Bulj thrown out of Sabor after Simpraga speech on Otisic
SDSS deputy Anja Simpraga accused Sinj mayor Miro Bulj in the Croatian Parliament of a campaign against the last Serbs in Otisic, and Bulj received a third warning.
A dispute over a village of about forty residents in the Dalmatian hinterland reached the Croatian Parliament (Sabor) on October 13. It touches on the position of the Serb community in Croatia and mentions Serbian Orthodox Patriarch Porfirije. Anja Simpraga, a deputy of the Independent Democratic Serb Party (SDSS), used a free-speech slot to accuse the Sinj mayor and Most deputy Miro Bulj of running a campaign against the remaining residents of Otisic near Vrlika. The exchange that followed ended with Bulj’s third warning and his removal from the chamber.
What did Simpraga say about Otisic?
Simpraga spoke at the start of the session, ahead of the government’s annual report, which Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic was due to present. She described Otisic as a village that once had more than 1,000 residents and now has barely 40, mostly elderly Serbs. Electricity reached it only in 2008.
By her count, about 300 former residents, relatives and neighbors return every summer and gather at the Church of St. Archangel Michael. She attended the village feast day for the past two years and announced she would go again next year.
She built her speech around a comparison with Gospic, which is in the public eye because of illegal waste dumps, while, as she put it, Otisic is being pushed into focus by “political waste that has been recycled countless times, and its eternal chemicals of lies and hatred.” She named Bulj as the driver of that campaign and claimed that graffiti appeared in the village after his public statements.
“He doesn’t care that Otisic woke up the very next morning with messages of hatred and death, such as the Ustasha U, ZDS or Kill the Serb.”
She closed with the line: “Otisic is not resistance to Operation Storm, Otisic is resistance to the hatred that poisons and destroys us,” alluding to the military operation of August 1995.
Bulj had earlier claimed that gatherings in Otisic were taking place which he called a “Chetnik shindig,” and that President Zoran Milanovic, Prime Minister Plenkovic and the Security and Intelligence Agency (SOA) had been informed about them.
How did it lead to the third warning and removal?
After Simpraga’s speech, Bulj asked to speak over a breach of the rules of procedure, and Milorad Pupovac of the SDSS joined the debate. He ironically commented on Bulj’s way of speaking:
“It is an obligation to speak Croatian in the Croatian Parliament. I do not know what language my colleague Bulj was speaking.”
Bulj answered immediately, and his reply included a jab at the Serbian patriarch:
“I speak the way I learned and where I was born. I am not like you, defending the Chetnik Porfirije Peric when he sings Chetnik songs and causes division in Croatia.”
For that remark Bulj received his third warning, which cost him the right to take part in that part of the parliamentary debate, and he was later removed from the hall. Reports on the debate contain no reply from him to the claim about the graffiti in the village.
The session opened with the government’s annual report, to be followed by a debate on a Social Democratic Party (SDP) proposal to vote Plenkovic out over the illegal waste dumps.
