Australia or Croatia?
Posted February 14th by Braddock Family in Australia, Croatia, Dalmatia, Dubrovnik
We are often told we must finally decide where we want to settle and raise the kids. Yet we can’t. Our confusion was made manifest this week by two issues – one public and the other private.
The cheerful smile above belongs to Britt Lapthorne – a young Australian girl who disappeared in Dubrovnik last year. Her body was discovered several weeks later in the sea below the walls of the old town.
Last Sunday an Australian current affairs program, Sunday Night, broadcast their investigation into her death. Sunday Night used facebook to find girls who believed that local Croatian men had attempted to abduct them from the same nightclub, Club Fuego, in which Britt was last seen. The girls separately produced identi-kit pictures of their attackers, that have since been identified as Croatian police officers.
The reaction to the program by Croatian officials and the locals in general was appalling. facebook groups sprang up declaring Dubrovnik a safe city, which of course it is. But posts were made to these groups declaring the girls on the show to be liars, or that the story was part of a larger conspiracy to damage Croatian tourism, or that Britt deserved what happened to her because she was young and out partying until the early morning.
Whether attempts were actually made or that the girls were simply confused in a stressful situation, whether Britt was murdered or simply fell to her death from the cliffs around Dubrovnik, or whether or not the program was too sensational, the facts remain the same. The Croatian police have mismanaged the investigation from the very beginning. They refused to believe Britt was missing. Then when her body was found they issued a statement prior to the DNA results that it couldn’t possibly be hers – which the DNA proved to be incorrect. They did not ask for the CCTV tapes from the bar until over a week after her disappearance.
The Croatian media then attacked Britt, describing her as a drunk and known to be promiscuous.
Britt’s sad demise has made evident many of the bigotries that still exist here. Nationalism and sexism have tainted the police and public response to her disappearance and the Sunday Night investigation. Croatia’s recent history has created a feudal society where general civility and personal responsibility are lacking. The local police in their inaction have shown that they believe their responsibility lies in protecting Dubrovnik’s reputation rather discovering the truth. Croatians would rather attack the character of Britt and the other girls, the foreign press or foreigners in general than discover the truth.
Slavenka Drakulić in Cafe Europa described the difficulty of building civil societies in former communist countries 15 years ago, and her warnings are still relevant today. (An interesting aside – several of her books are difficult to find in her native Croatia because of how critical she is of conditions here, yet I can walk down to the local market and buy a copy of Mein Kampf easily! One of her recent opinion pieces can be found here.)
Travel journalists (on Croatian Tourism Board organized junkets) and even bloggers such as ourselves (with a vested interested in attracting guests to this country) extol the beauty of Croatia – yet few comment on the lack of good service or complain about an unacceptable level of rudeness. Foreigners are often seen as targets for financial exploitation – if they are traveling they must be rich – and it is not a giant leap from there to see young female backpackers as easy targets for other attacks.
More personally, 2008 was the 20th anniversary for Julie and I of our high school graduations. Julie went to PLC and I attended Scotch College in Perth. Whilst not caring to attend the reunion, I did have a drink with an old classmate whilst we were back in Australia.
He had attended the reunion and there had discovered that of our class of 120 from 1988 – 8 have died, 1 from a car accident and 7 from suicide (including our dux). This stunned me. Scotch College is a private boy’s school in the wealthiest area of Perth – one of the richest per capita areas of Australia. Yet my class has an annual suicide rate 130 times the national rate in a country with an already relatively high rate. Why?
In the school’s newsletter, which constantly gives glowing accounts of what its ‘old boys’ have accomplished, nothing is ever mentioned of this fact.
In Croatia we live with a greater sense of community in a less civil society. In Perth’s civil western suburbs we find young men killing themselves – something must be missing in society there. So we return to our problem – where to live and raise our children?
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Miquel
February 14th, 2009
Good summary of the issue. Given that Croatia has some large hurdles to overcome for EU accession, including law enforcement issues, I just don’t see them getting this all in place by the end of this year as shown with the issue of Britt, as well as the political assassinations in Zagreb in the second half of last year, and the various incursions on free speech from the Facebook issue to Ranko up in Motovun. It seems the closer the EU gets, the further HR pushes it away.
To sort of add something in to your whole issue of safety and tourism in Croatia, here’s what the Rough Guide Croatia says under Crime and Personal Safety > Sexual Harassment:
“Croatian men like to regard the annual deluge of foreign female tourists as fair game, but any display of Mediterranean machismo tends to be leavened by genuine attempts at gallantry and charm. A suitably firm response should be enough to cope with unwanted attentions. Alternatively, try to imitate the repertoire of stony silences and withering looks employed by the local women.”
Leave it to a British guide to say that the guys are pretty much asses, but in the nicest way possible. It’s just unfortunate that there is more of a physically threatening undertone to this these days.
In regards as to where to raise kids, for me being in the US, the choice is easy in that pretty much anywhere in Europe is vastly superior. Children in the future are going to need to have multi-lingual abilities and that simply can’t happen in the US. That and due to the size of European countries, there is an immediate sense of others in the world as opposed to the US which few citizens leave (at best 30% of us have passports and it’s more like less than 20%). Also the social systems in the US are abysmal. Having no national health care system is reprehensible. I have no idea as to how many parallels there are with Australia, but at the very least a child growing up in Croatia will learn Croatian, English, and probably German and/or Italian. That’s not bad despite all the political ills of the crescent currently.
-miquel
Ivana
February 15th, 2009
Fantastic….
Elizabeth
February 23rd, 2009
Where to raise our kids. my husband and I ask ourselves this question everyday. We have been living in Croatia now for a year, and my answer for now, is most definitely here. Despite the bad attitutudes, arrogance, beureaucracy, obsession with vanity etc that seem to plague the general Croat population, we have uncovered a strong sense of community and a love of nature that lies within a small portion of the population that I believe will get stronger and more prevalent over the next 20 years. These are values we hold dear and which are hard to genuinely find in the US and BiH (our native countries). Knowing that our kids become what they live, we are finding it easier and more rewarding to surroud them with good things here. It is such an effort to seek out these things in my native US and in Bosnia things are a mess. the stress of trying to live simply is too much work elsewhere. Here we are comfortably finding a happy medium. It aint perfect but we can deal with the stress of modern living so much more enjoyably here in Croatia. And I hope it will stay that way……….just my few kunas on your musings…
Jane
February 28th, 2009
I’m with Elizabeth on this. At ground level (though that seems to permeate quite far into the apparent brick wall of bureacracy) I believe that the strength of family ties, religion, and culture in Croatia, particularly Dalmatia, is very special, and implies an extraordinary amount of self regulation, decency and morality.
Here in Croatia, more than anywhere else I’ve lived (England, Ireland and France) and visited, I’ve particularly valued an over riding sense of personal safety. It’s a fact that crime rates are relatively low in Croatia but it’s impossible to put a price on the feeling of being able to walk around, almost anywhere, and at all hours of the day, feeling unthreatened.
That doesn’t help Britt’s family, or the families of those at Scotch College in Perth who chose to end their own lives, and I feel extremely uncomfortable mixing any sort of discussion on where to live, or how to enjoy Croatia, in the context of the very serious main content of the posting and bearing in mind the lives lost.
It’s one thing being relieved to see the back of English newspapers – the scores of major and minor tragedies and system failures, in relative context and from an abstract position; quite another to see a posting such as this in an altogether different setting.
I guess we’ll all be relieved when Lifejacket Adventures
resolve their location dilemmas and hope that the decision is not overly based on the tragic circumstances they report. There is a lot more to discuss, but not at the risk of trivialising the loss of life that is the main feature of this posting.
Sea Kayak Croatia
March 1st, 2009
Jane – thanks for the comment.
The main point I was trying to make was not about our place of domicile and was maybe confused because I tried to personalize the post. Its more that both communities live in denial (and probably need to so as to survive) of problems at their very core. It just happened that both events occurred during the same week. If I knew of another way to help (especially the Lapthornes) I would – all I know is to try to keep these things in the spotlight a little longer – it seems to me everyone else is attempting to trivalize the loss of life. The post was not abouts ‘hits’ or ratings or tourist numbers or ‘school pride’.
Even though you and I are supposed to be writing more light-hearted ‘travel’ or ‘expat’ blogs sometimes we have a responsibility to tell people the reality of Croatia (and Australia) – and to stop printing all the ‘happy’ stories for a little while – and in a small way keep the pressure on those at the top (in both communities).
(My true thoughts about the Britt case can be found here under the username “shanejulie” – http://visitcroatia.proboards21.com/index.cgi?board=news&action=display&thread=6409&page=4 .)
Jane
March 2nd, 2009
Shane – my blog is for fun, hopefully honest and informed on the subjects I write about, but not supposed to be about anything other than what motivates me to spend time and research on a specific posting. I wouldn’t presume to take on any wider responsibility, and certainly don’t feel equipped to comment on the overall “reality” of Croatia, whatever that means.
I think we are both agreed on the need to avoid trivialisation, and have to agree to differ on what we think our respective blogs are for. Viva la difference!