Marovic

I met Svetozar Marović in the mid-eighties. He was educated, wise and brave beyond other politicians of his generation.

He had only one falinka at the time - it was not possible to understand him at the first reading.

That spring - in 1984 if I remember correctly - I got my first editorial job. With a team of young journalists, I was supposed to prepare the Pobjeda supplement for May 25.

That holiday was celebrated even after Tito's death as Youth Day, which did not bother me. But it never occurred to me that it was still celebrated as the late leader's birthday.

Despite this, the editor of the internal politics section, Vidoje Konatar, gave me a free hand.

- Be careful, Mala, that you don't mess around with Comrade Tito, there was a lot of fighting with the Central Committee over that autocephalous church of yours - was the only warning.

***

The most politically sensitive task, the interview with the president of the Association of Socialist Youth, was given to a slightly older colleague, the late Bato Božović.

Laganica, there is no work for me, the answers came to him in written form. I can put off reading almost until I break.

I leave a little earlier, but it doesn't work. Sentences complicated, too long and full of philosophical concepts. I breathe and reach for the phone, and then - from the sky and into the ribs:

- This interview can't be in the newspaper, when I don't understand you at all, how about the readers?

- Okay, okay, tell me what I can fix now - he was polite beyond expectations.

- Nothing, except to come to Pobjeda and do a live interview...

He came right away. And answered all the questions, without asking for mandatory authorization.

He took his word for it that everything would be delivered as he said...

***

And it was, literally. To his and my baksuzluk.

The next day, lightning struck both Pobjeda and the Central Committee.

Some from the editorial office call their connections to Dva Kočega to spy on them, and some answer the calls of CK members from that building as if they didn't know anything...

We will give them freedom and democracy and multi-party elections - a comment appeared in Pobjeda about the combination of anarcholiberals and neo-liberals.

Said - done. Of course, not only because of the interview, Marović was in the crosshairs but also because of holding official meetings at Skaline. Even then, going out on the Street was tantamount to treason.

Because of the famous proclamation "Let's stop election fraud", it was Marović's turn in 84. hit the entire communist top.

Maybe that's why he never referred him to this democratic...

***

He lost his position and job. Even then, his party comrades immediately let him down the drain. He was disappointed and depressed, but a little less than now.

Vidoje Konatar saved me. Dead-cold, he declared both before the Party and before the Service that he personally approved the interview. Although everyone in the newsroom knew that he had only read it in the newspaper.

I was fined and forced to take a break from writing for a while.

So Svetozar and I had enough time to become friends. Not as a politician and journalist, but from the real thing.

The nineties separated us.

I joined the Liberal Alliance and graduated the same year - at obituaries.

He chose DPS and ended up - on a warrant...

***

I never envied his dizzying rise, I had too many opportunities to see what the government can do from a man.

I had nothing to do with it, I knew that at some point he would have to replace his wrong choice with the right one.

That's why that night, in front of the A1 screen, I tried with all my heart to believe that it was true that "above all, he wanted Montenegro to be not only independent but also democratic, to belong to everyone and not just to powerful individuals".

And I hoped to hear a logical answer to an even more logical question.

Which is why he not only allowed, but also founded the construction of such an autocratic regime.

He didn't answer. But not because he didn't hear me, but because there is no explanation for participation in this type of government except - the will to power.

He had at least as many opportunities to leave in 25 years, but he didn't.

And that is the cause of my disappointment. And anger... And - most of all - sadness.

How lucky that I didn't turn on the TV that night...

***

- I am an illustration of the political situation that can be an example to others of what can happen to them if they resent someone who decides about them - said that night another Svetozar, not at all like the one I knew.

That Svetozar would not mark himself as an illustration.

Rather, he would lust after himself. And admitted that he personally bears a third of the blame for the first seven years, and even half of it for the next 13.

In the party, he was not only responsible for the name, but also for the ideology.

And especially for the improvement of field practice, which - after all, Svetozare - recommends as a good method of party work.

That Terrain ruined half the lives of at least half of the residents. He didn't recognize them either as Depees fans or as normal people.

***

Montenegro was deprived of its right to normality a long time ago.

Because of the abnormal ambition to rule until death. And if possible - hers.

Is it realistic that Svetozar Marović sees this only after five years of silence. And that he remained silent for two and a half decades so as not to become Montenegrin Ivo Sanader.

The fact that his fate now resembles Sanader's was a political decision.

Despite this, neither from the political nor from the human side, it was not polite to lament one's evil fate in front of:

- a fifth of Montenegro that is hungry for bread;

- a third who have not seen 200 euros since that note was in circulation;

- the half that is hungry for freedom more than anything.

***

That Montenegro was waiting that night for the answers to which he has the keys:

Has he ever done anything in his career similar to what Sanader did?

What does he know about those who did?

