Victory for Karamarko against Nacional.
HDZ President and Deputy Prime Minister Tomislav Karamarko has won the case at the Zagreb Municipal Civil Court against the Nacional weekly which has to pay him 70,000 kuna because it has published an interview with Josip Manolić in which Manolić stated that Karamarko used to work for UDBA, former Yugoslav secret police. Nacional also has to remove the controversial interview from its website and publish the entire verdict, reports Index.hr on January 29, 2016.
Karamarko’s attorney Veljko Miljević said they would appeal the verdict because they considered the amount awarded to be too small. Neither Karamarko nor the editor of Nacional Berislav Jelinić were present at the court.
In addition to Nacional, Karamarko also sued for defamation Josip Manolić himself. However, the trial which began on 20 January at the Municipal Criminal Court was referred to the conciliation council which must make a decision within three months.
The lawsuit against Nacional followed the interview published on 2 June last year in which Manolić said that the secret police caught Karamarko in some petty crime and that he was then blackmailed to work for them. After the article was published, Karamarko filed lawsuits against Nacional, Manolić and Ante Barišić, professor at the Faculty of Political Sciences, who had confirmed the claims in an interview.
After Karamarko filed a lawsuit for defamation, Manolić said that the trial was “the best way to establish the truth”. Karamarko, in turn, claims that Manolić lied “due to political motives and pre-election purposes”. He also said that some of the former employees of the secret service who had investigated him were ready to testify in court that Manolić’s charges against him were false, and that he was not an associate of the former Yugoslav secret service, but was instead a victim. He added that all his life he had openly promoted the pro-European and anti-totalitarian policies and that Manolić way trying to discredit him because of his support for the prosecution of perpetrators of communist crimes.
Manolić was one of the founders of HDZ and one of Croatian President Franjo Tuđman’s closest associates. However, immediately after the World War II he held high positions in the Secretariat of Internal Affairs of the former People’s Republic of Croatia and the secret service. In 1992, as Croatian Prime Minister, he was Karamarko’s boss and appointed him as his chief of staff.
Nacional journalist Orhideja Gaura pointed out that the disputed interview with Manolić was authorized by him and that the in interviews journalists do not need to seek confirmation of statements by the other side. “This is a message to all media – be careful what you do, be careful what you publish, be careful with whom you talk to”, said Gaura.
