Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Someone must have slandered Marko Rakar, for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested

This is my brief account of events which happened last week, I am going to try to make it as precise as possible and as neutral as possible although I am aware that this is not entirely possible.

On Tuesday evening last week (6th of april 2010) new web site appeared on the internet called registarbranitelja.com. This is basically search engine which allows you to search war veteran database. This is highly disputed document because it contains more then half a milion names and just about everyone agrees that this list is inflated with about 100-150.000 names – the problem comes with the fact that based on your presence on the list you might be able to draw some benefits from your war veteran status (not all people can do that, it is more related to people who were either retired with military pensions or handicaped during war, usualy with PTSD diagnose).

Around 22:00 I have received few calls from my fellow webmasters and immediately after that from some journalists asking me if it is true that I am the one behind that web site. The reason for that claim was few anonymous comments on some web sites (I have identified at least three sites, comment appears to be made about the same time) which claimed that part of my google analytics code which I used on my “World forum e-democracy award” winning site pollitika.com was used on that site as well. I was unable to confirm that because site was down (probably due to overhelming interest), site is now online and that code is not visible.

At the same time, few war veteran NGOs have protested and basically made a number of non-specific threats against person who published that registry and that fact scared me and made me panic because it was clear from numerous journalist requests that I will be identified as possible author of that site. I have tried to access that site thru the night without success and early in the morning I went to police in order to explain my non existing role in this and to ask for protection. One of the problems later reported is that during night I have contacted President of Republic of Croatia for whom I worked in recent election campaign. I did that in order to warn him about developing story and to express my assessment that this story will inveitably affect him and his office. We have also agreed to talk with National Security advisor early in the morning so that he can make some suggestion on what to do. His advice was to simply go to the police and I followed it immediately.
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