Thirty-four years ago, I don't know if I've told you this before, as a tenant I shared a small semi-basement apartment in the house of the Lozo family in Dimitrova street in Split with two large pantagans. It was Saturday, October 28, 1989, when I heard a commotion upstairs, noticing a large number of parked cars in front of the house and the owner Tomislav bowing unusually condescendingly to a young, obviously important guest from a limousine with Zagreb registrations.
I remember the exact date, and not only because on that day I pasted on the wall a torn page from Slobodna Dalmacija from that day, with an interview with Zoran Dunđerski from the Institute for Environmental Protection, who, by order of Cian, drew up a plan for systematic extermination of Split, assessing how in the Split area there live half a million pantagans, that is - as it is beautifully pointed out in the title - "Two rats per capita".
Two months later, namely, as a reporter for Nedjeljna Dalmacija, I found myself at the famous founding assembly of Split's HDZ in the Marjan Hotel, and among the guests, along with Franja Tuđman, I recognized the boss Tomislav Loza and his guest from Zagreb, realizing that his name was Perica Jurič, a guy whom we will get to know a little better later as Deputy Minister of Police and head of Tuđman's Service for the Protection of the Constitutional Order.
And when, a year later, the people of Hadeze from Split celebrated the anniversary of the historic meeting of the Initiative Board of the Split HDZ on October 28, 1989, in Tomislav Loza's house, I finally realized that on that Saturday above my basement den, the Split HDZ was actually founded. Realizing that while I was looking for them under the bed, the pantagans were thrashing overhead the whole time, I decided that I had to get out of the way and hide, as best I could. I soon moved out of the famous house, but I only got a housing loan after they fell from power, fleeing from Pantagan and Hadeze people.
Then I found bingo on Gripe - a fantastic, spacious living room apartment of a retired ballerina, a wonderful old lady from Split who gave the apartment for an almost insultingly small amount of money. The catch was in the condition: to stay in it until death. To anyone else it would be an opportunity not to be missed - the owner was in, um, advanced years - but not to me: although I knew I would make the lady's last years easier, I couldn't imagine a life of waiting for someone to die so that I could snuggle up. Later I found another apartment, and the lady is a smaller fool than me. At least it wasn't hard.
Why am I telling you all this?
Waiting for someone to die in the meantime is nicely regulated by the Law on Obligatory Relationships and Contracts on Lifetime and Lifetime Support, and in the Republic of Croatia - the way it was created over our heads in tenant basements - today is the fastest, easiest and cheapest way for a living Croat to get to an apartment .
A few weeks ago, for example, the nation was shaken by the story of an eighty-five-year-old woman from Split, who shared her sad story with an HTV journalist. She reminded me of that old ballerina: having become a widow at a relatively young age, with a nice family inheritance, the lady made good money by working hard all her life, until she fell ill, and in fear of illness, signed a contract with her daughter on lifelong support, assigning her an apartment with a single condition: she did not want to go to a nursing home.
Caring for her sick mother lasted as long as her savings - barely two years - and her daughter ended it with one cold sentence. "You can choose: either in psychiatry, or in a Home for the elderly and infirm, or you will die in your bedroom, alone with no one of your own."
A story like hers in this cold and callous time has a thousand and one dark nights. Seven and a half thousand such contracts, according to the latest estimates, are signed every year by sick old women and infirm old men "alone without anyone of their own" in the Republic of Croatia, and God only knows - because the state is sick of counting - how many of them are deceived desperadoes who unscrupulous "supporters", callous children or horse thieves with a toothpick in their mouth, driven to death with an "offer that cannot be refused". Every year, two hundred unlucky people who have been defrauded by child support contracts contact the legal advice center of the Union of Croatian Pensioners.
Sweet-talking rats roam the ramshackle apartments in attractive city centers and nursing homes in the suburbs, visit sick old people in cold rooms and offer them care, help and generous sustenance, all the while handing out papers with fine print and apologizing for the smears of boiled honey that run from their mouths. . So the merciful ones often sign it themselves, so that the grandmothers don't have to worry.
And then the Croatian state finally got involved in the lucrative real estate transfer business last year, passing the Law on Social Welfare, which forces everyone who receives social assistance to sign an automatic state registration of all real estate they own. Well, like unscrupulous real estate hunters, the rat country visits lonely poor people in dilapidated houses and apartments, offering them a miserable social assistance of one hundred and thirty euros and that piece of paper with tiny letters and spots of boiled honey.
"You can choose," says the Republic of Croatia. "Either you're going to a psychiatric hospital, or a nursing home, or you're going to die in your bedroom, alone with nowhere to go."
Social assistance in exchange for real estate can certainly be called assistance, but not assistance, and especially not social assistance. That's help exactly as much as five euros to a beggar in front of a church in exchange for a contract on posthumous kidney and liver donation.
So what is the difference between people visiting lonely old people offering them a hundred euros a month in exchange for their real estate, and the state doing exactly the same? Except that the rat state plays it safe, and lures the poorest and the weakest with one hundred and thirty fucking euros, while among the first there are also honest and well-intentioned ones, like one, I know a man, who after the death of Miljenko Smoja, gave his old widow Lepoja a nice sum for an apartment in Dražanac, and Lepa then lived with that couple in her apartment for almost twenty years. She almost died.
And what, in contrast to the mufljus who sign perfectly legal Lifetime Support Agreements with demented grandmothers, the state is doing - illegally.
In the Amendments to the Law on Social Welfare, which was in 2017 - supposedly precisely to prevent fraud with life support! - adopted by the same Plenković government, and voted by the same HDZ Parliament, namely in item 123a it is stated that "a legal or natural person who performs social welfare activities may not enter into an agreement on the alienation of the user's real estate with the beneficiary to whom it provides social services".
Anyway, in the past year, since the Law on Social Welfare came into force, the Republic of Croatia has put forty thousand poor people on real estate, mostly the only ones they have and live in. In legal language, if that's easier for you, the state - all the while laughing at the law and Article 123a - concluded a contract on the alienation of real estate with forty thousand "users to whom it provides social services".
After which, if I were in the place of those unfortunate people in Bania, I would still check the aid contracts they signed with the Ministry of Construction.
The lesson of the story? The party that they founded on those long-ago Saturdays, one floor above my tenant's basement with pantagons, has meanwhile grown nicely, and before the last internal party elections, they counted exactly 211.492 members. When they passed the Law on Social Welfare, 102.297 poor Croatians had the right to social assistance.
Yes, you did the math right: exactly two per capita.
Bonus video:
