Europe in Sepia. Dubravka Ugrešić
had posted a picture on his Facebook profile, of himself and a girl (presumably not the one he raped), his attendant comment: Why sweep her off her feet when a smack will do the trick?
2.
My frantic reaction to the missing date is defensive; a reaction against the madness of the surrounding reality, a helpless attempt to bring it to heel. Soon I am to head south, first for a brief stay in Budapest, then on to Zagreb. As my entry into a different time zone grows imminent, panic has taken hold.
In Zagreb it’s as if all clocks stop. Maybe the problem is with me, imagining things that aren’t there, maybe the geography bears no relation to my sense of temporal numbness. In any case, the more clocks there are, the more our sense of time dissipates. The media fabricates events rapid-fire, according each equal value, after all, news is news: a girl brutalized, a parliamentary session, a corruption scandal, tits and ass—just repeat in a different order: a parliamentary session, tits and ass, a corruption scandal, a girl brutalized. At some point reality itself gets caught in the tumble, as if competing with the media, and we, bowed and battered consumers, sell the media devil our souls at cut rates. He lures and enchants them, like a cat toying with a half-dead mouse. Technological innovations are syringes of temporal adrenalin, fueling the sense that time is surging irreducibly ahead. Once we killed time chin-wagging over coffee, today we kill it texting and tweeting. Gossip is the last form of concern for our fellow man—that’s how one journalistic wit put it. Perhaps it’s our final and only form, which explains our jostling as we wade the oceans of digital gossip. From screens and displays, from smartphones large and small, the human soul flashes a cheesy grin.
3.
In mid-November 2012, the beloved face of Croatian general Ante Gotovina beamed from Croatian TV screens, front pages, and posters. Tens of thousands gathered in Split on November 16 to celebrate his release (along with that of the relatively media-friendless Mladen Markač) from a prison at the Hague war crimes tribunal, his touching down on homeland soil. The same day a hundred thousand gathered in Zagreb’s main square. There were prayers, tears of joy, candles, streamers and firecrackers, singing, hugs and embraces—a spectacular display of collective (male!) national hysteria. The two generals had been exonerated of their roles in a “joint criminal enterprise” to ethnically cleanse some 250,000 Serbs from Croatia during a 1995 offensive code-named Operation Storm. Many Serb houses were burned to the ground (20,000 the best estimate), Serb property ransacked and looted, and around 600 Serb civilians murdered. Pressure from the international community initiated a restitution process that never got off the ground. It was thus that the dream of Franjo Tuđman, “the father of the Croatian nation,” came true. The number of Serbs in Croatian has shrunk from 12 percent before the war to 4.36 percent in 2011. The mass sackings, harassment, expulsions, the extorting of their houses and apartments, the discrimination and terror—all of this and a lot more besides—began before the war itself, and long before their “humane” and “voluntary” resettlement. (No one, of course, will ever acknowledge this, and even if they did, and it turned out to be true, it happened twenty years ago—so who cares.) The columns of Serb refugees, American ambassador Peter Galbraith sitting briefly in solidarity with them on a horse-drawn cart, were captured and broadcast on global television.
The acquittal of the two Croatian generals, particularly that of Ante Gotovina, a figure pregnant with symbolism, closes the file on what Croats call the Homeland War, absolving the homeland of any lingering guilt, declaring it an innocent and brave victim, wiping clean every stain from its defensive war, and returning, for a moment, the shattered honour of a long roll of murderers, looters, arsonists, and thieves. The Hague verdict triggered a long pent-up national orgasm. Like Franjo Tuđman, who was fond of a pigeon or two, Gotovina released birds of peace, appealing to Croats to look to the future, calling to the “self-exiled” Serbs to return, and, in light of his acquittal, again affirming that his testimony to the Hague judges had been beyond reproach: “I live with a sense of satisfaction that my actions were those of an honest and dedicated military officer who gave his all in difficult circumstances.”
4.