Is all property, both his and theirs, acquired by inheritance from ancestors and government salary?

Instead of an answer, he offered the public, who knows how many times, only the art of rhetorical stunts:

Why "all this had to happen to him"...

Is he really "that first, greatest criminal"...

Is he "the one who stole millions, owns hotels, banks, stocks and hydroelectric plants, the one who has real estate worth millions".

How lucky that he didn't ask anything, I read during the show the first three hundred responses from that public on the portals. I hope he didn't get sick when he did it later.

And that, before the next appearance in front of the cameras, they will understand that the fact that the majority does not believe anything in the Special Prosecutor does not mean that he never tells the truth.

***

Marović was also honest when he said that he was "very proud of what was done in Montenegro in a certain period".

But honesty is only the conviction that we are telling the truth - wrote Meša a long time ago - and there are many truths and they differ among themselves.

That's why I still can't believe that he actually said what I heard.

What specific period? What is he proud of?

On the war of occupation, the deportation of refugees, Bukovica or Srebrenica...

To the looting of the state by the original accumulation of capital, which is why we can't trace anyone's First Million...

To the fact that we have the most educated street vendors, taxi drivers and painters in the world...

To the moral, political and economic ruin of Montenegro...

To the hatred that his party vampirizes before every election, so let's drive the "Turks" to the bullies, slaughter the "Shiptars", and reserve the willows for the Serbs...

***

The only thing that Svetozar Marović did that night that was valid was Milo Đukanović's croc. But croc is still only an unfinished drawing.

- What can be done to him, cannot be done to others - he confirmed what half of Montenegro has known since birth.

Except that doesn't mean he's a dual personality. Rather than being an autocrat.

- Being against him meant being guilty - he didn't even have to say, so many oppositionists lost half their lives because of that meaning.

- I supported him in the conflict with Bulatović, although the cause of that conflict was power, not the status of Montenegro in the FRY - he was 23 years late and as an insider.

- I will take some things to the grave - agreed, if they are personal.

If they are not - he is obliged to tell you "some things" during his lifetime. Otherwise, Montenegro will end up in the grave before him.

- He can only kill me - he completely fainted at the end.

If Milo Đukanović had ever intended to kill him, Svetozar Marović would not have had the opportunity to tell us.

***

When he started talking about himself, I started to argue loudly with the picture at the bottom of the screen.

- The political process takes place in such a way as to determine who should be punished and first to prepare a media lynching.

What an exclusive, hundreds of people had their faces taken by warrants from his party's media...

- I am compromised because I am a witness to the growth of Đukanović's power in different phases.

Momir Bulatović was also compromised for the same reasons, so we did not spend a decade studying his property record.

- I was inclined to reconciliation, to build Montenegro together.

More than half of Montenegro is inclined to this, but it is neither normal nor moral to have a simultaneous inclination to both reconciliation and depees.

- Milo Đukanović is now surrounded by those who cannot oppose him.

Just now? And I wanted to swear that he heard the last criticism from party comrades back in 1997...

***

Unlike many others, I believe that Svetozar Marović's health is impaired.

That his family's life was ruined and that he signed a plea agreement to save her - also.

That he is most hurt by what happened to him and his family in 2015, that they arrest his children and brother, the whole family, that his mother dies watching what is happening - I can testify, and I support former friends in the most difficult days.

And now I wouldn't have anything to add or take away if it was said by some clerk Svetozar who had an affair with some accountant Milo.

But this Svetozar is one of the three young, beautiful and smart people under whose rule "children and brothers, entire families" were arrested 30 years ago.

Even then, someone's "mothers died watching what was happening", Slavko Perović's mother was not the only one. But, the obituary about her death is the only one that until then, and it seems to me even then, was banned in Pobjeda, which was edited by that trio.

And not only mothers were victims of the politics of that trio. Omer Šarkić's father's heart gave out when they started to forcibly take his son to the battlefield.

***

Instead of publicly apologizing, even belatedly, to the two of them and to all the victims of his own war and post-war policies, Svetozar Marović started a new reckoning.

With a vigor not seen in people with impaired health, he lashed out - without mentioning names - not only at Omer Šarkić, but also at the other initiators of the long-dead Resist protests - Dejan Pejović, Džemal Perović, Jovan Gajević and Demir Hodžić.

- Typical Montenegrin narcissism due to fame and privileges - says His Holiness, whose party destroyed the country because of these goals.

- Before any solution, they shared functions - he must have confused us with depees.

- The old political forces gathered that wanted rehabilitation - said the man who is not even allowed to speak while waiting for his baptism.

- There appeared some form of post-referendum trauma - the diagnosis of the head of the sickest country on the globe, after admitting in the same breath that he was - against that referendum...

P.S. For that part of the prank that follows me - let it be easy for him. If I could pray, I would do that for him too. In silence, but only on the condition that he doesn't leave his again.