Who is the Boss in VREME?

Very little is needed for pro-regime readers' "reactions" to be printed in the papers. Concretely, it was enough for VREME to publish in its 19 December 1994 issue an interview made by an Alternative Information Network (AIM) journalist with Miko Tripalo, a Sabor (Croatian parliament) deputy and President of the Action of Social-Democrats for Croatia, for the interviewee to be harassed. The "Reactions" columns in Croatian papers are a bit slow, and the spontaneous reaction of the witch hunters is not sufficiently organized, so that all the dailies from Vecernji List to Glas Slavonije first waited for Sabor Speaker Vladimir Seks to send in his signed comment, before reacting.

After Seks's initiative, the papers followed with headlines such as: "Tripalo's Gaffe in Belgrade", "An Act of Treachery", "Your Excuses Are Bad", etc. The author of one of the letters claims that Tripalo is the first opposition politician who informed the Serbian public that "Croatia is not militarily or politically ready for war" (the quote is taken out of context, which is what Seks did), and that he unintentionally offered "guarantees for a peace of mind to the Serbian regime". If Tripalo hadn't said this or that, and in the "middle of Belgrade", the regime would certainly have quaked with fear in face of Croatia's readiness for war. Another Vjesnik reader criticizes Tripalo because more territorial defence weapons were not distributed to the people of Croatia in 1990, i.e. in 1991 - even though Tripalo was just starting his comeback at the time, after having been put on ice following the break down of the "Croatian spring". The reader has greater ambitions: he writes that "it is necessary to reconsider the question of the deputies' immunity", especially if "they spit all over their own country without impunity, even in Sabor," and that they should be thrown out of the Sabor "when their mind and conscience black out". In short, they're in for it, whether they say something for the Belgrade papers or in Parliament. One can't say "something", only what Seks and company wish to hear.

"I didn't have the opportunity of reading your interview", writes a reader in an open letter to the Dalmatian daily Slobodna Dalmacija, and continues with that famous expostulatory introduction "but". The reader is surprisingly "well-informed" of the situation in the paper! "You know I have heard that Mirjana is one of the main policy-makers in VREME". In order to avoid confusion, the reader is thinking of Ms Mirjana Markovic! (Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic's wife). He disagrees with Tripalo's assessment that VREME is far from being a regime paper, but claims that it is the paper of Belgrade's vapid globe-trotting intellectuals, who find their environment limiting and are playing at being the "opposition".

Readers' and other reactions in the papers are just echoes of Seks's assessment of a "unique and unrepeatable example of shameful activities against one's own nation". The attack on Miko Tripalo is just part of a series of attacks against prominent intellectuals and all they stand for: from Vlado Gotovac (President of the Croatian Society) and Ivan Supek (President of the Croatian Academy of Arts and Sciences) via Slobodan Prosperov Novak (PEN) and Ivan Zvonimir Cicak (the Croatian branch of the Helsinki Watch) to historian Ivo Banac. The aim is to break, or at least humiliate open critics (e.g. the weekly Feral Tribune has paid the state 300,000 DEM in taxes, because it is taxed as pornography), or simply those who think differently and cannot or will not fit into the 'spiritual renewal".

Tripalo heads a small party and the campaign against him is not aimed so much at discrediting the Social Democratic option, inasmuch as Tripalo has been singled out by Seks and other watch dogs for having communicated, albeit, indirectly with someone from Belgrade. The system wishes to thwart communication and control everything, in order that the "normalization of Serbian-Croatian relations might come from the top. And, everybody knows who is allowed to speak!