An open letter: I am leaving Blue Dawn

An open letter to the Chairmen of Blue Dawn, and to the Republic.

Twenty-four years ago Luka Matar chose a nineteen-year-old from Kromine to carry the standard of the rebranded party into the most devout district of the Republic. I carried it. I gave the party twenty years in the Assembly and never once broke its whip. I voted for the great purge when the Republic asked it of me, and I voted to fund the Council for Internal Affairs every time it asked for more. I asked nothing in return but that the party remain what it was founded to be: the political arm of a divine Republic.

I am asking now, and I am refused.

Under Leon Rukavin and Ante Brov the party has become a bureau of labour contracts. Rukavin signed the Treaty of Brod Moravice and called it statesmanship. Brov has bought the provinces with the District Governance Act, the cities with NaroMart, the farmers with the Food Security Act and the bankers with the Financial Charter. There is not one word of God in any of it. There is a budget, a payroll, and a machine that runs on both.

The men who now lead us are soft-handed bureaucrats who are abandonding the spiritual roots of the Republic for labour contracts. They have made the state an employer and called it stability. They have made the faith a department and called it moderation. They have made the Assembly a market and called it peace. I have sat in that chamber for twenty years. I know what it is.

I was the youngest man ever sent to it. I do not intend to be the oldest man to apologise for what it has become.

I therefore resign my lifetime membership of Blue Dawn. I do so without rancour toward the men who once knocked on doors beside me, and without any illusion that a party can be saved from the outside. But I will not put my name to a settlement that treats the faith of this Republic as one interest among many, to be traded at the next congress.

I remain, as I have always been, a son of this Republic and a servant of its faith. To the clerks in Sinj who believe the provinces can be managed with a line in a budget, I say only this: the Republic was not founded on a labour contract, and it will not be preserved by one.

I shall be heard from again.

Ivic Davor Kovrekovic · Kromine, March 1976