From: draskovi@usc.edu (Zoran Draskovic)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.europe
Subject: Croatia
Date: 13 Aug 1992 20:13:32 -0700
Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: girtab.usc.edu


Thin-Skinned Croatian Leader Moves To Squelch Journalistic
Satire

By Peter Maass
Special to the Washington Post

Zagreb, Croatia - Poking fun at Croatian President Franjo
Tudjman is no laughing matter.
     Just ask Viktor Ivancic.  In a satirical weekly he edits, Ivancic
made a tongue-in-cheek link between Tudjman, Adolf Hitler and
Joseph Stalin.  A few days later, Ivancic and his colleagues were
notified by the state prosecutor's office that they were being
investigated for breaking a communist-era law that forbids the
"spreading of false information" damaging to the nation.
     They are in the same boat with Tanja Torbarina, a popular
satirist who made the mistake of jokingly comparing Tudjman to
an "illegal squatter" in political office.  Her editor at Globus
Magazine, Denis Kuljis, who faces the "false information" charge
in a separate incident, says he can't believe what's happening to
his star columnist.  "It's like prosecuting Art Buchwald," he said.
     The parodies were designed to highlight what many here view
as Tudjman's authoritarian tendencies, and they have certainly
done that, although in a far more personal way than the journalists
had expected.  The human-rights group Helsinki Watch has sent
Tudjman a blistering four-page protest letter that accuses his
regime of trying to silence anti-government journalists and
politicians.
     The May 22 letter charged that "members of the Croatian
government have consistently tried to ostracize independent
journalists, political figures and others by equating their
criticism...to being traitorous to the nation or supportive" of
neighboring Serbia, Croatia's arch-enemy since the breakup last
year of the old six-republic Yugoslav federation.
     Tudjman, a former general in the Yugoslav army for whom
charm and patience are not strong suits, seems to have shot
himself in the foot at the moment when everything appeared to be
going his way.  Last week, Croatia was admitted to the United
Nations.  A few days later, the U.N. Security Council imposed
tough sanctions on the new Serb-controlled Yugoslav state as
punishment for its aggression in former Yugoslav lands.  Both
events seemed to help Tudjman's effort to quicken the U.N.-
enforced disarmament of Serb militia units that occupy a third of
Croatia.
     Serbia has tried to capitalize on Tudjman's insistent
nationalism by accusing his government of being a fascist
reincarnation of Croatia's pro-Nazi World War II regime.  The
charges are exaggerated, but even the United Nations has accused
Croatian military forces of serious human rights abuses.
     Here in Zagreb, the Croatian capital, diplomats express
concern that Tudjman may be trying to turn state-run television
into a one-sided propaganda tool - much as Serbian President
Slobodan Milosevic has done in Belgrade.  Also worrisome, they
say, are some of the president's oddly imperial habits, such as his
penchant for wearing a regal-looking sash.  For his recent trip to
the United Nations in New York, they noted, the president of a
financially strapped country of 4.7 million flew in an expensive
private jet rather than on a commercial flight.
     Tudjman's latest image problem began a month ago when he
named Vladimir Seks, a right-wing leader of the ruling Croatian
Democratic Union, as the country's chief prosecutor.  In one of
the ironies that Europe is full of these days, Seks is an anti-
communist dissident turned nationalist who founded the Croatian
chapter of Helsinki Watch and who now is being criticized by it. 
     In an interview, Seks declared that satirist Torbarina aimed to
"destroy the president's authority" and "depict him as a criminal"
when she mockingly suggested that Tudjman is an illegal squatter
in the luxurious villa of the late Yugoslav leader Marshal Tito. 
"Intolerable," Seks said.  After being charged, Torbarina promptly
wrote a column in which she offered to provide Tudjman with
office space in her house.
     Ivancic, Torbarina and the others are charged under an
infamous law known as Article 197, which carries a five-year jail
term.  This is not Ivancic's first scrape with Article 197;
Yugoslavia's communist government used it against him twice. 
The new crackdown is viewed by diplomats and politicians here as
an attempt to discourage criticism of Tudjman in advance of
presidential and parliamentary elections that may be held next
month.
     But human rights activists here say that the government
crackdown extends well beyond journalistic criticism.  A leading
Serb politician in Croatia, Milorad Pupovac, is being investigated
under Article 197 after he said that children in the republic who
were raised in the Serbian Orthodox Church were being forcibly
converted to Catholicism.  And early last month, Zagreb police
prevented a group of well-known left-wing politicians from holding
a founding convention for a new party.
     What unsettles many observers here is that Tudjman's
government may not fully understand some of the ground rules of
democracy.  Seks, for example, says he sees nothing wrong with
Article 197, which Helsinki Watch wants repealed because it
"criminalizes speech".
     Seks, who dismissed the Helsinki Watch letter as unfounded,
contends that Article 197 does not intimidate journalists.  But
clearly, he said, they cannot compare Tudjman to Hitler or Stalin.
     How about Lenin? he was asked.
     "I'm not sure," he said.