduced the postulate
of the mass movement,
the republic as a
national state.
And in these damned Balkans this 'national'
does not have the civilised meaning
of a community of all citizens,
rather, it denotes ethnicity.
Which means that Franjo
Tuđman wasn't the one
who first declared Croatia
a country of Croats,
it was Tito, Kardelj and Bakarić.
This Constitution did and
did not weaken the Federation.
This Constitution strengthened the
Party leadership with Tito in the forefront.
Because a system in which decisions
are reached through a consensus
of the republic and district heads,
which is what has already been set,
when 8 of them have to make a decision,
important political decisions,
and they have already began to
publicly present themselves
as representatives of
particular interests,
later on, the talk of this nonsense
called identity would begin,
special interests of their
own federal units.
Then there is no such thing as
compromise, much less unison,
without an authority
to put it all in order.
And when the authority
disappeared in 1980?
Ah, yes. But while he was alive,
it was very productive for Tito's reign.
The federal centre of power
was strengthened by the decentralisation.
The European Union is a good
example of the same problem.
They're also having
trouble with this.
The density of their relations
is much larger than the
integration of their political system.
A system still partly
relying on the consensus
of the representations of the national
governments of the member states.
In Yugoslavia, in a situation in which you
had an authority outside the system,
Tito was the president,
but, formally, there was the
presidency of the Party
and the presidency of the state,
consisting of an equal representation
of all the republics and districts,
an external scenic arbiter such as Tito
had a very wide field to manouver.
His hands were completely untied
to act as the integralist factor
for the very reason that the
formal system didn't allow,
didn't guarantee integration,
and very often didn't even
provide an opportunity for it.
That's why the
turnabout took place.
When he died, the decision-making
jumped into a greater deficit
than the accumulation of revenue.
Profit wasn't recognized
at the time,
what mattered was the accumulation
of revenue and the production,
enabling people to get everything
they needed for a life of quality.
That was collapsing, but the political
decision-making was in a greater deficit.
So it was the creation
of a system that served,
it was crisis management.
It enabled system
to get through
the crisis of the nationalist
decentralisation,
to abolish it as something autonomous
in a properly Hegelian manner,
preserve it and raise
it to a higher level
in terms of the factors
within the system itself.
But it was possible to
run it only through
a personalised
political authority.
And without a persona, without Tito,
it suddenly entered a crisis.
The interesting thing is, pardon me,
I'd like to just add one more thing,
the interesting thing is that,
I have my own understanding of it,
but I do think it's something
still worth discussing in
the collective
understanding of our past.
The interesting thing is that the system
didn't collapse in 1980, but in 1990.
That's the big question.
So, you had undemocratic
leaderships in all federal units.
Which couldn't get
along together.
And they managed to
stay afloat for 10 years.
The simultaneous decline
of the economy aside,
there was the indebtedness.
To begin with, they discovered that
the indebtedness already was huge.
We woke up after Tito's death
when things have just begun to unravel...
It took his heirs and his children
some time before they realised
that daddy was gone, that they
were now supposed to do something.
Then they slowly started
admitting our economic problems
into the public debate.
And then, all of a sudden,
the discovery of 20 billion dollars of debt.
It's still in a serious
order of magnitude.
But 20 billion dollars then,
dollars 32 years ago,
that was a complete shock.
Shortages began,
I don't know what...
So, the decline of
everyday life was palpable.
Could you tell us how you,
personally, dealt with these
shortages, coupons, the
odd-even driving restrictions?
I didn't drive a car.
I didn't care about that part.
And I had already heard something
about ecology and environmental concerns.
And I always thought:
the less cars driving around, the better.
I didn't care about
that at all.
But having a newborn child
and not knowing whether
you would be able to find
baby food and diapers.
Getting a paycheck or a fee,
which would be worth 40
per cent or 3 times less
the very next day in
foreign exchange bills.
It meant being on a constant hunt
for what could be obtained.
Coffee, butter,
like I said, things for the baby.
But such everyday things
like butter and coffee as well.
A frantic rushing to exchange
every dinar you got to foreign bills
to preserve its value.
It meant constantly
waiting in lines,
chasing foreign bill smugglers
around corners and all across the city,
waiting in lines in the banks.
One could really survive and
get by even in this hyperinflation,
but at the price of
a lot of work and a lot of time.
Hyperinflation was good
because it made all life on credit,
which endemically
existed in Yugoslavia
already since the second
half of the 1960s,
much easier.
Because the hard-currency clauses,
the reassessments of interests, etc.
Not even the banking system
managed to keep up.
And it wasn't allowed to,
for political reasons,
almost until the
end of Yugoslavia.
There was no radical
impoverishment then,
but, all of a sudden, we all had to deal
with economics on an obsessive level.
Things that were
supposed to be routine.
All of a sudden that
took up most of your time.
But the point is in the
political side of the story:
alongside all that, you have
a system incapable of making decisions,
whose protagonists, key building blocks,
are constantly attacking each other.
And consciously insisting on a competitive
position in relation to the others.
Croatia advocating this,
it's in Serbia's interest to do that,
Slovenia has other ideas, etc.
And they live together for 10 years.
Huh? How is that possible?
This is where the power of the
achieved nationalist identification
with a republic
showed itself.
Before they set out to
become independent countries.
It was in construction
since the late 1960s.
It had continuity.
Its constitutional acknowledgement was
its incorporation into the then regime.
Which was what had
allowed it to survive.
Not only while Tito played the arbiter
above the quarrelsome conglomerate
comprised of the leaders
of the future national states.
But even when
after he was gone.
And when they could reach
a consensus on one thing only.
Since they were all
undemocratically appointed,
which was how they
had come into power,
the only consensus they agreed on
was to watch each other's backs
against possible
discontent from below.
And that was frightfully powerful.
And that's where the
exceptional role of what
Slobodan Milošević
personifies comes from.
Because he went back to
what was tried out in Croatia in 1970 and 1971.
He went back to the
mass nationalist movement.
He merely called it
an Anti-bureaucratic revolution
to cover up this 'nationalist'
in the beginning.
But it emerged very soon
because of Kosovo.
You followed the political developments
in the other republics
on a federal level?
- Sure.
As far as media went,
since a relative
liberalisation was at work,
there were two excellent
newspapers.
One was the Belgrade daily
newspaper 'Politika',
and the other a Belgrade
weekly called 'Nin'.
It was the height of journalism
during Yugoslavia.
There you could see everything, not only
from Serbia, but from the other states.
Written quite professionally,
as much as it was possible at the time,
providing factual information
and coherent interpretations
on very many things.
And in the autumn of 1987 I realised
that something serious had happened,
after Milošević's triumph at the 8th Session
of the League of Communists of Serbia.
It was just like our
10th Session in February 1970.
Did you watch the live coverage?
- Yes, I did.
I recognised that something serious
had happened not only because
2 fractions had a quarrel
and one of them lost.
But because the winning
side was on the march,
on its way to totalise
its success through
everything that was
happening in society.
The Belgrade
'Politika' and 'Nin'
turned into rags
within a month or two.
Suddenly they were no longer
worth buying nor reading.
It was just one of the indicators
of what was happening.
Of course, plenty other
ugly things were taking place.
The symptomatic thing
about Milošević's movement
was that he had fallen out
of this common game
that kept them all in power through
arguments aimed at the public eye.
Not only did they stage their
arguments for the public,
but they really were at each
other's throats over resources
and political measures which
would suit one or the other side.
And, at the same time, they
had a nonaggression pact
as well as an agreement
on common defense
against the possible
rebellion from below.
Milošević fell out of it
because he had won the grass root
support of his lower echelons
through employing this
authoritarian nationalist matrix
that Savka Dapčević, and
Miko Tripalo and company
had staged the general
rehearsal for.
They chose
the wrong moment
because Tito was still
over their heads,
so they couldn't go
on with the show.
Milošević had a wide field
to take it all the way.
And enough unscrupulousness,
or determination and skill,
whatever people
choose to call it now,
to really make Serbia
the first separatist republic.
And not Slovenia or Croatia.
In the autumn of 1990,
a few months before
the democratic Constitution
was passed in Croatia...
You mean Christmas? - No, the Christmas one
was passed on the Day of the Yugoslav People's Army.
December 22. But, since
that was the last thing
that they wanted to tie
to this as a holiday,
they glued the holiday that
took place 3 days later onto it.
A few months before
this Constitution,
Serbia, under Milošević,
passed a Constitution
deeming Serbia an
independent national state.
But it also liked working
both sides of the street.
Because it still benefitted
from being in Yugoslavia.
Just like the Croatian Constitution
of December 1990 wasn't separatist yet.
And the Serbian
Constitution included
a deliberate absurd: Serbia
was an independent country,
but this was achieved
without leaving Yugoslavia.
However, Yugoslavian laws
were applicable only
if they didn't go against
the interests of Serbia.
They retained the freedom
of arbitrarily deciding
which laws would be implemented,
and which would not.
And this appearance of
Milošević as a national leader,
no longer relying on the
suport of the others,
but having his own
support from below,
caused panic.
And then the other leaders,
first of all, in Croatia and Serbia...
Granted, in Croatia the leaders
hesitated for a moment,
because they had
legitimacy issues.
They were inflicted
on Croatia after
the violent suppression of
the mass movement in 1971.
But there was no such
hesitatation in Slovenia.
But the political public in Croatia,
pushing its leaders to act,
talking about 'Croatian silence',
asking them to radicalise matters as well.
Upon the emergence
of Milošević's movement,
again manipulated
from above,
but apparently fuelled by
mass participation from below,
everyone reacts as if
it were a national menace.
Although there is no trace of any
endangerment of Slovenia, Croatia,
or anything like
that in 1987, 1988.
Slovenia was never even
threatened by Milošević's regime.
But he came in handy for them,
aiding their own nationalist mobilisation.
Because the pact of common
protection was now obviously failing.
He no longer needed them.
But they kept on
still playing that game.
It always takes longer for
all the consequences to sink in,
longer than it does for the
events themselves to take place.
Throughout the 1980s,
even with Milošević in power,
on the federal level, Serbia was
allowed to act as arbiter in Kosovo.
Regardless of the existence
of this incoherent system
through which the provinces,
that is, parts of a republic,
were at the same time
direct members of the Federation.
Did you follow, were you informed about
what happened in Kosovo in 1981?
Sure.
It was the talk of the town.
Everyone knew about
the demonstrations in 1981,
about Kosovo's claims for independence
as a republic, about the repression.
Information didn't circulate
through normal channels,
media couldn't send a reporter to the
scene and get some real information,
such a thing
was not possible.
But there were rumours, there were
always people who were better informed,
and we heard that about
900 people were killed
in the suppression of these
demonstrations in the early 1980s.
There was even a cruel joke.
At the same time, the Solidarity
movement was taking place.
In 1980, 1981, there were
rebellions in Poland.
And more suppression,
de facto a military coup, almost.
Calling it a military coup
would be wrong because
the Polish army didn't
act on its own,
it was carrying out
orders from Moscow.
9 people were killed in
the direct conflicts
between the army and the
people resisting them.
In Poland.
And the official news said
that in Kosovo in Yugoslavia,
in the beginning of 1980, 1981 at most,
9 people died as well.
And then there was this joke:
How many Albanians died in Kosovo?
Or, rather, as jokes are neither
politically nor morally correct,
the formulation was:
How many Shiptars died in Kosovo?
And it said: 9, but new ones.
What does 'new ones' mean?
In the economic reform,
in 1965 we had
a monetary reform
in which 1 dinar
replaced 100 old ones.
So that when you said something new,
it meant it was worth a 100 of the old ones.
9 Albanians were killed,
but new ones, which means 900.
That was how that joke
expressed that story as well.
Yes. We followed many things,
as much as was possible.
Besides, as a consequence of
this odd, ethnic pluralisation
during the 1980s, the media in Croatia,
and the media in Slovenia especially,
reported much more on
what was happening on Kosovo.
Much more than the
media in Serbia once
they had all fallen under
Milošević's control.
So that one could
access information.
Just to point something out:
although in Slovenia
the public had already
condemned the repression
used on those miners
who had shut themselves
in Stari Trg,
they had this
kind of suicidal strike,
the federal presidency still
allowed the army to intervene.
This reflex of suppressing and
preventing any revolt from below,
even if it was the enemy of
my enemy, was still strong.
The triumph of Milošević, who had
reached his position through formal means:
he became the Chairman of the League
of Communists of Serbia in 1986.
But he really assumed power after
the internal conflict in which he eliminated
the opposing fractions,
in the autumn of 1987.
And when he eliminated his predecessor
Ivan Stambolić, first from political life,
and 10 years or more after
that by taking his life.
On the one hand this meant
that the nonaggression and common
protection pact was disrupted.
But this change
didn't arrive overnight.
The system still worked
in such a way
that he was, from Croatia
and Slovenia, still granted the right to,
as far as the provinces were concerned,
alter the arrangements,
take away their autonomy.
And nobody disturbed him in this.
They even made official
decisions regarding Kosovo.
Because he couldn't have
the JNA at his disposal
for interventions without the
confirmation of the collective presidency.
They continued doing that.
Moreover, a sign that
they all favoured
the nationalist approach
because it allowed them to do whatever
they wanted in their backyards
could be distinguished
in their treatment of
these initiatives, present
until the end of 1988,
the democratic transformation
that was already in the air
and already seemed
unavoidable,
while, from our point of view,
it presented something
desirable and possible
for the regime.
From Slovenia, across Croatia to Serbia,
the same consensus
of Party leaderships
was still in operation,
dedicated not to allow democratic,
direct elections for the Federal Assembly.
Allowing democratisation,
democratic elections, pluralist, direct,
only in the republics.
The thought of having a democratically
legitimate supranational body
on the level of Yugoslavia,
that was...
Regardless of whether
they were bragging about
their great democratic qualities
as the Slovenians did,
or the Croatians,
a bit more shy about it,
or whether they had
this nationalist,
more of an authoritarian,
populist rhetoric
like in Serbia with its
Anti-bureaucratic revolution.
But they all calmly and
placidly agreed that
there mustn't be any
federal democratic elections.
You mentioned the factional clash
eliminating Stambolić and Dragiša Pavlović,
the effect of the Anti-bureaucratic revolution
in the provinces and Montenegro.
Seeing all that, did you think about
whether they were going to continue
their, so to say, march
in the other republics?
Everyone else was thinking about it,
so that my contribution wasn't required.
I was thinking about how they were
taking very good advantage of it
for a nationalist mobilisation
in Croatia and Slovenia.
Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina
were standing there a bit confused,
to put it in personified,
or personalised terms.
That's why I spoke of
their pact of mutual
protection at such length.
The so called people,
the crowd from below
was their common enemy.
Until Milošević managed to nationalistically
mobilise the populace for himself.
And becoming
independent of the others.
But there was no danger in that
for Croats, or Croatia and Slovenia.
But, when the complete breakup
of Yugoslavia was underway,
then Milošević had his chance,
since he had managed to win
over the JNA to his side.
Because he was, again,
smarter than the others.
He was the only one
to rhetorically advocate
the sustainment and
preservation of Yugoslavia.
And then his regime
saw a chance
to try and claim
whatever it could
of the territories of the
neighbouring republics,
that is, Croatia and
Bosnia and Herzegovina.
But his nationalist movement of
the so called Anti-bureaucratic revolution
posed a danger to Croatia and
Slovenia only in its nationalist ideology.
Not in any reality.
They mobilised everything they could,
as if the world was coming to an end,
as if they were facing
a coup in Slovenia,
when these nationalist
leaders from Kosovo
announced that they
were coming to Slovenia
to hold their so called
"truth rally" there.
The Mladina journal was the only
one that reacted cooly.
"What's that to us?
All they need to do is report
their desired location to the police.
And book rooms for themselves in the hotels.
That's their problem."
But the nationalist media,
which were the majority,
and the nationalist politicians,
once more, the majority,
with the support of the independent
cultural national intelligence,
as is always the
case around here,
made such an overblown circus out of it,
as if they were facing a threat
of being trampled over by an army
of a million zealous fighters
about to enslave the
whole of Slovenia.
They painted a
distorted picture.
And these very theatrics
testify to the ostensible threat
coming from Serbia at the time,
what we would
nowadays call a political spin,
but with extremely hard, palpable
consequences in the war later on.
Before we move on to the 1990s,
I'd like to ask you
whether you served in the JNA?
I did.
How did you
experience it?
Where did you serve?
When?
Fortunately, not too
far away from home.
I was stationed
in Benkovac.
It's on the railway line
from Zagreb to Zadar,
so I could sometimes travel home
without excessive complications.
And my wife and friends
came to visit me.
The experience was a
complete abominability.
I don't think I would
have felt very different
if they had sent me
to prison instead.
Having to be there
in that closed space.
I'm not referring to the containment
of 4 walls, but a closed space
surrounding you even when
you're under the open sky.
Kicked around by some
halfwitted squad leaders.
Doing pointless things, strenuous
and inconveniencing at that.
I was a bit older than customary
when I served the army.
It was in 1979. I was almost
26 and a half years old.
I potponed it for
as long as I could.
From a functional point of view,
it bordered on collapse.
Thinking that this creation could
ever have some kind of role
in, God forbid, defending
the country or anything like that.
I didn't think it would last any longer
than the Royal Yugoslav Army
did in the April War in 1941,
capitulating in less than 2 weeks.
Truly, the level of incompetence
in handling things...
I was in some kind of platoon
with a recoilless...
So, we had one of these,
as they called it, artillery pieces,
a weapon was something
one person could use,
a gun, pistol, bomb,
machine gun, mortar,
and this was an artillery piece,
a recoilless gun requiring a crew of 5 people.
In the end, one of the more sound
and educated officers told us its story.
It was an artillery piece that did
its share in the Korean war in 1951.
That was the last time
it was actually usable.
It was something
used against tanks.
It fired a missile similar
to the ones in mortars.
But it fired horizontally, that
is, aslant, as these things went.
And it was supposed to fight tanks because
it had this cummulative projectile
able to go through
their armour.
However, tanks, the speed
at which gun turrets moved,
the level of precision,
the sight and all that
had advanced so much
in these nearly 30 years,
28, 29 years since the Korean war.
And this one stayed as it was.
Heavy. To haul it anywhere,
transfer it from position to position,
all 4, 5 men had to pull
with all their might.
It was something
incredible, if you fired
it in some hypothetical
combat situation,
fired this missile
at the tank,
first of all, it was
recoilless because
it let out all those
exhaust gases behind it.
You created such fireworks
that you could be spotted out of
a satellite in the Earth's orbit.
Let's say you miss that tank,
or you hit one, but there are more,
they could set their sight on you
in 3 seconds and shower you with gunfire.
And you would barely have
the time to begin pulling it
into another trench,
a reserve position.
If this thing ever ended up
on an actual battle field,
you wouldn't need an enemy,
you would destroy yourself with it.
And there were many,
many other things like that.
Personally, I managed to get out of it
through having some typewriting skills.
So I escaped from the
infantry training to an office.
But then I saw an
interesting side of all this,
stemming from the fact
that I was in the army
at the same time that Tito
was dying in Ljubljana
during those 4 months,
after which he finally died.
So, I was sent to the army
in the autumn of 1979.
And I was discharged
in the summer of 1980.
I managed to scrape out
every possible reduction.
But I was able to observe all kinds of
things during these 4 months.
The first thing was the overwhelming
paranoia of the whole regime.
When my best friend returned from his leave
over the New Year of 1979 to 1980,
granted, he was in Velenje,
but he had stopped by in Ljubljana
before making
his journey back.
And the taxi driver told him that Tito,
after the New Year's celebration,
which was, I think,
in that hill near Kranj,
where he had one of those
presidential palaces, mansions,
he had been urgently taken to
the Ljubljana Clinical Centre.
He told him everyone was
in a state of panic.
As taxi drivers were already
equipped with radio transmitters,
they had a reputation for always
being better informed than others,
and passing on the
correct information.
So, he came to tell them
what happened to Tito.
And the media didn't release
it until a couple of days later,
reporting that Tito had
serious heath problems,
that he had to remain
in the hospital.
From that moment on we
were confined to the area
of the barracks, without
any rights of leave,
not only were the longer
visits home forbidden,
but the visits to
the town as well.
Thank goodness, there were no
mobile phones at the time,
so we couldn't feel the pain of
those being taken away as well.
But all the small radios and transistors
we had so we could listen to music,
the news, whatever we wanted,
I had one of them too, were taken away.
An order was issued
to collect all of them.
And store them in the
command headquarters.
We weren't dispossessed. We were
all supposed to get them back in the end.
But it was a signal
of panic for the army,
and they assumed we could be targeted by
enemy propaganda or who knows what.
Officers intensified
the on-duty measures.
Many of them, but not all of them,
slept in the barracks every night.
The regime they created
resembled war preparations,
as if we were about
to be attacked.
But there were
no real war preparations,
we didn't take out the
real battle armaments,
which were not used in
our stupid training,
we didn't have to take them
out of the storage depots,
reactivate them
or anything else.
They were just alarmed.
It was more of a political alert,
a sort of political alarm
that went on for months.
Which those of us in the army
experienced very traumatically.
Firstly, not being able to leave the
area of the barracks was awful.
It really intensified
the feeling of being in prison.
Secondly, the presence of the officers
in the barracks day and night was horrible.
Because of the general state of disarray
in the whole military institution,
which really gave the impression
that it was about to fall apart,
when the working hours of the officers
were over and they left,
only one stayed on duty.
But that one was somewhere getting drunk,
solving crosswords, phoning his lover
through the military telephone
exchange or God knows what else.
I've seen all of
these things happen.
But he doesn't get in the way.
And when the officers
are finally gone,
the regular life of the
barracks disappears.
When they leave, all of a sudden,
the rumpus begins.
Some brought hookers to the barracks
through the wire and fence.
Some used this same wire
or other holes in the wire to get out.
Those who were on good terms
with the storage workers and cooks
robbed the food supplies
in the evening,
throwing feasts
for themselves.
