Zadar – Croatia, the War, and the Future

You Go Girls – Croatia’s First Women Run Brewery

March 8, 2016 by inavukic 49 Comments

From Left: Ana Teskera
and Maja Sepetavec

I choose this story to mark the 2016 International Women’s Day – 8 March 2016.
It’s a story of courage, determination and enthusiasm to achieve in a country where the economy yields large unemployment figures that point to a bleak personal and community future, young people leaving the country in search for jobs elsewhere… Well I think Ana and Maja from the beautiful Zadar in Croatia are just fantastic!

Zadar, Croatia
Europe’s best destination 2016

These two brewers in Croatia have created Croatia’s first women-run co-operative brewery, aiming to produce delicious, natural beer (“Blond”/reportedly comparable to American Pale Ale however its secret ingredient makes it so much tastier) while supporting their local community – in the coastal Zadar area! And what a hit it promises to be – it’s in this area that lots beer gets drunk in summer with great music festivals and famous dance parties that attract hundreds of thousands of young people from all over the world. So can’t go wrong – right? Well almost! They just need a little more money to help set up fully so they have decided to raise Start-up funding through the well tested and tried Crowdfunding online. After perfecting their recipe and recruiting new members, the next step was to make a deal with another local brewer to create the mutual brewery itself. They launched a crowdfunding appeal, story raising the target of US$8,000 in just seven days and have extended that target to US13,000, which is making solid headway to achievement. The money will be used to buy two 1000 litre fermenters, bottles, labels and cases.

Ana and Maja
thank the donors of startup funds
through crowdfunding
“this much” as 40% goal reached
PHOTO: Facebook

They’ve now almost reached 80% mark of their extended fundraising goal so your help is appreciated I am sure if you are so kindly inclined and I trust many are.

BRLOG Beer
cooperative timeline
“Plavusa means Blond 🙂
Photo: Facebook

Ana Teskera and Maja Sepetavec, from Zadar on the Dalmatian coast, run BRLOG: a craft beer brewery that started off in their garages and balconies, and is expanding rapidly.
Their online crowdfunding promotion says that they chose to start the business as a cooperative because “a cooperative is a way to transform the talents of two women with brewing skills into an inclusive, organic group of people who can construct, program, book-keep, write business plans, and create..
This is how we want to change the world. Individually we are little, working together in cohesion, we are a force of varied and crafty skills. If a group of people from Zadar can do it, the world can too.”

Ana and Maja of BRLOG beer Croatia
give talks on cooperatives
Photo: Facebook

Zadar, like all Croatian coast, thrives through summer months but as the weather cools and tourists return to their home countries, Zadar needs its own enterprises to keep it vibrant and strong. And their cooperative will certainly contribute to that with new jobs and a tasty beer to boot. As well as producing the beer, Ana Teskera and Maja Sepetavec believe the BRLOG helps the town.
Ana and Maja consider that the cooperative will enrich the local community in the way they know best – through production. They are a beer brewery startup and a social enterprise. Indeed, community funding via crowdfunding is likely to give to that society a boost in courage and will to keep creating new jobs in other industries right there where they live, not just startup funds for one cooperative.

Ana and Maja and
BRLOG beer fridge

“We are two women who brew our own beer. Not only for the taste, but for the sheer pleasure of making it,” they say. “From our brewing hobby came an idea, and from that idea – Croatia’s first co-operative craft brewery.”
The pair say working co-operatively has allowed them to be greater than the sum of their parts, and build “an organic group of people who can construct […] book-keep, write business plans, and create”.
Beginning as a pair, there are now ten other members involved in the co-operative.
“Individually we are little, working together in cohesion, we are a force of varied and crafts skills. If a group of people from Zadar can do it, the world can too,” reports James Sullivan of Cooperative News.

The humble beginnings
of BRLOG beer brewing
Photo: Facebook

The blond ale they produce is free from preservatives, unpasteurised, and made up of four different hops and three varieties of malt.
To help tempt more backers for the project, the two women also offer a service known as ‘kegerator’ – transforming old fridges into beer taps, providing a case of their beer and installing the newly kitted-out fridge in people’s houses.

And now that
special ingredient that goes
into BRLOG beer and only
known to Ana and Maja
Photo:Facebook

The two women say that until recent times, the process of brewing beer has been considered divinely guided, and the domain of women. Only more recently, since brewing became commercialised, did it become male-dominated. They’re aiming to redress that balance.
“Craft beer is a product somebody personally stands behind, a product that can only be made when the makers show persistence, hard work, diligence, courage and friendship,” they say. “In a word: BRLOG!” Things that happen in a DEN (BRLOG in Croatian)!
And I say congratulations young ladies and happy International Women’s Day! Ina Vukic, Prof. (Zgb); B.A., M.A.Ps. (Syd)

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Ana Teskera, BRLOG beer, Croatia, Croatian beer cooperative, International Women's Day, Maja Sepetavec, Zadar

Croatia: oppression of religious freedom stemmed from bigotry of Jewish filmmaker’s tantrum

October 3, 2012 by inavukic 27 Comments

Maribor school excursion flyer Photo: Mario Profaca

A producer on Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, Croatian born Branko Lustig, was boycotted in Croatia after telling Zadar primary school children (of Catholic faith who also have Religion as part of school education curriculum) – God doesn’t exist. A Minister in the current Croatian government, swiftly picked up on this boycott with subtle but oppressive and calculated denial of religious freedom that would ultimately benefit the cause of taking the focus away from Communist crimes (WWII and throughout the duration of Former Yugoslavia) and mass murders and ethnic cleansing perpetrated by Serbs against Croatian people between 1991 and August 1995.

On Wednesday 26 September, as part of “Modern Jewish Film Festival Zagreb”, Lustig appeared in the coastal city of Zadar to show to primary school children his film “The Last Flight of Petr Ginz” ( Petr Ginz was a Czechoslovak boy of partial Jewish background who was deported to the Terezín concentration camp during the Holocaust. He died at the age of sixteen when he was transferred to Auschwitz concentration camp and gassed).

Prior to showing the film, Lustig delivered a lecture to the seventh and eighth graders during which he said: “God does not exist for me, I do not believe in God. If God existed he would not have allowed the Holocaust to occur, the horrible torture and murders of Jews in Nazi camps, as in Auschwitz camp where I ended up at the age of 11. He wouldn’t have allowed the Srebrenica massacres during the recent war…”

Lustig’s words shocked the school children, and their parents. After all, as Catholics, as Christians, they have been taught to accept God’s will without rebuke, without denying His existence, no matter how harsh His will may at times fall.

Then Lustig told these school children that the film blames the Christian church for the Wars of the Crusaders and that if schools don’t teach their pupils that there were in history Crusader Wars then these schools are very bad schools.

Lustig’s final message to Zadar’s school children that there mustn’t be hatred and divisions between them seems to have, justifiably, fallen on deaf ears or considered bigoted as on Thursday 27 September, in Knin (the town cleansed of Croatians during Serb aggression against Croatia in the early 1990’s), school children boycotted his appearance and the showing of the same film.

Well, Lustig threw a doozy of a tantrum regarding the boycotting of his film in Knin. He expressed profound disappointment and accused, seemingly without any evidence whatsoever, the Principal of Knin’s school of telling his pupils not to attend. Croatian media picked up swiftly; scandal of big proportions erupted as some paddled and wielded their evil tongues in the direction of WWII persecution of Jews by some parts of Croatian population. At the same time parents of school children in Knin were heard, and reported by the media, saying words to this effect: I don’t want my children hearing this blasphemy that occurred in Lustig’s lecture in Zadar.

Lustig, in his bitterness and wounded pride of an Oscar winner, went so far as saying “if in my country I cannot say what I think and feel then fuck democracy.”

