“If there is anyone offended, if some innocent people, victims, their families are offended, it was not me who has offended them, they have been offended by those who trade in their suffering, that is what my article is about,” Dežulović said on Wednesday morning in an interview with the N1 broadcaster, which published his column on its website.
The journalist also commented on reactions to his column by the Homeland Movement party and the Ministry of War Veterans, which claimed that with his article Dežulović “is trying to degrade all victims of Vukovar and the Homeland War.”
The journalist said that he did not intend to apologise over his column and that its point, which he said many did not get, was to speak up about the “cheap, thieving trade in the sacrifice of Vukovar.”
“I wrote about that cheap, thieving trade in the horrible sacrifice of Vukovar. I know about that sacrifice much better than many who today are outraged, because I was there. They don’t need to tell me what Vukovar is and how it used to be. I know it, I saw it,” he said.
Dežulović said that he used a swear word in his text on behalf of the city and considered it his right because he was in Vukovar when the city was falling and because he knew what it had been and what it was today.
He also commented on the fact about which he wrote in his column, namely an estimate by the national statistical office that 5,500 Vukovar residents left the city in the past ten years.
“And the government has invested billions of kuna in the city. What has it invested in? In what kind of city?” Dežulović wondered, adding that one had invested in an ossuary city, a city for the dead because “Vukovar is not a city for the living nor was it planned to be a city for the living.”
“It was planned to be a city serving as an eternal warning, a measure of patriotism for the rest of us. It is not a city for its residents and those who can admit it, and the 5,500 who have left, are aware of that. You should ask them why they have left, they surely have not done it because several billion kuna was invested well in Vukovar, to make their life better,” he added.
Dežulović’s article was strongly condemned by Vukovar Mayor Ivan Penava, the HDZ party branch in Vukovar-Srijem County, and the HVIDRA association of disabled war veterans, which asked the competent institutions to state if there were elements of criminal liability in Dežulović’s articles.
MP Bojan Glavašević of the Green-Left Coalition sided with Dežulović on Wednesday, saying he, too, has been warning for years that Vukovar has been sacralised instead of being a town for the living because some politicians parasitise on it.
