THE STORY ABOUT THE EVICTION OF LITTLE JELENA AND HER

MOTHER

AIM. Zagreb, November 1, 1994

It is early in the morning. After a rainy night, a pleasant Zagreb autumn day dawned, a day of an eviction fixed in advance to take place in 64 a, Drziceva street. I call Nevenka J.. Perhaps the piece of news brought yesterday by the daily "Vjesnik" which is close to the Government, that "the Constitutional Court has interrupted evictions" - has brought her, too, some good. Does it mean that finally a moratorium has been proclaimed on all police evictions of tenants from the apartments which belonged to the former Yugoslav Army (JNA). Threatened tenants and the public which is increasingly raising its voice against it have demanded for quite some time that the Constitutional Court of Croatia and a group of independent lawyers consider this complex legal and political problem.

• I have received no official document. Please, come!
• Nevenka, apparently calm, answers. Yesterday, she threatened that, when they begin throwing her out, she would pour petrol over herself and set herself on fire. In order to help someone, who is far away from the social and the geographical space of former socialist countries understand the magnitude of her drama, one should be reminded that apartments in socialism used to "socially-owned" and one of the major life winnings at state lottery. The market of housing still does not operate. In order to rent an apartment in the black market, Nevenka would need to pay two her monthly salaries of 250 German marks. For more than two years, rituals of an unequal skirmishes between the self-organized citizens and the two powerful state Ministries, the police and the army, are repeated. Representatives of groups for human rights and the opposition parties, politically involved lawyers and public figures, friends and neighbours of evicted families sit in the apartment and in a passive resistance try, usually in vain, to prevent the eviction.

Tenants who have found themselves in an apartment which belonged to the former JNA after October 1991 - having exchanged it with someone or having been granted it by the Army before it withdrew - are faced with eviction from their homes. In the turbulent time of war and political and legal shifts, the Croatian Government has issued a number of decrees on taking possession of the property of the JNA and on banning free use of it. According to the opinion of numerous independent lawyers and other personalities from the public life of Croatia, including Cardinal Kuharic, the administrative decisions - because this is not a matter of court verdicts - on account of which the citizens are evicted from the apartments have no legal validity, they are in contradiction with law, in collision with the Constitution and they violate the universal civil and human rights of the affected citizens. Evictions, however, continue, at times they are extremely brutal. According to the existing data, over 15 thousand people could be evicted from the five thousand apartments, mostly civilians who were employed by the JNA, members of their families, divorced wives with children, or simply those who have decided to remain in Croatia after the withdrwal of the army.

For Nevenka J., at the outskirts of the city, on the sunny Zagreb morning of October 27, the day did not seem to dawn. The police acted by order and carried out the eviction, although the Constitutional Court suspended another one only two days before that. Nevenka is a nurse, a self-supporting mother. For eighteen years she has worked in the same hospital which, in the meantime, changed its owner (The former Military Hospital, in autumn 1991, after the agreement between the present Croatian Minister of Health, Dr. Hebrang, and a general of the JNA, Andrija Raseta, became the property of the Croatian Ministry of Defense. According to the agreement, employees of the hospital who had decided to remain in Zagreb

• the majority of them - were supposed to be given the possibility to retain the apartments and their jobs). After a subsequent revision of the housing fund under the auspices of Minister Hebrang, the hospital certified Nevenka's tenant's right over the apartment.

Nevenka is a Serb from Glina, a town in the heart of Croatia which has memories of an Ustashe massacre of the local Serbian population in the Orthodox Church in 1941. With the aid of the JNA, Glina was occupied in 1991 by the same local Serbian population, and today it is within the occupied territory of the so-called Serbian Krajina. Nevenka received the news from Glina that her brother, in order to avoid recruitment into any of the armies of Krajina, injured his own arm with an axe. She had no intention of leaving Zagreb with her child, where she was educated and spent her entire professional life.