Using the supplies
intended for daily usage.
All in all, a sense of
freedom would reign.
With the officers inside,
all these things suddenly disappeared.
Then everybody had to
scrape along somehow.
And then one could overhear
many conversations.
From many conversations
with the officers,
as well as conversations
they had among themselves,
and I was a scribe, so
I was inside their office,
closer than
the other soldiers,
I gathered that, although
nobody had told them so explicitly,
no order was issued, there
was no political analysis
or piece of information
that they received,
but everybody understood that this
whole mobilisation was caused
by fear of something on the
inside, rather than the outside.
That was why, like I said,
we were not taking out any guns.
Because, according to their doctrine,
in Benkovac, we were the hinterland
of the coast,
of Zadar and so.
We were supposed to
be the front line
of defense in case of
NATO's seaborne attack
across the Adriatic,
from Italy.
That assignment was
in force for everyone,
from Istria in the north to
Montenegro in the south.
But there were
no military preparations.
Rather, they understood
that Tito's death
could mean a possible destabilisation
of the regime from the inside.
Some of these political things
were already noticeable.
What about the atmosphere
after Tito's death?
Well, then that...
Whatever your opinion of him was, it
was a shock and change for everyone.
Not really like fatherless children,
or, at least, not everyone.
But it was obvious that now
something was going to change.
Besides, we were deafened by
those commemorations, those things.
It lasted for a month,
two or three.
The only good thing
was the proclamation
of a week of national
mourning because then,
all of a sudden, they played
really great music on the radio.
This stupid pop music and
turbo folk came to an end.
They played serious,
classical music.
They played very
jovial things as well.
But, to people who don't like it,
all classical music is sad.
For example, you could hear a cheerful
Händel canatata or something of that sort.
But, no, it was all...
I culturally profited from Tito's
death through good radio program.
You can imagine what sort
of music they usually
played through the
barracks loudspeakers.
Predominantly turbo folk.
Up until then, I wasn't even
aware of the existence of that genre.
Before that,
I lived in another world.
And when he died, within the
barracks you couldn't hear anything
normal for quite a while.
Nothing but these
commemorative things.
The constant reading
of some speeches...
A competition in
ideological ardour
among all these officers and
noncommissioned officers was on as well.
Every troop, every platoon,
every last one of them
was writing letters to the
Presidency of the Party
assuring them we would
follow Tito's path.
And then they
read it in public...
We were on constant shock therapy
with an additional IV of ideology.
And then it all
settled down.
Then, I suppose,
everyone was so happy
because they realised that
the world hadn't ended,
that things were
somehow moving on.
By the time
these negative,
up until then, well hidden economic
matters started coming out,
I had already been
discharged from the army.
That story actually began sometime
at the end of 1980, the beginning of 1981.
The shock from the demonstrations
in Kosovo and the brutal suppression.
These things were
already out by then.
In the late 1980s or in 1990, 1991,
when did it occur to you that this breakup
of Yugoslavia, this desintegration,
was going to turn into a war?
It never occurred to me.
When it began, I still couldn't believe it.
I found it so absurd.
That's what happens when
things get too close
and you no longer
want to analyse them.
And you had an additional
resistance towards it
because every
nationalist paranoiac
says he saw it coming.
But not because he knew
it was going to happen,
rather, because nationalist paranoiacs
have to claim such things are coming.
Regardless of the real
state of affairs.
Like a broken clock that tells
the right time twice a day.
No. I was in utter disbelief.
Even when the JNA attacked some
of these posts in Slovenia.
It's wrong to call it an attack on
Slovenia, they were in Slovenia.
And Slovenia was a part
of their legitimate domain.
Even when it began, 2 days after
the declaration of independence,
on June 27, 1991,
I still thought it was just
a show of force,
some sort of incident, a quarrel that
was going to end in a political compromise.
Besides, in Croatia, the war
progressed at a snail's pace.
The war arrived slowly.
And there was a lot of
manipulation in the media.
Until mid-September,
Tuđman claimed
that the JNA was not the enemy,
the JNA wasn't going to attack us.
That it's all a misunderstanding,
ignited by these Serbian extremists here
and those installed from Serbia,
which was, granted, all true.
It's also true that
the JNA had no strategy.
It didn't give out any signals
of what it was up to.
If the JNA had a strategy
to gain control
over all of Croatia,
it wouldn't have withdrawn
from Karlovac.
That's one piece of knowledge
in military geography I acquired
while I was in the army.
Because some captain first class
wanted to take the exam for major.
And as this was during these
long days of sitting around
in the barracks
during Tito's dying,
he used me as a scribe to help
him prepare for his exam
in military geography.
Then I was able to read
many of their manuals.
And I learned that Karlovac
was the biggest garrison,
the place with the
largest concentration
of soldiers and equipment
in all of Yugoslavia.
The reason for this was that
Karlovac was the bulwark of defense.
In case of an invasion
from the East,
because nobody could stop those
tens of thousands of Soviet tanks
in the Pannonian Plain.
And the JNA strategy
had given up on using Zagreb
as the bulwark of the defense.
Generally, a big city is like a jungle,
a big city is a great seat of defense.
And they had given up on it because it
would mean the destruction of the city.
Nowadays, nationalists
would never concede that
the JNA took care
to spare their city.
At the price of
withdrawing further inland.
But, as Karlovac was where
the mountainous parts began,
and they, in line with partisan tradition,
loved forests and mountains,
then Karlovac would be the stronghold
of their defense on that side.
Additionally, in case of
an invasion from the West,
through Istria or
the Adriatic coast,
Karlovac would be close enough
as a background source
of reinforcements and
resources for those
who were holding the
first lines down below.
That's why Karlovac had such
an enormous concentration.
Which leads to the
conclusion that,
if the JNA had wanted to take
control over all of Croatia,
all it needed to do was
to sit tight in Karlovac.
There were more soldiers
than people there.
And it would have been like
putting a lock to the whole country.
The railway lines and roads between
the north and south of Croatia
pass through
Karlovac as well.
Since you were excluding the routes
through Bosnia and Herzegovina.
And there would have
been no way out.
Much indecisiveness
was involved in all of that.
I think that Tuđman's leadership,
Tuđman himself and everyone around him,
were going out on a limb with
the declaration of independence.
We'll just declare this.
A bluff, right?
And we'll see. Either they
won't dare to use force to stop us.
Or the West
will help us if they do.
Neither of the two happened.
Because they did use force to stop us,
since the JNA's ideology, doctrine,
policy and regulatory rules
legitimately made us its domain.
Just like Slovenia before us.
They didn't let go so easily.
The EU and the USA
never even dreamed of
burdening themselves with another war
on account of some batty nationalists
who wanted to play at
becoming independent.
They had no issues
with an integral Yugoslavia.
It wasn't a problem.
And being pulled into war
by nationalist gamblers,
well, they didn't admit
to that even when
it was obvious that
everything was going to hell.
They never took an active part in it
until 1995, when Clinton decided to,
as the saying went at the time,
get it out of the headlines.
We had a war
at a snail's pace.
Nobody really
acknowledged it.
The JNA didn't attempt to
subdue all of Croatia.
The Karlovac example
clearly demonstrates that.
It was operating along some
ethnic map of its own devising.
It decided where it wouldn't
get involved with Croatian forces,
the police and the new creation
of the Croatian National Guard,
and where it would put a
stop to their interventions.
They were obviously acting upon
their ethnically drawn lines.
The Croatian police
was able to
intervene in Pakrac.
It wasn't able
to intervene in Knin.
Because the JNA
wouldn't let them.
To this day they
can't agree on whether
the occupation of Vukovar,
where they dug themselves in
and destroyed everything for
3 months was necessary,
or they shold have
gone around it
and headed westwards.
To attack Osijek, or also go around it
and attack Zagreb, or not?
They were also
caught off guard by this.
The JNA paid the price for
being an ideologised army.
Functioning only
based on the presumption
of the reality
of what the regime
ideology was saying.
While the people were mostly
still in favour of Yugoslavia.
In the first couple of days
of the conflicts in Slovenia,
they were making
scandalised statements:
"My goodness, they have cut
off our bread delivery."
Or: "They have cut off our
electricity and water supply."
Well, you don't tell me.
And why wouldn't they?
When you acted as an
enemy, aggressive force.
No, they were certain that
the nationalist leadership
was manipulating the poor
people whose majority
was on the side of the
Army and Yugoslavia.
They didn't have
good political analyses.
Even before the war in 1991,
early on in 1991,
they came up with some
political proclamations
against these new
nationalist leaderships.
As if that was going to
actually work on anybody.
So, there were many excuses
for people like me,
who wouldn't believe that we were
truly dashing headlong into a war.
Because there were many
incomplete or ambiguous moves.
To put it in these terms.
You spoke of Milošević,
his politics, his intentions.
And how did you see Tuđmana and
his rhetorics, his rise to power?
Like pitch darkness.
He just used a new base of legitimacy
and returned us to the post-1945 era.
A revolutionary government
with the whole society at its disposition,
like putty in its hands,
taking on any shape it desires.
Overshadowed by the war.
Was it really revolutionary, or?
- Yes.
In the sense of revolution as
an impingement upon society,
a launching of social changes which
no longer dance to the same music.
Just 2 things.
Putting aside this national mobilisation
that contributed to the war.
Croatia is not a passive
victim of the war.
Croatia is a victim of the war,
but it is not a passive victim
in regard to its
political leadership.
But putting
even that aside.
Overshadowed by the war, what kind of
reform did the the economic system undergo?
Everything was in public ownership
and run through self-management.
What did the Croatian state do?
It returned everything
to state ownership.
Before the privatisation.
Before the privatisation,
there was a step backwards.
There was a return to the same state of affairs
as in the Stalin and Soviet Union
beginning with the
late 1920s until the end.
Making the state the
owner of everything.
This was the quiet fall
of self-managment.
Because everyone was drunk with
the tale of a national country.
And then there was the war, a time
in which one didn't ask questions,
but tried to defend
oneself, or hide
in an effort to
preserve one's life.
A time in which you realised
that you were endangered
by your own people,
not just the enemy.
A time in which everyone knew
that people were quietly disappearing,
that they were being
killed and all that.
Everything was great, a revolution
including a revolutionary terror,
an usurpation of all social
resources under state control,
and then their division
based on political credentials.
One thing.
The second thing, an
equivalent of what we,
thank goodness, mockingly
observed from afar
in China -
the cultural revolution.
There was a cultural tyranny of
something called spiritual revival.
The imposition of this nationalist,
conservative, clerical tradition and ideology
onto everything.
First and foremost,
onto culture and education.
We all know that very well.
All it takes is a
summary conclusion.
It was an attempt at
cultural revolution.
In the first half of the
1990s, Tuđman and company
constantly talked about
spiritual revival.
Later on, they
quieted down a bit.
Talking about the need for
a mental transformation of Croatian society.
And, as he used to
say: the Croatian man.
Who should be a nationalist
and a Catholic.
A clerical Catholic at that,
a militant Catholic.
From me, that was what this team
was about from the very beginning.
Once more, there was
no trace of democracy in it.
This formal democratisation
came in handy for them.
They legitimately used their chance.
Maybe they didn't even know.
Judging by some imperial occurrences,
I am certain that they did not know,
or at least some of them did not know
what fell into their laps.
They coincided with the kind of
political decrepitude and primitivism
that was nurtured in Croatia
and all of Yugoslavia
for decades and centuries past.
And, without much ado, they had
something what was not even a program,
but a message of
pure nationalism:
We are in favour of a Croatia without
Yugoslavia and Communism.
Many analysts are right
to point this out.
They were the only ones to...
HDZ (Croatian Democratic Party), you know.
There was none of that: "We'll introduce
privatisation into the economy,
we'll introduce the free enterprise,
we'll do this, we'll do that.
No, it was:
"Well, obviously, it's us, Croats.
What's there to talk about?"
And this coincided with that.
The relative majority voted for
the most radical right wing
position in the first elections.
Not absolute.
Nobody had the
absolute majority.
But the relative majority, about 45 percent
of the voters, voted for that.
Did anyone in your surroundings, any friends or acquaintances of yours
vote for them?
Did your behaviour towards them,
or their behaviour towards you change?
I have to admit that I've never
had a declared HDZ supporter
in my circle of friends
or closer acquaintances.
People who voted for HDZ,
but were embarrassed
to say so are
a whole other matter.
That was a good sign,
because they at least thought
it was something objectionable.
But, no.
I had none of that.
Another quite interesting thing,
I'll tell you about it in a moment,
I'd just like to say this first.
Members of the HDZ
didn't see it coming,
they weren't prepared to become
such a dominant party right away.
I was a member of the election
board in Trešnjevka district.
At the time, it was the biggest
election precinct in Croatia.
I was on the
election board in 1990.
And I know what kind of complaints
the members of the HDZ made.
They were preparing for somebody
stealing the elections from them.
Or at least attempting to do so.
They had a paranoid story
that transformed every irregularity
into a Communist attempt
to steal their elections.
They were blind to the fact that
the Communists couldn't wait to step aside,
to get off without
getting a beating.
That was what they behaved like.
They constantly displayed
this paranoid rhetoric
on the day of the
elections, complaints.
Even in the runoff elections,
it was still echoing.
Although by then they
knew they were winning.
Their mayoral candidate,
Boris Buzančić, an actor.
That was another
disappointing development,
that people who, at least in the cultural public,
did not give the impression
of being primitive or dopey
were joining such a party.
Buzaničić, whom a
TV reporter asked for
a comment on the first
day of the elections.
And he started:
"These Communist attempts..."
Then somebody tapped his shoulder
and told him: "Hang on, we won."
Then he changed
his tune a little bit.
They weren't ready for it.
Regarding the question about the
reactions of the people in my surroundings,
the greatest disappointment
was that this
pseudodemocratic nationalism
had absorbed
almost everything
that wasn't as plainly
primitive as HDZ.
Everyone else was a nationalist too,
they just didn't want to be one so vulgarly.
HDZ was real, pure primitivism,
scheming with real ustashe.
Not to kid ourselves.
Everyone who found that distasteful
mostly carried themselves in such a way
that made it clear it wasn't the nationalism
that they found distatesteful,
just this vulgar,
primitive manner.
But, actually, nationalism had then
practically become the air we breathed.
There was a single person
in the whole Parliament,
aside from the people in the
Serbian Democratic Party
and their 5 representatives,
who were there in the beginning,
but very soon, much before the war,
due to the intolerance of the
Croatian political elite,
they were practically driven
away from the parliament,
there was one, single man
who stood up to all this.
Just one. And that man
was professor Nikola Visković,
who arrived to the first makeup
of the parliament as a half-half.
The shared coalition candidate
of the Green Action and SDP.
