Not a Fairy Tale But… Reckon with Us; Fifth Chapter, Second Part

30 Jun Not a Fairy Tale But… Reckon with Us; Fifth Chapter, Second Part

Second part of the June Monthly Chapter
Written by Dragan Markovina
Voiceover by Marija Drndić

Her footage of the fall of Vrlika, captured amidst a scene of total panic, became—to use today’s parlance—viral. Because of that, and her reporting from a besieged Dubrovnik, she became a kind of star of war journalism, which led to an absurd situation in the near future. While the horror of the artillery attacks on Dubrovnik from sea and land broke her psychologically, it also led to an irreversible realization—having been explicitly warned—that the task of HRT (Croatian Radiotelevision) was war propaganda, not the truth. This made her continued work at the station impossible. Specifically, she had submitted a report on the actual, devastating state of the city’s defense, which was never broadcast; in its place, an officially intoned segment full of falsehoods by the Mayor of Dubrovnik was aired instead.

She barely managed to escape Dubrovnik thanks to the editor-in-chief of Slobodna Dalmacija, fleeing on one of the small private speedboats used by those maintaining a link with the blockaded city—all through dangerous winds and surrounded by Yugoslav Navy gunboats. In Metković, they picked up Boris Dežulović, who was returning from a perilous journey to Vukovar, from where he had sent his iconic reportage just before the city’s fall. After the censorship in Dubrovnik, her work at the television station was effectively blocked, and she was literally ostracized by her colleagues. This manifested as total isolation; she was given no journalistic assignments, yet—by her logical assumption—they did not dare fire her because she had made a name for herself reporting from dangerous frontlines and had been physically assaulted by a Serbian nationalist. Thus, Heni continued to receive a salary for another year and a half while doing nothing, in an obvious attempt to wear her down. The peak of this ostracism came after she won the “Journalist of the Year” award for her war reporting, after which the Split bureau—more than twenty colleagues—signed a letter concluding that she did not deserve the award.

When we spoke about this, I asked her if they were truly all such opportunists who had switched overnight from being Party journalists to journalists of the new regime. She replied that the exceptions could be counted on the fingers of one hand—excluding, of course, those who had already been banned from working or entering the building. It wasn’t that the situation at HRT hadn’t been clear to her earlier; in 1991, she had sent footage to the international exchange showing a rampaging crowd strangling a JNA recruit during a protest in front of the JNA headquarters in Split—where a young soldier, Saško Gešovski, was killed—triggering the fury of her editor-in-chief. When she finally requested to terminate her employment contract, the paperwork was ready within half an hour.

Leaving HRT and being unable to work professionally opened a chapter of life under constant pressure and threats, which exploded the moment she was finally able to do her job professionally again. Among other curiosities from her television days is the fact that, while covering the negotiations between the republic presidents at Tito’s villa in Split, she had the chance to meet Slobodan Milošević and Franjo Tuđman. She concluded that Tuđman was completely oblivious to the actual situation in Knin and the Dalmatian hinterland, while Milošević was a pathological liar capable of calmly denying documented facts right into the camera.

A new professional life began at Feral Tribune, the iconic weekly that started as an independent publication on June 1, 1993, following a state-crushed strike at Slobodna Dalmacija. Contrary to the mystifications and myths that always highlighted the key role of Feral’s creative trio—Ivančić, Lucić, and Dežulović, embodied in the satirical acronym ‘Viva Ludež’—Heni emphasized several times that, from Feral’s inception, a small group of excellent journalists participated equally alongside the three of them. She believed in Feral’s success from the start, however insane it seemed at the time. Unlike her departure from HRT, which she does not regret at all, the shutting down of Feral, along with the media gossip that followed, is something that struck her deeply. The transition from television to print was no problem for her; she immediately began conducting major political and cultural interviews, staying with that format until she became editor-in-chief. Then, in addition to interviews and editorials, she took on the burden of dealing with threats, lawsuits, and the grueling daily work of assembling the paper. The Feral Tribune under Heni Erceg’s ten-year leadership was significantly different from its beginnings—more seriously profiled, moving beyond the emphasis on satire. For this reason, during her tenure as editor-in-chief, Feral Tribune was realistically at its best. This, of course, did not help it survive. Regarding the eternal debate that Feral failed because it couldn’t adapt to the post-Tuđman era, Heni debunked this theory, noting that many were afraid—and even more were unwilling—to advertise in Feral. Simultaneously, printing costs soared, politically motivated lawsuits piled up, and they had no inclination to transition into a web portal format. Unwilling to fire employees, they collectively reduced salaries. When things neared the end, she had no qualms about extracting some funds from then-Prime Minister Ivo Sanader to save Feral—which didn’t stop her from provocatively putting him on the very next cover.

Ultimately, the paper was shut down after a serious buyout offer was rejected because it required a change in editorial policy.

Since then, Heni has been writing columns for the Ljubljana-based Mladina, a weekly that strongly echoes the Feral story. When asked if she was surprised by receiving the “Otokar Keršovani” Lifetime Achievement Award from the Croatian Journalists’ Association, she did not hide her surprise, nor the fact that she was pleased, despite her reluctance for public appearances.

Yet, perhaps the most interesting, saddest, and most beautiful part of our conversation concerned her relationship with Split, living with threats, and her marriage to Viktor Ivančić. When asked if she planned to write an autobiography, she laconically replied that the real idea would be to write Viktor’s biography, through which the story of Feral would also be told. That, of course, requires will and time. Regarding her relationship with Split and the threats she lives with—the city she never actually left, despite having considered it in the worst moments—Heni was completely open. She spoke of how the threats and street harassment, which never truly ceased, caused a fear of people and of moving through the city, often triggering panic attacks. Over time, and thanks to Viktor’s presence, she managed to cope to some extent. But she still avoids large gatherings and limits her movement to a very narrow area between Bačvice and the Riva. The peak of that isolation was visible through one of the most powerful editorials she ever wrote, on the occasion of the dark and massive rally in support of war criminal Mirko Norac on the Split Riva.

The story of Heni Erceg, her career, and her fate, is thus a story of the legacy of our Partisan revolution, of missed and realized professional dreams, of the power of love, of the patriarchy and fascism in which we constantly live, of unceasing violence, of a fundamental loneliness, but also of perseverance on the path of resistance and belief in one’s own work. Beyond all this, the saddest part is that Heni Erceg’s work has somehow always remained in the shadow of the Feral trio on one hand, and the fact that Split was far from the national spotlight on the other. Consequently, her work and her solitary position as a woman editing a revolutionary weekly—surrounded by violence in a city where that violence was perhaps most pronounced—always attracted less attention than the resistance of women in larger centers, who were often more formally or informally united. This, of course, says nothing negative about them or their work, as they too were exposed and attacked from all sides. But it speaks to how difficult it was to be in Heni Erceg’s shoes. And yet, it is certain she would do it all exactly the same way again.