To this I would normally say “Hoorah! Bravo, Lustig!” But I cannot; I must not because he does not in this case deserve it!

Lustig gives himself the right to preach and practice democracy and yet denies the same to the Christian children and families who refused to hear his offences against their God.

Also, politically wired undercurrents swelled in this whole affair and there were those who associated the Knin’s school children’s film boycott with the World War II Ustashi collaboration with Nazi Germany. Suggesting that roots of antisemitism are still crawling about Croatia in the form of President Ivo Josipovic’s metaphoric “Ustashi snake”.

The Croatian government did not lift a finger in the defense of religious freedom of their citizens in this whole affair. In fact, oppression and fear mongering became the order of the day, as journalist Mario Profaca writes on Dnevno.hr portal:

“Caught at the very dawn of 2^nd October 2012, in the net of Marija Gerbec Njavro’s Croatian Radio First Program, who bashed fear into their bones with her interview with Ivo Goldstein, Davor Gjenero and the minister for sciences, education and sport, Zeljko Jovanovic, especially as the Minister repeated his assessment that the Knin boycott of Branko Lustig’s film was a ‘second holocaust’, the parents of fourth grade High School children from Zagreb took their children to the bus terminal in silence …

From there, buses took their children, at their own cost, to a compulsory ‘field lesson’ to Maribor where they will visit the Jewish Square and the synagogue. That excursion costs 205 Kunas per person, including health insurance for eventual ‘accidents within Croatia’, and they have insurance beyond Croatia’s borders if they’ve paid an extra 30 Kunas per person.

Parents’ response is totally understandable, given that a boycott of this excursion would be marked as absence from (field) school lessons, and in line with the already known opinion of minister for sciences, education and sport, Zeljko Jovanovic, for Jews this would be – a third Holocaust.”

The politically and anti-democratically calculated content of this school excursion to Maribor shocks even more when we realise that it does not include a visit to Tezno, a suburb of Maribor where a mass grave from Communist crimes is! The mass grave holds the remains of more than 15,000 Croatian innocent people and Home Guards who perished there in the post WWII Communist purges. In their multitudes mass graves of Communist crimes, across the territory of Former Yugoslavia, compared by population magnitude, put the Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime crimes to minor categories; and Tezno mass grave twice the size of Srebrenica 1995!

On his Facebook page Mario Profaca also comments on the Croatian Radio Program episode, referred to above, that “Ivo Goldstein was embittered by the Knin boycott of Lustig’s film who said that watching the film ‘would be an opportunity for the children to learn something about their own history, not only the one from 1941 to 1945 but also the one from 1991 to 1995’.

With that, ‘historian’ Ivo Goldstein has scandalously drawn an analogy between the WWII Holocaust of Jews with the Serbs in the so-called Serb Republic of Krajina during Croatia’s Homeland War.”

Giving a just dessert to the swept-and-mesmerised-by-left-winds journalists of Slobodna Dalmacija newspaper, who in their write-ups on Lustig’s “Godless” existence ask when one should reveal to Croatian children that God doesn’t exist, Dnevno.hr journalist Zvonimir Hodak skilfully extricates a sobering thought:

“If it’s normal for Lustig to force his atheistic views upon children, why would it be abnormal for the Catholic majority in Croatia comprising of 85% of people to react to that”.

The fact that Goldstein thrust his twisted, anti-Croatian, pro-Communist finger into this twisted pie which accompanied Lustig’s film doesn’t surprise me at all. It just saddens me for the fact that it suggests justice for victims of Communist crimes is still far, far away. I know, everyone knows, that Goldstein justifies Communist crimes and sees them as acceptable ways of dealing with WWII woes and foes regardless of the fact that just like Jews, millions of innocent men, women and children were exterminated (by the Communists). Judging from his book “A History”, where Goldstein talks of Serb revenge upon Croatians and Muslims for Serbs perished in the Holocaust, it’s easy to see that his justification of mass murders committed by Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina during 1990’s could be viewed (without due condemnation?) as “Serbian revenge for the killings of Serb during WWII”. The fact that Serbs attacked and brutally murdered Croatians and Muslims during 1990’s because they did not want democratic regimes splitting Yugoslavia, the fact that they tried to murder in its bud the democracy that feeds him, means nothing to him.

