ANTE TOMIĆ

sport j2 money culture scene video subscription OPTIMIST CLASS Ante Tomić Ante Tomić What a ridiculous and miserable aspiration it is: to make a state. This is wilderness ... In a serious state, the police would have found a long time ago and the court convicted those who killed an old woman in her nineties 8563529 Denis Lovrovic / AFP Posted: August 29, 2020 10:36 pm Facebook Twitter Messenger E-mail RELATED NEWS 8563501 BIG CHANGES The end of hatred? The defenders do not protest, the Church also gives support, here is who is the only one on both sides JUGUL FOR THE GLOBE 'Four days before the Storm in Washington, Al Gore received me, he had a message for us from Clinton ...' With General Luka Džanko and several dear friends from the VEDRA organization, anti-fascist war veterans, we were at the commemoration of the victims of war crimes in Grubori on Tuesday. We traveled along a narrow serpentine road along the green Peručko Lake, between forests and meadows, across Knin, a dilapidated, sad town where only a huge white building of the monkey name Church of Our Lady of the Great Croatian Baptism shone in the hot August sun. Eventually, through a long shady gorge, we burst into a wide valley, as if into some hidden prehistoric world, into a wilderness without people. You would almost expect a brontosaurus head on a long neck protruding above the crown. The village of Plavno is a dozen hamlets scattered on the slopes at the edges of the valley, and Grubori is probably the most remote. From the Orthodox church in the center, we travel two kilometers uphill, on a white road that construction machinery, apparently, passed shortly before us. They freshly cut vegetation and leveled a neglected forest road so that the president, two ministers and a couple of smaller budgets could easily come to lay wreaths in black limousines and address the place where Croatian special police killed six Serb civilians exactly a quarter of a century ago. one old woman of ninety, one invalid in a wheelchair, and one marginally weak-minded unfortunate woman. All the abandoned houses of Grubor, broken tiles, ruined walls and gray dilapidated shutters, can hardly be seen among the leafy hornbeams, maples, oaks, forks, wild walnuts. Blackberries ripen in dense, large bushes. While Milanović, Pupovac, Medved and Milošević, who were a meter away, spoke in unison about the necessity of reconciling their former enemies, I picked up maybe half a kilo of sweet black fruits from thorny tendrils. And I found a fig tree, almost choked with surrounding vegetation, and an apple of tiny green fruit, and a wild vine and a few dogwood trees, branches full of bright red berries. Cherries are bitter and sour, your mouth is expensive if you go to eat them raw, but the jam and juice from them are divine. We went down the angry whistle back to the church on foot. The new road was already marked in some places by the rain that fell two days ago. In the shade of the forest, through the black, rotten leaves, a small stream murmured softly, birds sang on the branches. I closed my eyes for a moment and it seemed to me that I could hear all nature constantly beating, pulsating uncontrollably with force, and I knew that everything was useless to us, excavators, bulldozers, chainsaws, mowers, shovels, machine tools, all tools and all human effort in vain before an invincible green force that will soon, in just a few weeks, as soon as the president and ministers leave, conquer all this again. In the following days I thought a lot about Grubori and Plavno, about a long ago large and rich village, where the famous Serbian educator Dositej Obradović served as a teacher , and today a desolate, cursed place, where only a few blind old women weave garlic wreaths on a table in front of the house. a day waiting for her benevolent Orthodox God to take her to himself. On Wednesday, for example, in the kitchen, while eating chicken for lunch, I heard someone on television repeat that famous lament, how we made our country, and young people, alas, are moving abroad again. What a ridiculous and miserable aspiration, I thought: to make a state. When Croatians start talking about "their country", anyone uninformed would think that it was a godsend, a civilizational feat almost in the class of sending a manned spacecraft to Mars. Why this pride? Have they ever been to a place like Grubori? The second time I came across an interview with Miomir Žužul , where he describes the extremely sensitive political circumstances in which we found ourselves in the summer of the ninety-fifth. If they had accepted the political autonomy offered by the international plan Z4, the Serbs in Knin today would have, claims the former head of Croatian diplomacy, a state within a state. We are also glad when our people say “state within a state”, as if they are mortals of almost incomprehensible authority. What kind of shitty country is Žužul talking about? Was he really impressed by the state skills of a stupid Knin policeman and the economic, political and military strength of the self-proclaimed SAO Krajina? And he really thinks that, instead of the poor, starving, discouraged SAO Krajina, with the Croatian army of the ninety-fifth finally came a serious system, a lubricated bureaucratic machine in which everyone works flawlessly, diligently, selflessly, honestly. Both before and after the Storm, and when Mile Martić ruled and Josipa Rimac shook , it doesn't matter. There was no state in Knin, nor did the state see it. Because, the state is not just a piece of washed and torn synthetic cloth that beats on the storm on the mast at the Knin fortress. And the ostentatious white Church of Our Lady of the Great Croatian Baptismal Covenant. The state is a postman on a motorcycle to whom an immobile old man in Grubori will leave ten kunas for a beer when he brings him a pension. The state is a road that will constantly bury puddles and cut the branches that hang over the forest road. And an electrician who will deftly climb on a pole and connect a cable damaged in a storm, and a teacher who will teach children the uppercase and lowercase Cyrillic letters š, and a bus driver who will board workers from industrial plants in the city every morning at six in the village. It’s a huge job that never stops. The state is here twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and not just when the president and two ministers come in black limousines. In a serious state, after all, the police would have long ago found and the court convicted those who killed an old woman of ninety, a cripple in a wheelchair and a marginally weak-minded unfortunate woman. Instead of blabbering on like “our country,” we have to admit, this is a wilderness that looks less and less like an organized human community on a daily basis. Forests are gradually conquering our settlements. Wild walnut trees sprout through roofs, hornbeam roots and maples crumble asphalt and concrete. Soon, under the lush greenery, all memories of some Croats and Serbs once living here will disappear. And it is fair to be so.