384
p
ARTISAN REVIEW
tually made it possible for public OpInlOn to exist at all during
Communism. The little that existed has disappeared under the extreme
ideological pressure of the ruling party and its imperatives to "cleanse" the
state administration, universities, public offices, large state-owned com–
panies, and especially the mass media, of any "unwanted elements."
When the general manager of Croatian Radio and Television, Anton
Vrdoljak, who is very close to the President, publicly declares that he
reads the newspapers only while sitting on the toilet, and when ex–
Minister of Information and Director of HINA, the national news
agency, Milovan Sibl says that no journalist of mixed Croat and Serbian
blood can write objectively about the Croatian government, then you
have an unmistakable if gloomy picture of what the real situation
is.
Radio and television are state-owned and controlled, and the press
is
censored in several ways. The printing presses as well as the greater part of
distribution are sponsored by the state. If the ruling party does not like a
magazine and wants it to fold, it is enough that a printer refuses to print
it; this is what happened to
New Danas.
Even if a printer is willing to print
something, distributors can refuse to distribute it, as was also the case with
New Danas.
This second kind of censorship is perhaps the most dangerous,
since it is self-censorship and comes from within.
It
is a product of the old
system but also a result of the methods of control established by the new
system. In his latest report, special United Nations envoy for human rights
Tadeusz Mazowiecki said that he is worried because "human rights are
threatened with the spread of a nationalist ideology that marginalizes not
only ethnic minorities but also those Croats who are critical of the
government. This is felt especially by intellectuals. This phenomenon
feeds on the continuation of strict governmental control over radio and
television. "
It is all more complicated than it seems, because the intellectuals
themselves have helped create this atmosphere, which again brings us to
the war. To justify their more or less silent approval of official politics, the
majority of Croatian intellectuals took the position that it was immoral to
criticize the government of their country which, because it had been at–
tacked, was a victim: to do so would be to serve the enemy's interest.
Those intellectuals who felt otherwise, that there is no reason to postpone
the development of democratic institutions and that such dilemmas only
obstruct the democratic impetus in the country, became, as defined by the
government, heretics and traitors to the national interest. They reflect the
bottom line of the Croatian opposition parties. Although the parties make
up roughly thirty percent of the parliament, they are totally marginalized;
their ideas and proposals are publicly ridiculed by the ruling party.