Who is this Gotovina fellow? It depends on your sources. Glancing at the Ante Gotovina Foundation’s website, you won’t find much more than a handful of bank accounts soliticing donations. All these years the Foundation has been “fighting for the truth,” meaning Gotovina’s release. His wife, also a member of the Croatian armed forces, heads the Foundation. For the most part, the Croatian Wikipedia entry confines itself to Gotovina’s military role in the Homeland War. Other sites offer more eye-opening biographical details: that at sixteen Gotovina ditched school, and at seventeen made his way to France, where he joined the Foreign Legion. Having trained as a paratrooper, he served his unproblematic duty in problematic African countries. He then worked as a bodyguard, Jean-Marie Le Pen one of his clients. Sentenced to jail for a number of criminal activities, he fled first to Argentina, and then to Guatemala, where he trained right-wing paramilitary groups. Arrested on his return to France, he served but the briefest of sentences. He arrived back in Croatia in 1991, and soon rose to the highest military rank. Ten years later he was indicted by the Hague tribunal for war crimes committed during Operation Storm and, until his spectacular arrest in the Canary Islands in 2005, spent several years on the run. After seven years in pre-trial detention, Gotovina was acquitted on appeal, surprising many observers. A few months prior the Hague court had found him guilty and sentenced him to twenty-four years jail.
Ante Gotovina is a fairy tale about Croatian success. Many of the half-million Croatian veterans identify with Gotovina; he’s one of the guys. His is a story about a poor kid from a Catholic family, who flunks school, heads out into the big wide world, where, yeah, he gets up to a bit of mischief, but as a professional murderer in wartime and bodyguard in peacetime, he masters lucrative dark arts. The homeland imperiled, Gotovina made haste in returning to defend it. Today, happily married for the third time, he owns an imposing villa in Pakoštane, built by his friends, acolytes, and brothers-in-arms while he was behind bars. The local municipality made its own contribution to Gotovina’s familial bliss, gifting its favorite son the land, which sits in a pine forest on a quiet inlet fifty meters from the sea, adjoining the once prosperous Club Med complex where, according to an empathetic journalist, young Ante first acquired a taste for French culture. How much has this Croatian fairytale cost the Croatian taxpayer? No one knows; the figures are one of Croatia’s most closely guarded state secrets. A villa in Pakoštane is chump change, a little gift that keeps on giving. In any case, who’s ever heard of a national hero having to buy his own lunch? On the subject of lunch, local residents slaughtered a fattened calf and organized a folksy reception in his honor.
5.
For my young niece, no dots connect Homeland and Gotovina. The only thing she’s worried about is when’s this Gotovina guy gonna go away! This Gotovina guy is hogging every channel, and she can’t watch her cartoons. Her saying when’s this Gotovina guy gonna go away! simply means when can I watch Tom and Jerry again?
Yet in December, the two of us will together go over school stuff about Nature and Society. The final mid-year class is about the Homeland. We have to revise all its symbols, learn the national anthem and the like. For her benefit I try paying closer attention to the Croatian coat-of-arms. I wonder what a military ordinariate is, what this imposing new structure in Zagreb, a monster from Albert Speer’s archive of unrealized projects, actually does. The papers say that the Military Ordinariate, the construction of which was financed directly from the state budget, is now seeking new funds for a bigger cathedral. And meanwhile, four hundred thousand people are unemployed, another hundred thousand are employed but not being paid, almost thirty percent of the country’s four million citizens are on a pension, a half million of them pensioned veterans of the Homeland War. Half a million! A Dad’s Army of this size would make a country far bigger than Croatia tremble in fear. If we’ve got half a million retired on pensions, how many have we got on active duty? The Republic of Croatia’s armed forces are a complex beast, with so many different units it’s hard to keep track. And that’s not counting the legions of police. Like all military ordinariates, ours is a legitimate child parented by the Holy See and the Croatian church, an institution for the pastoral and spiritual care of men and women in uniform, soldiers and police. A military ordinariate is a kind