He wasn't a 100 per cent
SDP representative,
only halfway.
So I used to joke in some
of my texts and say
that Croatia is a rarity
among world countries,
a country that, during the first 2
years of its multiparty democracy,
had an opposition with a name and
a surname, called Nikola Visković.
We had one oppositionist.
And this ensemble of "H" parties.
HSS and HSLS. In the beginning,
even the Croatian People's Party (HNS).
And Vujić's Social Democrats
of Croatia party.
And many other small parties.
Actively, and SDP passively,
they all de facto supported nationalism.
SDP didn't dare
stand up against it.
In the form of Zdravko Tomac, it even
actively and creatively supported it.
For a while, Zdravko Tomac
was the main ideologist of HDZ.
He idologically and politically articulated
some things in their stead,
things they couldn't even
intelectually articulate.
I think that the
intellectual insufficiency
of the right wing in Croatia
remains apparent to this day.
They have some 2 and a half
unacknowledged geniuses in their midst,
but they don't have
any real experts or
intellectual authorities in the field.
I'm not referring
to technical experts.
If you pay well, those
can always be found.
I'm referring to people who would
articulate their political ideas.
So they ended up without
any political ideas to speak of.
But, in the period of the first year,
year and a half after the elections,
especially when people realised
that there really was a war going on,
something that depressed
and saddened me happened
in regard to my closest
circle of acquaintances.
After the summer of 1991,
because, up until then,
there were only local
squabbles and outbursts.
One could convince
himself, as I did,
that ithere wasn't going
to be a real war.
And when the reality
of the war finally struck,
many people I know, people who have
in the meantime changed their minds again,
not today,
10 years ago or more,
deciding to once more take
a more liberal and democratic stand,
then, these same people said:
"This is not the time to criticise
the state, the government..."
In direct reply to my invitation,
a widely known cultural figure in Croatia
even gave me
the following answer
when refusing to take
part in an action, saying:
"No. This is not the time
for civil disobedience,
it's the time for
civil obedience."
Expressis verbis, these
were their exact words.
The fact that these people, apparently
too refined to be HDZ supporters,
still didn't find any fault in the same thing
that was the very fabric of HDZ,
which was nationalism,
that was truly atrocious.
Did this change the way you
behaved towards these people?
As far as our arguments and
disagreements were concerned, yes.
But it was only a matter of character,
and not character in its moral sense.
It's not that I'm too good for it,
perhaps the opposite is rather the case.
I may be too weak to sever relationships
with people over disagreements.
But these disagreements
were certainly manifested
and, one might say, seen to through
countless polemics, arguments, debates
that simply had no end.
How did you become
involved in activism?
I always related to it.
In the late 1970s, I was associated
with these leftist students.
Since the beginning
of my studies in 1972.
Granted, afterwards it broke up.
But, as various social problems
were very conspicuous later on as well,
a part of my commitment that was very
precious, edifying and dear to me
was the participation
in the editorial board
of a journal called Kulturni
radnik (Cultural Worker)
from 1981 until 1986.
We were not
the heirs of Praxis.
It was not journalism,
we published scholarly papers,
critical analyses of politics,
social issues and all these things.
And we were constantly
pestered by the Party entities
that were very intent on trying
to keep it under control.
After 5 years, it snapped.
In 1986 they brought in
a new editorial board.
But the commitment
to the publication
strongly motivated me.
Of course, man can easily
fool himself into thinking
that he's doing something
of great importance.
While the truth of the
matter is a bit different.
And it wasn't a big deal
in that the readership
numbered only a couple
of thousands, not more.
But it was still
during the reign
of a regime that
did not stand for
any pluralism
of political ideas.
In such an environment, every
divergent event caused great uproar.
Nowadays you would be
as happy as a clam
if you published an article of
20 typed double-spaced pages,
which is, to begin with,
too long to count
as readable
for most people,
and made the Party Committee or
whoever controlled this country
make an announcement
on your account,
it made you seem like some
kind of factor in all of this.
Several years after that, in 1987,
1988, I joined a group of people,
some younger people
who initiated it,
which met in the
University Club,
in what used to be the Street of the Brothers Kaurić,
nowadays Hebrang Street 17.
It was simply a circle of people
analysing the processes, events
and changes in the society
and political regime of the time,
not publicly.
Not secret, either.
Everyone was free to come.
Some of the top
intellectuals of the time
attended these discussions.
Rudi Supek, Žarko Puhovski,
Eugen Pusić, Branko Horvat,
Ivan Prpić.
He is a political scientist.
I can't think of
everyone right now.
Among the younger people,
a bit younger than my generation,
there was Nenad Zakošek,
Mirjana Kasapović.
And then, at the end of 1988,
after these discussions,
some of us came to the conclusion:
maybe we should get organised somehow.
For, all these analyses
and discussions
pointed out that things
were going downhill.
That they could
reach a real crisis.
Nobody saw the war
as such coming.
But we did foresee
some serious convulsions
that would, in the very
least, put a stop to
the economic recovery
for quite a while.
And we thought it might
be good to get organised.
Some backed out.
Some didn't want to do it.
Some were interested
in discussions and analyses,
but not in any commitment
of another sort.
For example, professor Pusić,
an academic, Eugen,
told me: "Ok. I wish you luck.
But I'm not really cut out for it."
Some were.
We formed an Association for
Yugoslav Democratic Initiative.
The idea first came to our minds
in a room of about this size,
in the University Club.
And then we discovered that the interest
was quite high all across Yugoslavia.
Not only Praxis dissidents
showed an interest in it,
but many liberally thinking people
who were not Marxists.
And it turned out to be
surprisingly numerous and wide.
But, when we launched it,
it never occurred to us
it could become a political movement
or, God forbid, a party.
Just an organisation
trying to formulate
and advocate
a peaceful and democratic
way of leaving this regime
that was coming apart at the seams
and suffocating everything.
And we were looking into it ourselves,
trying to find out what this might entail.
Sometimes we had polemics and
discussions on, for example,
what position to take up
towards the repression
and strike of the
miners in Kosovo.
On the one hand,
everybody was against repression.
But, on the other hand,
the miners were not on strike
because they were horridly exploited
and did hard work in very bad conditions.
Both health and
economic conditions.
They were on strike prepared
to die for the republic of Kosovo.
Their motives were also
completely nationalistic.
So, at first glance, the
fledgling sensationalist media,
starting to emerge
at the time, had it easy.
Either you supported the repression
and the Serbian domination against Kosovo.
Or you backed them,
Kosovo and all that.
Like the manifestations of support
they organised in Slovenia.
If you wanted to seriously
examine and solve problems,
then you had to
see the big picture.
So there were polemics and
divergences among us on this matter.
But we were a group
for political discussion,
fully accepting of
an exchange of views.
What we, of course,
failed to give was
a strong and convincing
impression on the public,
drawing some attention and
perhaps even some support
for the idea that the
first steps to be taken were
a few quick and specific
amendments to the Constitution
that would allow
democratic elections
of the representatives in
the Federal Assembly.
In order to place the further
processes under the control of
a democratically
legitimate body.
That was our mainstay.
And, of course,
we fared badly.
It was also where Ante Marković
failed completely,
despite his immense
potential for reforms.
And his popularity owing to
this economic success.
Very fast and sudden.
Managing to curb a
horrible hyperinflation.
That was the second wave.
The first hyperinflation
took place in 1983, 1984.
The second wave
arrived in the late 1980s.
He proved to be
economically very efficient.
