published in: TRANSITIONS Vol 5, No. 10, October 1998

Five Years of Irreverence

The story of a bold and beleaguered Croatian weekly By Pero Jurisin

Split--Take a shot of razor-sharp satire, mix in some take-no-prisoners commentary, add a dash of investigative reporting, and you have the formula for what has been Croatia's most controversial newspaper for five years, the Feral Tribune. Long a thorn in the government's side, Feral's fearless editors are routinely sued by politicians and other public figures. The lawsuits against them have made them as famous--both at home and abroad--as their journalism.

Feral has made waves over the years with words and pictures that make some people squirm and others praise the weekly as a courageous, independent voice challenging the government of President Franjo Tudjman. The paper takes on sensitive subjects such as corruption, nationalism, war crimes, and social problems. Its article last year on a Croatian soldier who confessed to murdering 72 people during the war shook the country--and also brought death threats to Feral editor Viktor Ivancic and his staff. Feral's giant headlines and signature photomontages deliver bodacious, often brutal satire. Politicians in various compromising positions, a pregnant pope--everyone is fair game. Tudjman is a favorite target--on one cover appearing as a piranha, in another literally in bed with his Yugoslav and Bosnian counterparts, Alija Izetbegovic and Slobodan Milosevic. In another trick photo, Milosevic morphs into Adolf Hitler. Readers say they appreciate the paper's independence and its support of democratic values. "With its devastating critique of an autocratic regime, Feral Tribune has significantly--and in certain aspects even decisively--prevented the struggle for media freedom and painstaking democratization of [Croatian] society from slipping into irrelevance in the long run," says Stojan Obradovic, editor in chief of the Stina news agency.

Nikola Viskovic, professor at the law faculty in Split, calls the paper "the only beacon of political and ethical truths amid this whole [Balkan] tragedy." Furio Radin, representative of the Italian minority in Croatia's parliament, praises its "healing intolerance of any totalitarianism. It expresses an exceptionally high degree of solidarity with the weak and the different, among which I also count national minorities."

Jagoda Vukusic, president of the Croatian Journalists' Association, says, "If it didn't exist, somebody should invent it." And fiction writer Predrag Raos calls it "a kooky, Mediterranean paper that shatters stupidities and concrete in people's heads."

Feral's journalistic work has received numerous international honors--including the International Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Gold Pen of Freedom Award from the World Association of Newspapers--while at home it is often rewarded with lawsuits. About 60 court actions are pending against the newspaper and its editors, about 15 on criminal charges. They seek a total of 15 million kuna (about $2.4 million).

SHARP FROM THE START

The first issue--initially biweekly--hit the newsstands on 1 June, 1993. But Feral's history dates back to ten years earlier, when it appeared as part of the Split weekly Nedjeljna Dalmacija. Its "father" was journalist and satirist Djermano Senjanovic, still a member of Feral's team today. Senjanovic's Feral grew out of Split's rich satirical tradition, epitomized by the late Miljenko Smoje--who himself soon joined Feral. Appearing on the last page of Nedjeljna Dalmacija, Feral quickly made a name for itself as a sharp social chronicle. But despite the support Senjanovic had inside the newsroom, Feral was under political pressure. Four months and 16 issues later, it was temporarily canceled.

A year later, Viktor Ivancic and Velimir Marinkovic, students at the electrical engineering college in Split, revived the Feral idea. As editors of the college's student paper, they had received Yugoslavia's most prestigious socialist youth award (which did not reflect any ideological bent and was given to creative young scientists, athletes, journalists, musicians, and artists).

Ivancic's and Marinkovic's Feral was launched on 28 October 1984, again in the back of Nedjeljna Dalmacija. The pair's basic orientation was evident: merciless ridiculing of the government, non-recognition of authority, and above all collectivity. In January 1985, the ideological commission of the central committee of Croatia's Communist party started labeling Feral's satire counterrevolutionary.