That morning, about fifty people gathered in Nevenka's some fifty (dearest to her) square metres of living space she awaited for thirteen years. Among the people who came to show their solidarity is a veteran of the 1991 homeland war, a 90-per-cent disabled person with three fingers missing from one of his hands, a refugee, a former political prisoner who had a daughter of a "comrade" forcefully moved into his one-room apartment in 1948... One could almost say, a cross-section of Croatian society. With the exception of those in power and the powerful. Tension increases with the arrival of the police. The police commander warns the gathered people that they are on "banned territory" and demands that they "withdraw". Noone leaves. Young corpulent policemen are registering those present, among whom there are foreign observers and journalists. Nevenka suddenly felt ill, started to tremble and shrivelled, sweating heavily. The police commander calls an ambulance. Some notice that he is pale and that he evidently feels uneasy, although he is, as he says, "just doing his duty". Arrival of ambulances saved victims of evictions in several cases. Once an eight-month pregnant woman was evicted (it was postponed by the arrival of an ambulance!). Another time, the victim was a mother with a retarded child. "Successfully!", she had a court decision about the eviction(?!). They are saved only until the next eviction anyway, and this autumn, the evictions follow one another in an accelerated rhythm of two to three a week, so that the activists (the "sitters") cannot make it to all of them. Persistence in carrying out the evictions is attributed by connoisseurs directly to the interests of the Minister of Defence, the powerful leader of the Herzegovina lobby, Gojko Susak. Namely, he intends to satisfy the needs of the increasingly dissatisfied Croatian veterans and disabled persons he has led to war with these very apartments which are not of top quality. Tudjman's Minister of Defence, despite numerous remarks about him military incompetence and his political role especially in Croatia's involvement in the war in Bosnia&Herzegovina, is one of the few who have remained in the Government all this time.

The police commander announces that he will act "correctly, but professionally". They were very rough, vulgar and sarcastic during an eviction recently. Several activists - fighters for human rights were taken into custody by the police and ended up with their necks in casts and other severe injuries. Insults on account of sex and nationality could be heard. ("You Serbian cow"). The Croatian Minister of the Interior, Jarnjak, even announced the very next day that he would initiate criminal proceedings against those who had "actively resisted" the police.

Nevenka has a written opinion of a psychiatrist about her disturbed psychic state - she suffers from depression and attacks of mortal fear. It sounds logical, but does not help her. The physicians of the emergency service gave her an injection of a strong sedative and left. A single word of theirs could have prevented the horror that follows, but they too, are acting "correctly and professionally". The guys in blue uniforms start pulling and pushing the people towards the door. Nevenka breaks loose from the hands of her friends, dashes into the hall and pours petrol over herself. I smell petrol and hear a scream. I cannot endure it anymore and leave the apartment - without professional assistance.

As usual, a group of onlookers is gathered in front of the house. The scene resembles those from movies on Latin American, Nazi, communist dictatorships. The policemen are carrying or pushing one by one the "members of the resistance", Jelena's friends and children from school are crying and screaming, a girl looses consciousness. The ambulance arrives again. All those who have not left the apartment volunatrily, are searched, pushed into the police van and taken to the police station. Jelena, who is still in a shock, shouting and trying to break free, is also dragged downstairs. Four policemen, "correctly and professionally", shove the fifteen-year-old girl into the van and drive away. According to circumstances, the victims of eviction are usually women with children under age. Or maybe, this is not accidental at all. Men more often hold important position (such as the physicians in the same hospital who are not evicted), some of them have connections or are influential. Some of them threaten with violent resistance, in fact, there was a case of an armed incident with a fatal result.

