February 2010
[1]Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas.
OLD MEN AND THEIR GRANDCHILDREN
One hundred and one old men
Over the weekend of July 19th and 20th, 2008, the town of Key West in Florida played host to 141 Ernest Hemingways. Hemingways from all over America gathered in Key West in a competition for the greatest degree of physical resemblance to the famous writer. This year the winner was Tom Grizzard, in what is said to have been a very stiff competition. The photograph that went round the world shows a collection of merry granddads, looking like Father Christmases who have escaped from their winter duties — in other words, like Ernest Hemingway. The old men, who meet every year in Key West on Hemingway’s birthday, also took part in fishing and short story writing competitions.
Another old man. .
The following day, newspapers in Croatia carried a photograph of an old man who has no connection at all with the 141 old men from the previous article. In Croatia on July 21st, 2008, Dinko akić died, at the age of eighty-six. Who was Dinko akić? akić was the commandant of the Ustasha concentration camp of Jasenovac, where Jews, Serbs, Gyspies, and communist-oriented Croats were efficiently executed. After the war he managed to escape to Argentina, and it was not until 1999 that the Argentinian authorities handed him over to Croatia, where he was sentenced to twenty years in prison. At that “historic” moment, many Croats saw the sentence of Dinko akić as an injustice — for them that same Independent State of Croatia (in which Dinko akić had killed Jews, Gypsies, Serbs, and unsuitable Croats) was “the foundation of our present Croatian homeland,” as the local priest, Vjekoslav Lasić, put it on the occasion of akić’s death. The priest was in fact merely expounding a thesis put forward by Franjo Tuđman, the first President of Croatia (since Ante Pavelić), and the “father of the Croatian nation.” “That is why every decent Croat is proud of the name of Dinko akić,” announced the priest Vjekoslav Lasić, adding that he was “proud that he had seen akić on his bier dressed in an Ustasha uniform.” The funeral of old Dinko akić at Mirogoj cemetery in Zagreb on July 24th, 2008 was attended by some three hundred people. Even aged criminals have friends. Three hundred people is not a bad number.
And yet another old man. .
On the day of Dinko akić’s funeral, another old man rose from the grave in Croatia. Zvonko Bušić Tajko—the Croatian Mandela, or the most renowned Croatian émigré (as some Croatian newspaper headlines put it) — landed at Zagreb airport on July 24th, to an enthusiastic reception by a crowd of some five hundred people. Bušić was returning to Croatia metaphorically from the grave, but in fact out of American prisons where he had spent thirty-two years. Way back in the 1970s, with his American wife, Julienne Eden Bušić, and a few friends, he had hijacked an American airplane on its way to New York, because “he wanted to draw the attention of the world to the unjust position of Croatia in the former Yugoslavia.” This gesture of “political activism” (as the Croatian papers defined Bušić’s terrorist act) ended ingloriously — Bušić’s explosive device led to one American policeman being killed and another losing an eye, and Bušić and his wife ended up in prison. Julienne was released on the eve of Croatian independence; she got a job in the Croatian Embassy in Washington, and later in Croatia, in Franjo Tuđman’s personal security service. The Croatian army built a villa on the Adriatic coast, so that she would be able to dedicate herself fully to writing her autobiographical novel Lovers & Madmen and to her political activities, lobbying for her husband’s release from prison. Among those gathered at Zagreb airport were Croatian politicians, patriots, pop singers (Marko Perković Thompson, for example), priests, children sitting on their fathers’ shoulders and holding their welcome banners up to the cameras, young people shouting Ustasha slogans (“For the homeland ever ready!”) and singing Ustasha songs. “The Croatian Mandela” made a patriotic speech and quoted a verse from Gundulić’s poem Osman, which every Croatian primary school pupil knows by heart:
The wheel of fate spins about
Round and about ceaselessly:
He who was high is cast down
And who was below is now
on high.
Zvonko Bušić added that, thanks to the good Lord and free Croatia (“At last I am in my free homeland!”), he had climbed high, while, according to the logic of the wheel of fortune, his enemies had fallen. The only person to comment briefly the following day on Bušić’s resurrection was the Croatian President Stipe Mesić (his motive could have been patriotic, but the method he applied was the method of terrorism). Zvonko and Julienne Bušić told the newspapers that they wanted a little peace, although Bušić’s lively speech, his evident excitement at finally finding himself “among his own people,” and the five-hundred strong crowd seem to indicate the opposite.
Doctor Velbing and Mr. Hide
On the July 21st, 2008, the day Dinko akić died, all the world’s newspapers carried a photograph of an old man with a long white beard and white hair, coquettishly gathered on the crown of his head like a kind of diminutive Samurai pigtail. This old man had no connection whatever with the Hemingways of Key West, nor with the late Dinko akić, nor with Zvonko Bušić, who was to land at Zagreb airport three days later. This old man looked as though he had fallen out of the file of some Hollywood agent: like a third-rate actor who specialized in playing Merlin and Gandalf in film fairytales. The old man was arrested in Belgrade by the Serbian police just as he was getting into a number 73 bus. It turned out that the old man was called Dragan Dabić, or rather Dragan David Dabić (3D), or rather — Radovan Karadžić. From the moment of the arrest of Radovan Karadžić, the Balkan butcher and European Osama Bin Laden, the media were flooded with numerous farcical details: Karadžić’s unsuccessful attempts to get involved in football and his derisive nickname “Phantom”; his statement that Yasser Arafat was first an international terrorist, then twenty years later he was awarded the Nobel Prize (an echo of Tuđman’s claim that someone who knew about the Nobel Prize had once flattered him: “If you were not a Croat, General, you would certainly have received the Nobel Prize”); Karadžić’s frenetic 1968 student speech from the roof of the university; his activities as a police informer; his financial fraud and embezzlement; his collection of children’s verse, There Are Miracles, There Are No Miracles; his alleged mistress who also has two names; his online shop where you can buy a little “velbing” (from well-being) or a “cross-shaped composition of the smallest velbing for your personal protection to be worn on the chest” or a large “velbing or spacious cross-shaped composition which harmonizes a whole space”; the decoration on his website, a Jewish three-branched (!) menorah, which is in fact the Orthodox three-fingered blessing in disguise; his cheap aphorisms, which seem to have been copied from Paulo Coelho (“Man is the most perfect instrument!”). Commentaries circulated on the Internet and in private emails. They included mention of the film The Hunting Party, set in the forests of Bosnia, through which Richard Gere hunts the notorious Bogdanovich, played in the film by the Croatian actor Ljubomir Kerekeš. . And then a friend of the author of these lines dug up a You Tube video clip from Barbarella in which Dr. Durand Durand (3D!) sets his Excessive machine in motion and performs his Sonata for the Executioner of Various Women. What possible connection can there be between Barbarella and Karadžić? None whatsoever. Apart from the fact that the Irish actor Milo O’Shea, who plays Dr. Durand Durand, is extraordinarily like Ljubomir Kerekeš, that is to say Dr. Bogdanovich, from the film The Hunting Party, in other words like Karadžić before his complete makeover.