My appeal with the highest court in Croatia crosses my mind almost daily. When will I get the final verdict in this travesty of a country? When will I finally get a chance to appeal to the court in Strasbourg? For crying out loud, I appealed against the insult verdict of the lower courts in Pazin and Pula in 2011. And the insult case was lodged against me by the then mayor of Motovun, Slobodan Vugrinec, in 2009. His first two cases for libel, which were lodged in 2008 and 2009, failed even in Istria, where he had all the political backing he could ever dream of in a so-called democratic country. In retrospect, Vugrinec knew what he was doing to me. Unable to stop me in any other way in my opposition to fraudulent golf development in Motovun, where real estate prices were skyrocketing at the time, he went for the courts. He knew it would take years, and maybe even decades, for me to extricate myself from the clutches of the legal system. After all, he got a degree in political science in communist Yugoslavia, where every trick in the book was invented to thwart a wide spectrum of political enemies. And it is precisely ex-communist cadres like him who took the power in Croatia after independence. Cockroaches one and all, they knew tricks galore. Used to doing everything behind closed doors and in the dark, they created the cockroach country in their own image. The courts are part and parcel of the cozy arrangement. As for my appeal, it is lingering behind the same closed doors and in the dark. Perhaps forever.