The windows on the building are closed. Only an elderly woman is watching the whole event from her balcony, one would say with approval. In front of the house, a little to one side, a group of men is standing, one of them in the uniform of the Croatian army. Permanent observers of evictions know him well: "Novak, from the Ministry of Defence". The emptied apartments belong to this Ministry. Future tenants receive the decision on the right to move in even before the apartment has been emptied, which is completely contrary to regulations. A man disabled in the homeland war is waiting for Nevenka's apartment for over a year - colonel Novak keeps repeating. He suggests that Nevenka should have voluntarily returned to her thirty-square-metre basement flatlet, which was, by the way, occupied by a Croatian policeman already back in 1991. The faces of the soldiers are gloomy and scornful.

Some categories of Croatian citizens, such as the one Nevenka J. belongs to, the policeman in the flatlet and the disabled war veteran who is waiting for Nevenka's apartment, are ruthlessly opposing each other. An impression of the existence of a "natural" conflict of their existential interests and fundamental rights is thus created. People are hostile to one another, they hate each other and seek each other's life, without even knowing one another.

Unfortunately, colonel Novak is not the only one who implements the tactics of confronting interests of different, mostly non-priviliged groups of Croatian citizens. The Association of Croatian Disabled War Veterans announced that it will take matters into its hands "in order to defend its interests", and even executed a private eviction. President Tudjman himself suggested that they had an irrevocable right to army apartments (therefore, the right to execute evictions as well), when he recently declared that people who were "directly or indirectly connected with the aggressors on Croatia" lived in this apartments. In Croatian politics, down from the media all the way up to the political top, a strategy of producing a chain of enemies, hatred, intolerance and revengefulness has been adopted. Refugees are thus confronted with the local population and needy persons (they are queueing for humanitarian aid together). The activists for human rights, the opposition and the independent intellectuals are proclaimed to be traitors, enemies of the state and the people. And so on and so forth. They are all seized with fear, insecurity, the feeling of hopelessness and loss of confidence in the legal state. Of all the theories of conspiracy which are fashionable at present, the conspiracy of chaos and ruin operates most conspicuously. According to certain other theories, this leads to anarchy and dictatorship.

Lies, terror and a videotape. After several hours of drama, Nevenka J. with her daughter who is under age was evicted from the apartment in a Zagreb suburb, and a disabled war veteran and an army truck were waiting to move in. It was all put on videotape with a camera of the Croatian Helsinki Board for Human Rights. What for? A film of the latest eviction was shown, with correct comments and with a correct timing, only on the "independent" OTV. This is another of the illusions of Croatian democracy. The OTV, the first private television, has a very limited broadcasting range, and its owner is Tudjman's leading strategist for media policy. As material evidence of the existence of democracy and concern for human rights, when necessary, it will all be presented to representatives of European institutions and Mr. Kinkel. Evictions will go on. An illusion of peace rules over Croatia, and an illusion of democracy, an illusion of respect for human rights and an illusion of the freedom of the media. In reality, however, the bad dream repeats and continues. Once, it was the Turks who chased away the Serbs, then the Serbs chased away the Croats... in 1941 the Ustashe evicted the Jews and the Serbs, in 1945 the Communists evicted the Ustashe and other enemies of the people; in 1948 both the first and the in-a-hurry converted latter evicted the supporters of the Stalin's Information Bureau... Nowadays, tenants in the apartments of the former Yugoslav army are evicted and, finally, everybody ought to be where they belong. The Croatian general Lausic got the apartment of the Yugoslav general Raseta, President Tudjman is living in the apartment nationalized in 1945 from a Jewish lady who is still living in an old people's home in Zagreb, a disabled veteran of the Croatian homeland war has moved into the apartment of Nevenka J....

In a part of the Balkans which wished to become part of the Central if not of the Great Europe, a new traumatized generation is growing, which will remember the story of little Jelena of the times when her mother wanted to burn herself alive, when she was driven away in the police van, and when the two of them spent the night - noone knows where. In the first few days they called from apartments of their friends in the neighbourhood. Like dogs thrown out in the street by their owners when they move away, which are then seen roaming around the old neighbourhood for some time.

VESNA KESIC