However, when I lived in Croatia, which was then a part of Yugoslavia, the secret police came one morning and took away my passport, my typewriter and a pile of books. Searching for drugs, they said. Without a warrant, of course. They never returned my passport: reasons of national security. I was taken of the air at the radio station where I worked (The Party actually said my program is "too Americanized", heh), and suddenly nobody would publish my articles. Curiously, a wheel felt off my car in a curve at high speed near city of Rijeka. I was barely 21 and just waiting for that chip in my head to explode. Real reasons I never knew.

Now, they (former Yugoslav bureaucrats who are now Croatian bureaucrats) may say that those were different times: Croatia was still a part of that hateful communist "Serbian-ruled" Yugoslavia. They, unlike me, obviously, had to "follow the orders" and "do their jobs." I let them be, let them all have their war, their flags, their new names on their old streets, their insatiable political ambitions, their voracious appetite for power.

After an unsuccesful attempt to leave the country illegally - over the mountain gorge of Savinjsko Sedlo in winter 1988, the following summer I moved my permanent residence to, then already more democratic Slovenia, obtained the passport there, and in a less than a week I was in the U.S. for the one-semester college exchange. Ooops, but I forgot to buy a round-trip ticket.

Ivo Skoric

P.O.Box 46

New York NY 10029