ROUND TABLE

Thank you very much Ante Beljo. I would like to thank the Croatian Information Centre for allowing me to come here and participate in this very interesting conference. Since I am not British, I cannot say anything about British politicians, but allow me to start with a quotation from several media.

The key problems of our age are ethnic civil wars and ethnic nationalism. We believed that the world was moving irrevocably beyond nationalism, beyond tribalism, beyond the provisional confines of the identities describes in our passports toward the global market culture which was to be our new home. In retrospect we were whistling in the dark. Repression has returned and its name is nationalism. Here is a quote from this week’s The Economist, where the author, whoever he or she is, in the couple of pages entitled “Ethnic Cleansing, Blood and Earth” speaks with a certain degree of admiration of the past. Here is what the author says speaking of Bosnia: “But it will probably be but the palest shadow of the harmonious secular Bosnia-Herzegovina that was once, held up as a beacon of enlightened tolerance in a sea of Balkan bigotry”. You have heard these sentiments before. So it is obvious that the West sees this part of the world and the ruminants of the Soviet empire in very specific terms. The empire provided stability, provided balance, provided clarity. It was easy to write about. It was not as messy as the current reality. Now new difficult histories have to be learned, new difficult words, difficult to pronounce, floating in a sea of bigotry. Now there are new statelets, as The New Economist puts it, wanting their place in the sun.

Now with the momentous changes that have taken place in the world in the past five years, there has not been, however, a corresponding shift in the thinking of the Western world. This was very eloquently pointed out to us by several speakers at this conference particularly Doris Pack, Stevan Dedijer, and most of the speakers today have eluded to it. Why is this so? Again, many reasons may be engraved into imperialist thinking. There may be vested interests at stake of the large states. They may be yearning for a simpler world that has passed and of course there is another important element, namely, years of Soviet propaganda to which illusions were made to as early as 1946 by George Orwell. Allow me to quote a short note that Mr Luciuk and I wrote in 1989 in the Canadian newspapers about George Orwell ‘s comments in an essay called “The Prevention of Literature” where he observed that “Soviet Russia constitutes a sort of a forbidden area in the British press”. Subjects, this is our comment, such as the Ukrainian famine, the purges and the deportations of Stalin of the 1930’s, the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, and forcible repatriations of refugees after World War II had been, in his words, barred from serious consideration. And you can see that it was as if George Orwell knew what would happen to the book Nikolai Tolstoy published on the Bleiburg violence which has literally been banned from British libraries. Orwell continues saying that conflicts with a prevailing orthodoxy will always be distorted or suppressed because of what he labelled at the time “the poisonous effect of the Russian mythos”. And at that time, in 1946, Orwell asked the question whether, “A true history of our times can ever be written”. History, however, is being written, now, today, by you. Fortunately Orwell can rest quietly in his grave.

The problem that remains, of course, is how that history is to be communicated, how it is to compete in the West. I think there are three important issues here that I might mention and read to you very briefly. First and foremost, of course, is the fact that the media are a reflection of the pervading orthodoxy; indeed they are very much a part of the process that creates that pervading orthodoxy. And we know that orthodoxy simply does not favour the existence or re-examination of the problems in the newly emerging states on the topography of the modern Europe.

The second serious problem of the small emerging nations is that they simply do not have the experience or the resources or the institutions to compete with their media on a larger scale, to say nothing of what has happened to the minds of the people under communism for the past 50 years. Having lived in Lithuania for two years, I can speak with a certain degree of assurance about the serious problems people have experienced, now that they have been given freedom.

The third problem not to be ignored is the nature of the media itself. We are all aware of the fact that the media more and more now are concerned with impact rather than understanding, with conflict rather than resolution, with simplifying rather than going to the heart of the problem. I recall the days when Lithuania was in the news. Then I met many of the journalists. I was in Lithuania at the time, just prior to the declaration of independence and immediately after it. At that time, Gorbachov came to Vilnius and it struck me then very clearly with what the media was concerned - not so much the independence of Lithuania, the significance of that independence in that part of Europe and elsewhere, but the presentation of an image of David battling Goliath. David was, of course, Lithuania, and Goliath was Gorby. In the cartoons and actual reports, those were the aspects being emphasised rather than an analysis or understanding of the implications of the situation. I think what Ante Beljo is doing, what we are doing here today is extremely important because of the conveyance of the information, proper conveyance to the world at large. I think Doris Pack was extremely correct in saying that we have to move and mould public opinion. Politicians will then simply have to take their cue from the public. So what is being done is very important and I know Ante Beljo is planning another conference in the future, perhaps in the next year, and I would like to suggest concretely that some of these issues be examined, namely, how the West perceives us as a small nation under the sun, and what can be done to improve the image that the prevailing orthodoxy, as Orwell said, can be made more heterogeneous. Thank you.

Ante Beljo: Thank you Mr. Ron Vastokas. Our next speaker is Mr. Askold Krushelnycky, a journalist who was in Croatia at the very beginning of the war. He is going to give us his perception of our problems.

Askold Krushelnycky