The last few years, Glas Istre (The Voice of Istria) has failed to publish a good number of my letters to the editor. They will all be published sooner or later, and the editor will be found wanting for these repeated failures. But the last letter, sent to the newspaper about a week ago, is uppermost on my mind at this juncture. It concerns false promises of golf development, which the politicians in power keep mouthing without a shred of evidence supporting their claims. And no-one appears to be allowed to challenge them. At least not in the only daily newspaper in these parts.

In my last letter I challenged two such pronouncement in recent issues of the newspaper, one from Ivan Jakovčić, the governor and the leading man of the Istrian Democratic Assembly, the leading regional party, and the other from Emil Soldatić, a key man of the same party on the municipal council in Motovun and its erstwhile secretary general. Jakovčić declared that golf development would transform the nature of tourism in Istria, and I wanted to know how many more tourists would it bring and how much more would they spend on account of the sport. Soldatić went as far as to claim that golf development would not only bring many jobs to Motovun, but that it would also stop the municipality’s long-term demographic decline. Again, I wanted to know how many jobs would there be on account of golf, and what would be their demographic impact.

In addition, I wanted to point out that not a single economic or demographic study of the effect of golf development on the peninsula had been commissioned to date to investigate such claims in spite of the fact that golf development had been vigorously promoted in Istria for an entire decade already. The governor and those closest to him do not seem to be interested in such studies. No matter what they would say, independent economists and demographers could challenge them all too easily.

Why has my last letter failed to see the light of day? How many more such letters will end up in the editor’s dustbin? Who wants to silence dissident voices in Istria, if not those whose pronouncements are being challenged? To put it a bit more bluntly, is Glas Istre indeed the voice of Istria? As for me, I very much doubt it, and all my hitherto unpublished letters to the editor are always available by way of proof. As I already said, they will surely appear in print sooner or later.