Croatian performance artist Marijan Crtalić probably won’t make it into the Museum of Modern Art. He is, in any case, seeking exit, not entry. In one of his pieces, “The Possibility of Exit,” he tries to bang his head through a wall. Literally. In another piece, “The World Should Know that a Croat Loves His People,” he attempts singing the national anthem with his hands bound, and tape across his mouth. Crtalić’s self-harm is artistic protest against state violence against the individual.
9.
Is it only the Croatian Catholic Church that is shameless, or is every church, ipso facto, such? The Croatian church is fed at a trough filled by the Croatian taxpayer, and despite being the wealthiest institution in the country (owing to its vast real estate holdings), it sucks the taxpayer’s teet dry. In Croatia, eighty-seven percent of citizens identify as Catholics. In other words, the Croatian everyman decides how much money should be allocated to the Church, and how much to his children’s education. With the Croatian congregation having cast its public doors wide open, the Church wasted no time marching straight on into the education system, the very heart of things. Although grade school religious instruction is supposedly voluntary, it’s Clayton’s choice — I mean, when have young children ever been able to decide this sort of thing for themselves? And the Church marched on: into secondary schools, universities and other educational institutions, into hospitals, courtrooms, the media, political structures — its influence insidious. In December 2012, the Church used every propaganda means at its disposal to attack a draft bill introducing human development and sex education into the school curriculum, with sectarian groups, the media, newsagents, and even a supermarket chain owned by a Croatian oligarch all offering assistance. The Church, which maintains a relentless campaign against homosexuality, the use of contraception, pre-marital sex, and the like, claims that sex education goes against its teachings. Citing the Pope, the Church sounded its bugle to the Croatian flock that they reject totalitarian attitudes and thinking. Introducing human development classes in schools is apparently a totalitarian act, sex education both anti-Croatian and anti-Catholic. That is the Church’s official position.
10.
I recently watched Nenad Puhovski’s documentary Pavilion 22, ten years after it was made. The film was only ever shown on the festival circuit, never on television. While judges at the Hague tribunal watched it as evidence, the wider Croatian public isn’t aware of its existence. Yet this general public isn’t completely oblivious to the “terrifying things” that took place at the Zagreb exhibition center in 1991. Several years after the fact, one of those directly involved, Miro Bajramović, gave an interview to the Feral Tribune weekly, in which he claimed that he himself had killed some seventy-six people, the majority Serbs. The case was hushed up, Bajramović dismissed as mentally unsound. Ten years later, however, police arrested six men, four of whom were released after questioning, while Bajramović and another man were eventually sentenced to relatively brief prison terms, most of which they served in pre-trial detention. All of the film’s protagonists, except the former minister of police and one Tomislav Merčep, the chief suspect, testified to the existence of notorious paramilitary units. Croatian jails emptied their cells as the war began. Apparently that’s the thing to do in wartime. Serving prisoners become “dogs of war.” Some formed paramilitary groups, one of which was led by Merčep. The documentary’s subjects maintain that Merčep’s “pack” tortured, raped, and brutalized (mostly) Croatian Serbs, before transporting them to Pakračka Poljana, where they were murdered. A hall at the Zagreb exhibition center functioned as a private detention camp, where the dogs of war engaged in “operational processing.” It seems many people knew what was going on, about the crimes being committed, but no one lifted a finger to intervene. The minister of police at the time defended Merčep’s “dogs,” claiming that they had performed an “enormous service.” He didn’t go into the precise nature of what this “enormous service” entailed. It took twenty years and constant pressure from Amnesty International for the Croatian judiciary to finally indict Merčep, who was arrested in 2010. The indictment accused him of commanding a paramilitary unit responsible for the 1991 murder of forty-three civilians and the disappearance of a further three persons. It stated that he knew about the extrajudicial arrests, the terror, abuse, torture, and execution of civilians, and that he did nothing to prevent it. His trial continues.
11.
An old friend had stubbornly refused to take me with him, and then one day he finally relented.
“There’s nothing to see, unless you want to look at people neck-deep in the shit, and in that case, be my guest!” he said. Today, in a hall of the Zagreb exhibition center, welfare packets are distributed to “special cases.” The bureaucracy, the media, and even those stigmatized as such, use the expression, one that adroitly quarantines a much wider despair. Because in reality, most of the population is barely getting by; it’s the rich who are “special cases.” Like many Croatians, my friend has slipped from the ranks of the former middle class down into those of the special cases. Many “cases” have advanced qualifications, yet as losers in the transition, are too young for retirement and too old for retraining. My friend spent his working life in two big companies — the first, a state-owned enterprise in the time when Yugoslavia was still whole, the second, a private Croatian-owned firm in the post-independence period. The director of the latter was a typical transition hustler. He got the firm cheap via political connections. In time he turned the employees into his personal slaves, and ceased making statutory contributions to their health insurance and retirement schemes. Then he started paying a quarter of his employees’ wages out in vouchers, vouchers only valid in a handful of supermarkets. Then he dropped hourly rates to minimum wage, and after that, he started paying half that minimum wage out in vouchers. And now the vouchers could only be redeemed at the firm itself. The company sold construction material, which in practice meant that employees could exchange their vouchers for toilet seats and bathroom tiles. The director wasn’t entirely without a social conscience, so he started stocking his shelves with pasta, Eurokrem, and tinned goods past their expiration dates. Employees could get hold of foodstuffs, albeit at twice the price of other stores. Of course at other stores, their vouchers were no good.
The owner of the firm abused his employees in every which way, all in the hope that they’d quit of their own volition, because otherwise, at least according to the statute book, he’d have to pay a severance. He didn’t let anyone go. And then, when the recession had bitten hard, he started laying people off without paying them redundancy money, knowing full well that the Croatian judiciary is paleolithic, and that even if someone did sue, it would take years to get a verdict against him. No one sued. Apart from the cleaner; she accused him of raping her in the toilet. To general amazement, the court believed her. But even this seemed to work in the owner’s favor. Sentences for rape are much lighter than those for embezzlement, corruption, and racketeering. In the sea of criminality, rape is considered shenanigans for grown-up little boys. My friend is on the unemployment agency’s books, and the welfare line. The owner of the firm, he’s a free man. He hasn’t gotten around to serving his time.