And completely
politically misguided.
Every day, he was aware that,
being the prime minister,
there wasn't a single law that he could
propose to the Federal Assembly.
Because, in order to make a proposal,
he had to have the consensus
of all the representatives
of the republics
and provinces sitting
in the government.
That was how the
government was composed.
So, the prime minister wasn't the
one who built the governement,
people from the federal
units were sent to him.
And then there was the matter of
agreeing on republican delegacies and all that.
Although the Federal Assembly
had one council,
the Chamber of
Republics and Provinces,
and another council, the Federal Chamber, supposed to
be universal, but it was undemocratic.
We had two republican councils.
They couldn't even agree on what
kind of consensus he was supposed to have.
He wasn't elected
by the majority.
So he ruled only through
temporary measures.
And he was still blind to the
importance, the crucial importance
of the introduction of a
democratic election principle
in one of the Federal
Assembly councils,
based on the principle 1 man - 1 vote,
and making majority decisions.
While the other council, by definition
in charge of and authorised to
guard the interests of
the republics and provinces,
would then have the option
of choosing not to pass
some laws and
something like that.
No, he didn't grasp the idea at all,
even though we spoke to him directly,
he didn't grasp the option
of joining the support
for democratic elections.
Instead, he formed his own party,
the Union of Reform Forces
figuring that he would,
thanks to his popularity,
win in all the republics and
make it through in this way.
Firstly, he was too late
because the elections
in Slovenia and Croatia
had already passed.
Secondly, it soon became apparent
that the nationalist options
were holding sway in the other
republics as well, of course.
Perhaps a federal election,
in which no ethnic group,
no ethnically defined nation
would hold the majority,
perhaps there he could have
found some room for maneuver.
But, as the Russians
would say, ne udalos.
This possibility never even
presented itself, much less came true.
When it became apparent that
things weren't working out,
as soon as the election results
from the republics came in,
it became evident that no political ground
was left for the kind of engagement
that the Association for Yugoslav
Democratic Initiative had been aiming for.
Some tried to transform
this assembly into parties.
So that several
parties emerged
in Serbia, Croatia and
I don't know where else.
But it was all flimsy
and marginal.
As for me, personally,
at some point
someone invited me,
and I somehow ended up
in this group of people,
the first one to react
to JNA's attack on Slovenia.
The same people who started forming
the Antiwar Campaign in early July.
I was always interested
in political matters
more than I was in the entirely pacifist,
ecological and similar topics.
Moreover, I still believe that the
mobilisation of the so called civil society,
preceding the fall of the
Communist regime in the late 1980s,
in Slovenia most of all, but
catching on in other places,
was an evasion of a direct
confrontation with political problems.
Later analyses found the same
phenomena in other countries.
For example,
in the late 1980s,
the ecological movement
in Hungary picked up as well.
It was a regime-unbacked way
for people to assemble,
but without directly
clinching with the regime,
without facing some politically
contentious issues
you had in common, although
your points of view were opposed.
Something passing
by the problems.
Alternative culture,
environmental protection and pacifism
as universal human values.
I wasn't particularly
enthusiastic about it.
There was a meeting
in Kumrovec
at which the Antiwar Campaign was
really created and founded,
although they already
had something going on
in Zagreb before that,
in the Green Action,
which I didn't
take part in,
anyway, I spent that meeting
outside, playing with the children.
Because a couple of us
had brought our kids.
While most of the
others were in session,
agreeing on a text
to go public with.
I took the Antiwar
Campaign seriously
only after the
next few months,
when it became manifest
that a problem was
opening up, a problem
that somebody could have
analytically foretold.
But neither myself or
the people arround me did.
And the problem was
the following:
in a warring country, a country
that was under attack,
a background war against segments
of the population was at work.
And I know we had some discussions
about it in the Antiwar Campaign.
Even in written form.
Because an internal bulletin
had started off,
a fanzine that later
became Arkzin.
I formulated it in a text:
A pacifist engagement in
a country under attack,
with its legitimate
right to defend itself,
seems pointless.
But it is not pointless
because we have...
Granted, we couldn't
affect this war.
When you're under aggression,
you can choose between
capitulating and fighting.
In this sense, the war does not begin
with the attacker, but with the attacked.
If they don't defend
themselves, there is no war,
as Czechoslovakia
proved in 1968.
There was no war there.
There was no war
in 1938 either,
when Germany ran over them.
Supposedly not a single
German soldier was harmed
in all of that.
But here you
could choose
not to fight.
In all that mess, I filed a
conscientious objection
so that, whatever else happened,
I wouldn't kill anybody.
I didn't want anyone
to impose that on me,
giving me a gun
and forcing me to
shoot somebody.
Not in order to to keep myself safe, but
not to be forced to shoot at others.
Could you tell us about
your conscientious
objection in more detail?
It was a mere formal act.
Nothing worth mentioning.
Did you get in any trouble...?
- No.
That's the hypocrisy
of all these situations.
Anyone even remotely known,
I'm no celebrity,
but I took part in some things
and my name was somehow known to them,
anyone even remotely
known was protected.
Later, the president
of that commission,
a doctor who was a member
of HSLS, not HDZ,
told me: "Well, you
had really put it nicely."
Later on, when our paths
crossed at some conference.
As soon as they knew you, as soon as they
knew that you knew some journalists,
especially if you knew someone
from the foreign press,
it was another
thing altogether.
Did you perhaps hear from some
other conscientious objectors
whose experiences
differed from yours?
Yes.
I remember one man, I had
known him long before all of that.
We weren't close, but
we were acquaintances.
Ratko Bečinović
from Karlovac.
They sent him
a draft notice,
although he had already
filed a request
for civil service as a
conscientious objector.
But the legislature was
very poorly regulated then.
Things were made in such a way
that it was possible for
them to acknowledge this
conscientious objection
only as a formality,
since it was, incidentally,
in the Constitution.
By the end of 1990.
But it actually entailed a whole
mass of obstacles and restrictions.
So we filed a request
to the constitutional court.
And, to our utter bewilderment,
the motion for the evaluation of constitutionality
was partly adopted.
Some parts of the law were
abolished in line with our motion.
And returned to the parliament
for discussion several years later.
But that was the first,
it was unprecedented at the time.
That was the first time that an association
started anything like that,
not to mention getting the attention
of the constitutional court.
And it was unheard of
for the court to make
a ruling partly in
line with our motion.
But, like I said, until then,
and that was in 1993...
And it took some time for
the Parliament to change it as well.
But, yes, the people who
contacted us had
terrible problems,
because, unlike myself
and some others here,
they were forced into the army regardless
of their conscientious objection.
They refused to go
because the procedure
of deciding on their
objection was in motion.
Then they would get beaten up,
put in prison, and all kinds of things.
I tried.
I went to Karlovac,
tried to reach him,
tried to reach anyone
who was in charge there,
someone who decided
how this man was being treated.
I didn't manage
to reach anybody,
but it was important
to create an atmosphere
that somebody was indeed
observing and supervising it.
As far as the constitution
of the state apparatus
and the whole ruling
structure was concerned,
it was also in a
very chaotic state,
which sometimes gave you
the opportunity to do more
than in a state of stability.
But, in most cases,
it was deadly.
Because there were no guarantees,
no laws or regulations were followed.
All kinds of things happened.
