"Don't you think, when you have a journalist who with his writing, with the noble goal of filling the newspaper's budget and his professional affirmation, endangers the safety of Croatian citizens and we put him under operational processing, don't you think that this is justified? Should we close our eyes because he is a journalist? What does it matter. A baker's company could say, why are you processing us, we bake bread for the people."
This is how Smiljan Reljić, former director of the Service for the Protection of the Constitutional Order and assistant to the Minister of Internal Affairs, Tuđman's official criminal with the authority to "operationally process" journalistic individuals whom the government labeled as "enemy elements", spoke in an interview to a daily newspaper about ten years ago. And there were over a hundred of them.
The quoted statement is grammatically intolerable - more thanks to the interviewer, I suppose, than to the interviewee - but at least the unintentional repetition of the word "writing" emphasizes the core of the ruling hoax, tenaciously preserved even a decade and a half after the formal death of the Tuđman regime: namely that "writing threatens the safety of Croatian citizens ".
Reljić didn't need to explain in what way "the writing endangers the safety of Croatian citizens", because the journalist did not decommodify him with uncomfortable sub-questions. In addition, it would be excessive to expect consistency in public appearances from the head of the secret police. Public explication of secret affairs almost without exception gives a humorous note to the combination of stupidity and meanness, as when, for example, the vitamin value of shit is promoted. The matter becomes a little less funny only when the journalist tries it without superfluous whys or hows, with the naive hope that the readers will cultivate similar digestive habits.
The long-ago interview is becoming relevant because Zoran Milanović, the current president of the Republic of Croatia, recently awarded Smiljan Reljić a high state award. The Order of Prince Domagoj with a necklace, it is said, "for proven courage and heroism in the Homeland War".
And since Reljić moved from Drniš to Zagreb on September 1, 1991, to the position of Assistant Minister of the Interior for Public Security, and soon became the head of the SZUP, it is clear that "courage and heroism in the Homeland War" - as and in the years after the war - demonstrated mainly by signing orders for the "operational processing" of unwilling journalists and other opposition-minded groups: orders to tap their phones, to their medical records are taken from clinics, they are stalked, their neighbors and relatives are interrogated, they are intimidated on the street... After the change of government in 2000, 126 journalistic files were found in the archives of SZUP.
Distinguishing a political criminal - after he had already proven himself by handing over important state ironware to war criminals - Milanović seems to be trying to end the first round of his rule with a new portion of nonsense: Allow me to solemnly vomit in the dawn of democratic elections for everything we consider democratic values! This points to the possibility that smearing the pre-election slogan of the late predecessor has not only a marketing, but also an essential reach. Perhaps the slogan "President for the President" is more correct to read as "Milanović for Tuđman".
Bonus video:
