Talk:2009 student protests in Croatia

Clarifications[edit]

Bolded parts of the following statements are in need of clarification to make the article more useful for potential readers:

The students were protesting the Croatian government's plans to reduce public funding for higher education, which had been provided for free up until recently.

(What does "until recently" mean? As far as I know segments of tertiary education in Croatia had started introducing tution fees since the early 1990s and at the time of the protest around 50% of all students in the country had to pay some tuition at their respective universities. The protest began when the University of Zagreb Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences decided to raise tuition fees for the tuition-paying half of their student body, with the consent of the democratically elected student representatives. This does not mean that education was free prior to that point. On the other hand, the days of the entirely public-funded education system were over in the early 1990s, which can hardly be defined as "recently".)

The occupation in Zagreb spread to other cities, including Split, Rijeka and Zadar. These other protests dissipated more quickly than the action in Zagreb.

(How quickly? According to the article, the Zagreb "occupation" lasted 35 days. Did the protests in Split, Rijeka and Zadar last for 2 days, 17 days or 34 days? This seems rather vague.)

After nearly two weeks, the plenum voted to end the occupation on December 4th.

(This is the first mention of the so-called plenum in the article. What is the plenum and how did it work? What was the plenum for and how many people participated in it?)

There are of course other issues which the article here skirts around, such as the number of people taking part in these protests as opposed to the number of people who are enrolled at the said faculty (the so-called plenum which convened daily during the blockade never managed to attract more than 600-700 people according to contemporary reports, as opposed to some 4,000 students who are enrolled at the said faculty at any given point.) However, the usual academic processes were banned for everyone during those 35 days. In addition, there were special designated students who patrolled the building and actively prevented anything resembling regular classes for those students and professors who wanted to go about their usual business (as can be seen on several youtube videos). Although these scenes were non-violent, they were hardly peaceful.

In effect, parts of the student body who saw themselves as revolutionary simply took everyone else as hostages, with the idea that their noble goal justifies any means at their disposal, and have substituted democratic means with non-democratic albeit non-violent ones. In addition, the person writing the article (and referencing an exremely poorly-written article at Dalje.com, which is hardly a trustworthy news source), wants us to believe that the student backed down only when the faculty administration threatened to "impose sanctions". However, since people who convened daily to decide whether to continue the blockade were officially anonymous, they were from the very beginning immune to any sanctions by the faculty. The faculty simply announced that due do the 35 days lost the academic semester was in jeopardy of ending as scheduled. Truth of the matter is that the blockade simply ended when the protest stopped being news and when the local media stopped being amused with the daily dose of marxist pamphlets which were read to journalists by anonymous members the so-called plenum.

So let's just stick to the verifiable facts shall we, this is Wikipedia after all. (And on that note - yes, I'm fully aware that David Icke did not express support for the protest nor did he visit the faculty, but that is what you get when you reference a disastrously poor source to support your claims.) Timbouctou (talk) 15:15, 17 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If there are better sources available, please cite them. I'm no expert on Croatian politics or internal affairs, so I had only the published sources that I could find to rely on. I originally considered nominating the article for deletion, but since I found sources that verified the facts, I added them. If you feel the article is invalid, you are free to nominate it for deletion. However, from the tone of your writing, I suspect that your neutrality in the issue might be in doubt. WikiDan61^ChatMe!_ReadMe!! 16:10, 17 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It is no secret that my neutrality is compromised when it comes to this topic (being myself a student at the faculty and opposed to the methods used by protesters), and that is precisely the reason why I'm unwilling to edit the article. If you would like to improve the quality of the article, I suggest you ask for help at WikiProject Croatia. Although the protest succeeded in becoming the center of media attention for a few weeks in May 2009, it did not receive a great deal of attention internationally and improving it or fact-checking it without using Croatian sources could be impossible. I do think that the topic deserves an article as it certainly is noteworthy, and I have no intention of obstructing constructive and verifiable edits. However, I will not allow it to become a biased summary of events which were themselves very much publicly debated during and after the blockade(s). Timbouctou (talk) 16:46, 17 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Check http://slobodnifilozofski.org/?p=2216 for further data. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.201.192.5 (talk) 00:21, 14 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]