Getting back to the Antiwar
Campaign and its engagement,
several months after
the Antiwar Campaign
was formed,
it occurred to me that,
aside from this feeble
and futile pacifism
as a principle,
which didn't even enable
you to publicly speak up,
because this was
what you could say:
"Well, don't wage war even though
the country has been attacked,
let things run
their course",
I realised that aside from that there
was a whole other area of engagement.
Or, to use the
ugly word, struggle.
And that was the struggle against
the militarisation of society from within.
And against the very violent
discrimination and persecution of Serbs.
In fact, for a while all post-Yugoslav
minorities, other than Slovenians,
were vitims.
Montenegrians, Macedonians
and Bosniacs were losing their jobs.
In the eyes of the
members of the HDZ,
who all of a sudden
ruled everything,
who could do whatever
popped into their heads,
these were all
suspect elements.
Especially when
things took off and
they joined the aggression
on Bosnia and Herzegovina,
when they started conquering
and potentially splitting off
parts of Bosnia
and Herzegovina,
then the Bosniacs really
became the topic of conversation.
Very many things
like these happened.
Other than losing their jobs,
how else were those who were
found objectionable dealt with?
The violent evictions from the apartments
made the strongest imprint on my mind.
They were orchestrated on very
suspect legal grounds.
I did some research on it
at the time and later on.
I should finish
a study on it soon.
They used an executive
order from July 1991,
in which the governement banned all
property status changes.
Which could have been made
by any of these federal
bodies, organs or institutions.
Which, of course,
included the JNA.
And it included the apartments
that the JNA had assigned to people.
Which was objectionable
for two reasons.
On the one hand, in the
Brijuni Declaration
in early July,
Croatia pledged
to a suspension of all activities
related to the secession.
And this executive order was
exactly this kind of activity.
The trouble was that the
Brijuni Declaration was just
an expression of political
will, which could be let down.
It wasn't a legally
binding document.
At some point, in a later case,
the constitutional court
very coarsely denied any legal
relevance of the Brijuni Declaration.
And the other
objectionable point was
thet these tenants already
had the right
of tenure in the JNA.
And that the JNA, in allowing for
these apartments to be bought off,
did the very same thing
as the Croatian state.
So, this wasn't a seizure
of Croatian property.
The housing facilities
were JNA's property.
And Croatia as the Republic of Croatia
had nothing to do with it.
Well, not to go into
further details.
But, based on very
suspect legal grounds,
people were thrown
out using force,
either bullying and threats
or physical force...
From about 30 000
apartments altogether.
Not people, apartments.
30 000 families.
Meaning, maybe about
a hundred thousand people.
At the very least.
And we in the Antiwar Campaign
were a tiny drop in the ocean
trying to, in some cases, stop
it, alleviate it, postpone it.
If nothing else, point out that there
was something controversial about it.
There are people here
who know more than I do,
who dealt with it
more directly.
I was among those taking
part in a kind of logistics,
occasionally going
to some evictions,
to be among those who were
physically, nonviolently resisting,
meaning, we wouldn't move
until they carried us outside,
notifying the foreign observers,
the so called ice-cream marshals,
the observers from the European
Community Monitor Mission.
I don't know whether
we managed to help cancel it
in more than
a couple of cases.
To keep people
in their apartments.
Some of the evictions
were postponed, etc.
But if it wasn't
for us here,
if it wasn't for Tonči Majić
and the Dalmatian Committee
for Human Rights in Split,
if it wasn't for the Centre for Peace,
Nonviolence and Human Rights in Osijek,
and some other groups, one that went on
to become the Civil Committee in Karlovac,
if it wasn't for these various
groups and organisations
things would have certainly
gone further and higher.
Because it became
a public scandal.
It became the issue at
stake between Croatia
and the representatives
of the European Union
and the representatives of particular
countries who were sent here.
Did you try to raise this story
to an international level?
As much as we could.
It wasn't very formalised.
We didn't know what
structures and bodies existed.
It was a whole
other world.
Yugoslavia wasn't a member state
of the Council of Europe,
it wasn't a signatory of the
European Convention on Human Rights.
Neither was Croatia
in the early 1990s.
Raising things to an
international level didn't have
that form of submitting
a shadow report,
or using stabilised, well-known
procedures and channels of communication.
We were winging it, flying
by the seat of our pants,
doing anything, contacting
anyone we could.
The grass roots activism
in the countries
of Western Europe
was of great help,
people with whom we established
contact through variuos chance ways.
Fortunately, since the
early days, the spring of 1992,
we had e-mail communication.
That was something
completely new.
And it offered a much greater capacity
of communication and dissemination
to marginal characters
such as us,
a level of communication beyond
our wildest imagination.
A lot of support came in
from all around.
On Tadeusz Mazowiecki's visit
in the spring of 1993,
as the then special emissary
of human rights for the UN,
the evictions were
discussed as well.
And that couldn't have been
achieved in any other way.
The European Community
Monitor Mission
also registered and
recorded all these cases.
It may have helped
in cutting it short
or preventing it from
coming into full swing.
Of course it wasn't in
our power to stop it.
But at least it had been turned
into a public, controversial issue.
This sounds very cynical.
Every one of the people
who suffered through that evil...
Imagine that suddenly
anyone can throw you out
from a place in which you have
been living like in your own home.
It's terrible.
The Croatian public is only
now becoming aware of it,
seeing scenes such as the
most recent one in Zadar,
where a family's home had been taken
away with purely economic-fiscal reasons.
And the terror is obvious.
It was a mass occurrence.
And we at least
contributed to
making it uncomfortable.
Although every survivor,
every victim of this
would find it cynical.
Because we didn't
help them in any way.
Except for a small show
of solidarity from some people
who didn't have the power
to change anything.
And maybe getting a deferral,
maybe being subjected to less violence.
It was like the difference between
pitch darkness and a small candle
or a lighted match
that showed you something other
than the darkness still existed.
It was the same
with many things.
The Antiwar Campaign
didn't get very involved
in regard to people
losing their jobs.
But we weren't
the only ones.
Some things were getting
published a lot in Feral.
Some other groups
had formed by that time.
By the end of 1992
the groundwork was laid.
And the Civic Committee for
Human Rights was founded.
And the Croatian Helsinki
Committee (HHO) soon followed.
A group for the direct
protection of human rights
was forming within the
Antiwar Campaign,
later on it was
independently registered
as the Centre for Direct
Protection of Human Rights.
The nice thing about this
Antiwar Campaign was
that it was the first
one to have logistics.
That was indicative.
Many other organisations
stemmed from that one.
Not the Civic Committee
or the Helsinki Committee
I mentioned, they
formed separately.
Many others formed
separately as well.
But the vey idea of
organisation from below
getting recognition from someone
on the outside, getting some support.
It had nothing to do
with the kind of money
handed out by donor organisations
and foundations later on.
Small support, a few
thousand marks from
activists in Germany, the
Netherlands, France.
That you could have
an office, a telefax,
that you could send something,
a computer and, later, an e-mail server.
It was very important
to make that first step
from which everything
could take off.
That's why it was fertile ground
for many other budding groups.
Aside from the
Antiwar Campaign,
you were active in the Croatian
Helsinki Committee (HHO),
you were the executive director of HHO.
- That was much later.
And in the
Open Society Institute.
As far as my career
is concerned,
at the time of these events
that we are discussing,
meaning, at the
beginning of the war,
these early years, the
first half of the 1990s,
I worked in publishing.
I worked for the publishing
company 'Naprijed'.
That was a job with which
I had a lot of spare time.
I was able to work
on the manuscripts
that needed to be prepared
for books, for publishing