French lawsuit against Bob Dylan for ‘incitement to hatred’

The Croatian association that filed a lawsuit against US singer and songwriter Bob Dylan for "incitement to hatred" said yesterday that it would be satisfied with a public apology.

French officials notified Dylan of the lawsuit last month when his "Never Ending Tour" brought him to Paris for three concerts at the Grand Rex, and to receive the Legion of Honour. Neither Dylan nor Sony, which distributes his CDs in France, have commented.

The suit was filed last year by the Representative Council of the Croatian Community and Institutions in France (CRICCF).

It was based on a quote in Dylan's interview with Rolling Stone magazine.

Referring to the legacy of the American civil war, Dylan said: “This country is just too f**ked up about colour . . . Blacks know that some whites didn’t want to give up slavery – that if they had their way, they would still be under the yoke, and they can’t pretend they don’t know that. If you got a slave master or Klan in your blood, blacks can sense that. That stuff lingers to this day. Just like Jews can sense Nazi blood and the Serbs can sense Croatian blood.”

The fact that Dylan was mis en examen (placed under investigation) indicates that a French judge took the Croatian complaint seriously.

"It is an incitement to hatred. We have nothing against Rolling Stone magazine or Bob Dylan as a singer. But we don't want Croatian war criminals to represent all Croats," Vlatko Maric, the head of the CRICCF, said in a statement.

A judge could, in theory, send the case to trial in Paris’s 17th criminal court, which hears cases involving freedom of expression. If found guilty, Dylan could be fined. However, a trial is as unlikely as an apology by Dylan.

Contrary to the Croatians’ allegation, Dylan did not explicitly compare Croatians to Nazis. If he had, his lawyers could argue that during the second World War, the Croatian Ustashi, allied with Nazi Germany and led by the fascist Ante Pavelic, set up eight concentration camps where they imprisoned Serbs, Jews and Roma. The Ustashi killed some 330,000 Serbs.

France's highest court, the cour de cassation, has increasingly ruled in favour of freedom of speech and against attempts to litigate history.

In October, it definitively cleared a French survivor of a Nazi massacre who was sued by Alsatian war veterans for implying that they volunteered and were not forced into service with the German army.

When the French culture minister Aurélie Filippetti pinned the medal of the Legion of Honour on Dylan’s cowboy jacket last month, the 72-year-old singer reportedly looked uncomfortable.

Ms Filippetti said that for the French, he embodied “a subversive cultural force that can change people and the world”.

Earlier this year, French army general Jean-Louis Georgelin, the grand chancellor of the Legion of Honour, objected to Dylan’s nomination because he had used cannabis and opposed the Vietnam War.