At the end of 1985, Ivancic began a column that gained a cult following, "The Notebook of Robi K. from Classroom IIa," in which he commented on current events through the prism of a ten-year-old boy. Robi K. was the star of Feral's first trick photograph, in connection with a story about a boy who had someone else's organ placed in his body by mistake at the Split hospital.

In mid-1986 Feral was charged with pornography for the first time. According to the prosecution, Feral had insulted the socio-political reality with photographs showing sexual activity between a man and a woman in three positions, with which Feral explained the position of the working class. The paper was eventually acquitted, and in March 1988 a district court rejected the prosecution's appeal.

(Feral has the distinction of being the first Croatian newspaper to be found guilty of promoting pornography, after publishing a front-page photo montage last year featuring Tomislav Mercep--a former ruling party member frequently linked to war crimes--when he established his own political party. Mercep's head was superimposed on the body of a muscular man urinating, with a headline suggesting Mercep "pissed off" the Croatian Democratic Union. Feral is appealing the fine it earned for that conviction, as well as several lawsuits filed by Mercep himself.)

In November 1989, Feral became Feral Tribune (though still popularly referred to as Feral), run by--as it still says on its masthead--"Croatian anarchists, protestants, and heretics (dear to God and not despised by the devil either)." Feral represented a rebellious generation, invoking values by then eroded by the political oligarchy. And it used a new form of expression, influenced by rock'n'roll, film, and comic strips. Nedjeljna Dalmacija was an influential high-circulation weekly, with a liberal orientation. Feral's contribution to this was significant. This was also a time of media freedom, which journalists refer to today as the golden era of their profession. Feral's relationship with the communist authorities was somewhat milder than the one with current government leaders, but still tempestuous. The editors today note that the authorities of that period were not particularly tolerant--they simply had limited resources. "At the end of the 1980s, the communists found themselves in ideological and systemic chaos and were absolutely incapable of doing anything properly, including repression," says Ivancic.

OUTSTANDING WAR REPORTING

Feral editors say Yugoslavia's Communists "gave up on them" when Croatia's Supreme Court ruled in October 1988 that though Feral's texts are "in essence vulgar and primitive, it does not necessarily follow that they are publishing untrue information." Still, the paper remained under pressure. In the turbulent late 1980s, the positions and opinions in all the newspapers became more polarized. This process became more evident after April 1990, or more precisely, after the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) had won the elections. This is how the separation came about between the Feral team and Nedjeljna Dalmacija, after their editor began imposing his pro-HDZ leanings on their work. And when the Robi K. column was interfered with on 30 September 1990, Feral's editors resigned and went over to Slobodna Dalmacija. Ivancic had already been working at the Split daily, while Predrag Lucic and Boris Dezulovic--who became Ivancic's partners after Marinkovic left journalism--were employees of Nedjeljna Dalmacija. The three edited Feral in their free time.

They proved to be top war reporters as well. They were the first Croatian journalists to enter the surrounded Sarajevo and the demolished Vukovar and were Slobodna Dalmacija's main war correspondents. For their work, they were rewarded with accusations by the government and pro-government media of Yugoslav favoritism and anti-Croat tendencies. But others praised the Feral crew. In February 1992 Feral received its first journalistic recognition, the Veselko Tenzera prize, which was awarded by the respected Zagreb weekly Danas.

One of Feral's major headaches was Drago Krpina, today the spokesman of HDZ and then the government representative for Dalmatia. Krpina called the Feral team monstrous, after its publication of a 1992 photomontage showing Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Tudjman as schoolboys in a class picture. State Prosecutor Vladimir Seks--the current deputy speaker of parliament--initiated a court process. However, in an attempt to prosecute the Feral crew in the name of the president, he neglected to obtain the president's consent. In addition, the president himself said he never saw that issue of Feral.

Four years later, Tudjman would be more engaged. In April 1996, Feral published "Bones in a Mixer." The story, about Tudjman's idea to bury the remains of fascist Ustashe soldiers alongside their victims at the Jasenovac concentration camp, compared his efforts to reconcile with the past with those of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. For the Franco comparison, as well as the accompanying photomontage, Tudjman launched a lawsuit that drags on until today. The article, written by Marinko Culic (he and Ivancic are co-defendants) explained what Tudjman meant when he proposed that the bones of the Ustashe should be buried in Jasenovac--where tens of thousands of Serbs, Jews, Roma, and Croats were murdered--as a symbol of "national reconciliation." Tudjman said he got the idea from Franco's monument of reconciliation between Spain's Republicans and Falangists.

The lawsuit was the first under a new procedure that allows the public prosecutor to sue on behalf of the president or four other top government figures if they feel they have been offended. Municipal Court Judge Marin Mrcala acquitted the journalists, but the prosecution appealed, and the lawsuit drags on. If convicted, the journalists could be sentenced to up to a year in prison. The case was set to continue on 28 September of this year. Weary of the process, Ivancic and Culic did not attend the last hearing and face being forced by police to attend the one in September.

UNDER PRESSURE

Feral's move to stand on its own came after the government intervened in Slobodna Dalmacija's privatization process in October 1992, installing a pro-government board of directors. This prompted a failed strike, many staff departures, and the end of Slobodna Dalmacija's independence. After sending a flyer as an invitation to create a new, independent Feral, the Feral crew and a group of journalists from Slobodna Dalmacija--among them Zoran Erceg, present Feral director; journalist Jelena Lovric; and Martin Maraca, Slobodna Dalmacija's former director--launched the stand-alone Feral on 1 June 1993.

Feral entered the media market at an inopportune time. The country was at war, censorship was in effect, and the standard of living was so low that even established newspapers were hurting. Still, the paper came out with 32 pages and two sections--the longer "serious" part and a shorter, satirical part. In its fourth issue, Feral ran an article about the Croatian Party of Rights that prompted party official Ante Djapic--today its president--to sue, making him the first of a long list of politicians to take the new Feral to court.

Ivancic says the lawsuits aim to create a "strategy of financial destruction of independent papers, which relies on insolent manipulation of the legal system." He stresses that the government used every possible kind of pressure against Feral. For example, in December 1993, Ivancic received military mobilization papers--the only top editor in Croatia called to war by his country.

On 1 August 1994, Feral also became the only newspaper assigned a tax that until then had been reserved for pornographic publications. The minister of culture and education, Vesna Girardi (herself a frequent Feral target), explained that the tax was placed on the paper for "continuous attacks" on the government. In April 1995, the Constitutional Court declared the tax unconstitutional. Croatia wanted to be accepted into the Council of Europe, and the tax had been one of the examples of the council's criticism of the country's treatment of the media. (In November 1996, as Foreign Minister Mate Granic signed the Council of Europe membership agreement, he was beseiged with leaflets with Feral covers and Reporters sans frontiers messages on them about the strangling of freedom in Croatia.)

In addition to writing about the war in Bosnia without a nationalistic twist, Feral covered alleged crimes related to 1995's "Operation Storm," which returned a key rebel Serb-held area to the authority of Zagreb. The pressure on the paper increased, as did police attention; inspectors paid visits to the editors' neighbors and also held "informational talks" with Feral staff.

Feral is not the lone target of such tactics. The ruling party and those close to it also target other independent publications, such as the successful weeklies Nacional and Globus. Vesna Alaburic, one of Feral's attorneys, estimates that about 100 lawsuits are pending against Globus, and 80 against Nacional, a third to half of them criminal charges. While court dates in cases against journalists are usually set quickly, a lawsuit Feral itself filed last year against the Slobodna Dalmacija distribution company for an estimated $473,600, which the distribution duopoly owes Feral from sales of the paper in Slobodna Dalmacija kiosks, no court date has been set.

In an interview with the Financial Times in May 1996, Tudjman called the Feral team "ideologues of the Yugoslav communist regime, children of Yugoslav People's Army officers, and offspring of mixed Serbian marriages." In a war-scarred country fomenting hatreds against everything connected to the former Yugoslav state, the Yugoslav army, and Serbs, this was an open call to lynching.

Nonetheless, the paper's popularity and credibility has grown, as has its circulation--from about 25,000 in 1993 to its current press run of 60,000, with 45,000 copies sold. About 40,000 are sold in Croatia and 5,000 in neighboring Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Yugoslavia, Germany, and other European countries. Feral's circulation figures are quite healthy by Croatian news magazine standards--third behind Globus and Nacional weeklies--but most advertisers remain afraid of doing business with the paper. Despite the limited advertising revenues and the money owed Feral by Slobodna Dalmacija, the newspaper manages to employ 30 people in its office in the coastal city of Split. It has numerous correspondents throughout Croatia and in neighboring countries, as well as its own publishing business.

CHARGES OF CLOSED-MINDEDNESS

The paper has received major grants through the years from international foundations, which recognized that Feral needed help to survive being shut out of Croatia's small advertising market and saw its importance as a highly independent publication in Croatia's repressive media landscape. The international community also actively monitors Feral's legal problems, and press-freedom activists have attended court proceedings.

Tomislav Jakic, media coordinator at Open Society Institute-Croatia, says he believes public opinion about Feral is changing. "I know personally people who a few years ago accused Feral of being an 'enemy media' of the Croatian state who now are regular readers."

However, some say Feral's formula is becoming too predictable ("In its unconventionality it has at times become a bit conventional," says Raos), while some critics say its views do not allow much room for other points of view.

"It is closed to opinions that are different from those it supports, and in that aspect it lacks the freedom its top people have always been advocating, " says Ivica Bonkovic, Nedjeljna Dalmacija's executive editor. Branko Tudjen, editor of the government-controlled Vecernji list, says it "exclusively advocates the opposition views regarding the current Croatian government and is markedly left-oriented." Reader Slaven Relja praises Feral for its outspokenness but says "it would be much better and more objective ... if it didn't find its 'truth' only on one side and constantly hammer on the negative."

A Feral project earlier this year, a monthly called Feral Music, highlighted the state of Feral's relations with the Catholic Church. A Feral Music billboard featured a photograph of a nun playing electric guitar. An avalanche of attacks followed, including an attack by Cardinal Franjo Kuharic. The church had earlier expressed anger at Feral over its trick photograph of a pregnant pope, as well as one of him smoking marijuana. Feral says it does not spare any religious denomination. Regarding the Catholic Church, Feral's editors believe it failed during critical moments in recent history, for example not being clear enough about its position on war crimes, especially on the Croatian side. Despite this turbulent relationship, Feral regularly features articles by Christian intellectuals.

The government's stance on war crimes--supported by the view of Supreme Court Chief Justice Milan Vukovic that Croats could not have committed war crimes because they were defending themselves--made a September 1997 story Feral published the most controversial and significant in Croatia's eight years of independence. When the harrowing account of Miro Bajramovic, member of a paramilitary unit under Interior Ministry command, detailed the unit's slaughter of civilians--mostly ethnic Serbs--he forced Croatia to begin a painful examination of its role in the war (see Transitions, November 1997).

Ivancic recently became Feral's executive editor, so that new Editor in Chief Heni Erceg can take a share of the court appearances on behalf of the paper. Feral lawyer Alaburic says the astronomical numbers of lawsuits place great strain on independent journalists, with Ivancic becoming a kind of symbol of this surreal situation. The Croatian Journalists' Association plans to launch a campaign for reforming the penal code, but parliamentary support for such a move seems unlikely.

Ivancic and his colleagues say they are quite aware that Feral often serves as an alibi for the government--as alleged proof of Croatia's media freedom. They believe that 90 percent of the media infrastructure is under direct control of the ruling party.

"A rigid legal system whose goal is to criminalize journalism as a profession is in effect, while the type of monopoly that exists in the printing and distribution of newspapers is inconceivable in the civilized world," says Ivancic. "Thus, as long as Tudjman and HDZ do not end up on the scrap heap of history, there will not be any significant improvements."

Pero Jurisin is a freelance writer based in Split.

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