By: Andrej Žitnik (Nova24tv.si)
“I meet Milan Kučan at the entrance to a restaurant in Rateče. Because he is old, I hold the door for him. And he asks me: They haven’t locked you up yet? I look at him in surprise and ask if they haven’t locked him up yet, either. He says they have not. And I respond to him: Then, we are both still free,” Uroš Urbanija, Director of TV Slovenia, shared his experience of his close encounter with Milan Kučan.
Director of TV Slovenia, Uroš Urbanija, will remember his visit to Rateče on Friday very well, as Milan Kučan, the former first man of the communist regime, made a comment to him at the entrance of the restaurant that could have been interpreted as a threat of imprisonment. When Urbanija held the door for him, the “communist bully”, as former minister Vasko Simoniti described him, asked Urbanija, “They haven’t locked you up yet?”
This time, Kučan stepped out of his “nice little man” role he plays for the cameras and showed his true nature – undemocratic and totalitarian. He has shown that respect for the integrity of the individual and for human rights really means nothing to him and that he is intimately on the side of those who want to forcibly remove the current leadership of RTV – which, for the time being, is protected only by the Slovenian Constitution.
Kučan would still like to have the option to imprison people
His statement is particularly problematic because it is well known that Kučan was once the head of the entire repressive apparatus of the former totalitarian state, which flagrantly violated human rights, and under him, the secret police, the State Security Administration, killed political opponents and carried out terrorist actions. The influence of the former forces has persisted in the transition to an independent state, and the judiciary, in particular, is still used as a means of repressing opponents and maintaining the influence of the transitional left. The panic on the left is all the greater because the Constitutional Court has not yet acted in accordance with their expectations, since control of broadcasting is of existential importance to them. Whether the court’s decision will follow Kučan’s “omerta” will be known soon.
But this is not the first time that Kučan has lost his nerve and “fallen out”. A few years ago, he also shocked a POP TV journalist with a chauvinist statement – when she asked him a question that was not to his liking, he responded: “You aren’t married yet, right? You should work on that.”