Not OK. Not acceptable. Not Just. Not humane.

With all respect to Lustig’s film and its message, the humane world must see that Knin boycott of the film was, as journalist Miro Matesic from Dnevno.hr says, simply the exercise of choice that democracy guarantees, or should guarantee. No more, no less. Ina Vukic, Prof. (Zgb); B.A., M.A.Ps. (Syd)

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boycott, Branko Lustig, Catholics, Christians, communist crimes, Croatia, Crusaders, Holocaust, Ivo Goldstein, Jews, Knin, Maribor, Mario Profaca, Miro Matesic, Tezno, The Last Flight of Petr Ginz, Zadar, Zeljko Jovanovic, Zvonimir Hodak

Human Rights in Serbia don’t mean much, research suggests

March 1, 2012 by inavukic 3 Comments

Serbian concentration camp Trnopolje Photo: Reuters 1992

According to the Croatian Defenders internet portal more than 70% of Serbian citizens have a negative attitude towards the Hague tribunal (International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia/ICTY) and consider that the Hague trials do not contribute to the reconciliation process.

These are the results from recent research ordered by the Belgrade Centre for Human Rights and OSCE Mission in Serbia (Organisation for Security and Co-Operation in Europe), carried out by Ipsos Strategic Marketing and presented to the public on Tuesday February 28. A representative sample of citizens over 16 years of age was surveyed in this research.

The research showed that 66% of Serbian citizens consider the establishment of the Hague tribunal unnecessary, and that the purpose of the Hague court is to transfer the guilt for the war and war victims onto Serbia.

Half of those surveyed consider that Radovan Karadzic is not responsible for the crimes he is charged with, and 41% consider Ratko Mladic should not have been arrested nor handed over to ICTY.

Croatian news portal Nacional on the subject of the same research writes that 45% of research participants stated that everyone should judge their own people. 12% consider that it’s not important in which country or which institution carry out trials for war crimes.

16% hold that in order to achieve justice, it’s necessary to cooperate with the ICTY. 19% hold that cooperation with the ICTY is only necessary to the extent by which it prevents further pressure. 40% hold that cooperation with the Hague is not welcome because it has not in any way benefitted Serbia. A dozen or so consider cooperation with ICTY necessary as a condition for Serbia’s accession to European Union.

Just over 20% hold that reconciliation is a key factor for future relations between the countries of former Yugoslavia. With this, 34% consider apologies by state leaders beneficial while 57% think apologies are useless.

Given that this research stipulates that those surveyed form a representative sample of citizens of Serbia it seems as clear as a sunny day that Serbs have not accepted, nor do they intend to accept, the fact that it WAS they who started the horrific wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990’s.

Furthermore the concept of human rights does not, for Serbs, spread beyond Serbia – as if there are no humans outside it. They want the world to leave them alone to judge their own people and if the world is to get involved then Serbs want Serbia to benefit from that.

Indeed, judging by the results of this research it seems that for a whopping slice of Serbian population Srebrenica, Vukovar, Skabrnja, Sibenik, Zadar … million refugees, countless rapes and tortures, numerous concentration camps across Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia – did not happen!

Now that Serbia has received the status of candidate for EU accession (with unjustifiable ease) let’s wait and see if the EU, International Human Rights watch and Amnesty International will criticise Serbs for their protective stance on war crimes committed by their people and hostility towards internationally administered justice. These three international bodies have always been so quick to react against Croatia and make her path to EU accession an undeserved nightmare. Ina Vukic, Prof. (Zgb); B.A.,M.A.Ps.(Syd)

“List of war criminals in Vukovar, Velepromet concentration camp and Ovcara” (Croatia 1991)