ZAGREB, Dec 7 (Hina) - Croatian politician and writer Vlado Gotovac passed away in Rome shortly after 11 a.m. on Thursday.
ZAGREB, Dec 7 (Hina) - Croatian politician and writer Vlado Gotovac
passed away in Rome shortly after 11 a.m. on Thursday.#L#
Gotovac had been ill for a long time and was under intensive home
care in Rome. He was looked after by a doctors' team at Gemelli
hospital. In the last few days, his condition was critical.
This intellectual and humanist, who left an indelible mark on
Croatia's recent political and cultural scene, since the early
1950s had been tirelessly advocating the notion of freedom, human
rights and the moral re-examination of society.
The Croatian public will remember him primarily as a politician
atypical for Croatian circumstances, as an exceptional speaker, a
stranger to scandals.
He saw politics as a moral act, which made him a tragic figure,
because this conception has always lost to the reality of day-to-
day politics, said Zlatko Kramaric, acting president of Gotovac's
Liberal Party, one of six in the ruling coalition.
Croatian People's Party president Vesna Pusic said she did not know
to whom to extend condolences first, his family or everyone in
Croatia who felt they had the proper chance to create a normal,
respectable, democratic, European country, whose founder Gotovac
had been. An irretrievable loss, she said.
According to scholar Ivan Supek, the Gotovac death is a big loss for
Croatian culture and the whole society, an assessment shared by
President Stipe Mesic, parliamentary speaker Zlatko Tomcic, and
numerous other politicians and public figures.
Although he had been in politics for several decades, Gotovac
became a member of parliament only in 1995, as a deputy of the
Croatian Social Liberal Party, of which he had been one of the
founders, and then of the Liberal Party.
Between 1955 and his arrest in 1972, he worked as a reporter and
editor at Radio and Television Zagreb. The former communist
government sentenced him to four years in prison for his political
engagement in the early 1970s. He was denied civil rights for the
next three years. He was also denied the right to get work in state
services or publish his works, namely make public statements.
A 1977 Swedish television interview in which he reiterated his
anti-totalitarian and humanist views cost him another arrest, a
two-year prison sentence in 1982, and another four years with no
civil rights. His detention in ex-Yugoslavia's dungeons cost him a
hepatitis infection he suffered from for 15 years and whose
consequences he battled until the last days of his life.
"My struggle to help the individual and society to become free
lasted fifty-five years. And that became the centre of all my life's
efforts," Gotovac told Globus weekly in October in one of his last
interviews.
That is what Croatia remembers him for.
In his famous address "Generals, Croatia Isn't Scared!" of Aug. 30,
1991, given at the beginning of the Serb aggression on Croatia in
front of the Zagreb headquarters of ex-Yugoslavia's federal army,
Gotovac said: "If we have no arms, we have strength... our
willingness to die if we can't live as humans."
"Don't let anyone scare us! Fear not, Croats, this is our
country...!" he told Croatia's Opposition supporters in 1996.
He ran for president in 1997 as the candidate of nine parties.
During a rally in Pula, a uniformed army officer assaulted him from
the back, but Gotovac ended his address despite the injuries.
"Yes for Croatia, but not of any kind" was his favourite response to
the ruling policy of the past decade he mostly disagreed with.
He formed the Liberal Party early in 1998 and was its president
until a recent convention which proclaimed him the party's honorary
president.
Gotovac published 14 collections of poetry and seven novels since
1961. He was a member of the Croatian Writers' Association between
1956 and 1997, when he stepped out.
Gotovac was born in the southern Croatian town of Imotski on Sept.
18, 1930. He graduated from Zagreb's Grammar School and Faculty of
Philosophy.
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