The chances for democracy in Croatia
Denitch, Bogdan
DEMOCRACY HAS been given a second chance in Croatia with a dramatic breakthrough by democratic parties in parliamentary and presidential elections earlier this year. The national-chauvinist HDZ...
...8 million upon her visit to Zagreb right after the elections...
...Russian hands are bloody, and the bloodletting is not yet done...
...In the Croat case, the effects of these policies were exacerbated by the Pentagon's passion for exporting expensive military hardware...
...Since then he has participated in sitins led by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) against evictions of Serbs from Zagreb and has gone to the Hague to testify about Croatian war crimes in Bosnia...
...The new prime minister, Ivica Racan, heads the Social Democratic Party (SDP), which has evolved from the old Croatian League of Communists...
...The pictures of Grozny after the Russian triumph are an indictment of the "triumphant" army and of the government that claims to direct it...
...The new foreign minister, Toni Picula, visited Sarajevo right after the election to assure the Bosnians that the new Croat government will treat Bosnia as a friendly and sovereign state...
...Note that half a year after undertaking responsibility for Kosovo, the "international community" has failed to provide even the funds for six thousand police, the minimum needed...
...This not only strengthens Montenegro by reducing its isolation but creates an "informal" channel for communications between Yugoslavian and Croatian NGOs, independent journalists, oppositionists, POLITICS ABROAD Chechnya AS THIS ISSUE of Dissent goes to press, the devastated city of Grozny is in Russian hands, and most of Chechnya is too, though the Russian hold is nowhere secure...
...The Hercegovinian Croats who have been receiving a U.S...
...A center-left government must betray its own base in order to be "responsible" in the eyes of the West and its financial institutions...
...There is every indication that the borders between Montenegro and Croatia, currently quite soft, will be open by this summer...
...here, from the beginning, it has been the policy of the advancing army...
...But doesn't the Pact on Stability negotiated in Sarajevo in 1999 provide billions of dollars of aid by the European Community (EC) for the Balkans...
...A coalition of six democratic parties, dominated by the alliance of social democrats and social liberals, now holds almost two-thirds of the seats...
...little bullies (sometimes) are forced to back down...
...Croatia has in effect elected a more political and powerful Havel...
...The massive defeat of HDZ poses a problem to all those commentators who have argued 34 • DISSENT / Spring 2000 that chauvinist ethnic-nationalism is the immutable master language of politics in the Balkans...
...I F DEMOCRATIC Croatia is successful, it will raise hope for the demoralized opposition to Milosevic in Serbia and for the endangered Montenegrin experiment in multi-ethnic democracy...
...Although the looting was locally organized, the devastation is the result of policies pushed by the United States and Western Europe and their instruments, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund: privatize and marketize immediately, and cut back on social spending and "excessive" wages and pensions...
...It would mean the end of hope for a way out of the economic and social blind alley into which Croatia has been led during ten years of right-wing rule...
...Austerity and neoliberal economics are a formula for the failure of democracy in Croatia...
...Mesic sharply broke with Tudjman and HDZ in 1994 over their aggressive policy in Bosnia...
...In fact, however, no serious price at all has been exacted for this awful war—except the price exacted by the Chechens themselves...
...That relationship is now likely to be restored, weakening Belgrade's influence—this is especially likely if the promises about easier return of Serbian refugees are carried out...
...What happens next will have a major impact on the region as a whole...
...The Serbian "entity's" main town of Banja Luka has traditionally oriented itself to Zagreb and the Croatian port of Rijeka...
...Imaginative and dramatic this was not...
...Any fear that we would respond quickly with substantial aid, which is essential, were dispelled by Madeline Albright's almost insulting "present" of U.S...
...And yet...none of us who supported NATO's military intervention in Kosovo called for anything remotely similar in Chechnya...
...Moscow means to rule the Chechens, not to get rid of them...
...This recognition of "the way of the world" is not an argument against stopping the little bullies...
...Instead, we will almost certainly encourage the Croat government to undertake a grim policy of fiscal austerity and debt payment, to show that it is "responsible...
...The national-chauvinist HDZ (Croatian Democratic Community) founded by Franjo Tudjman, which has ruled Croatia with an iron fist since 1991, lost control of Parliament...
...But the Croat opening toward democracy will fail unless the West provides massive aid to an economy that has been systematically devastated and looted for a decade...
...But we should also, at least, record the crimes of the big ones...
...The rest of us have managed to do nothing...
...Victory in Croatia went to a coalition of clearly secular parties, committed to parliamentary democracy and an open society...
...Tourist buses from Dubrovnik already make the trip...
...It hardly seems possible that the United States or the EC will seize the moment for democracy and stability in the Balkans...
...It is useless to hope that the United States and Western Europe might come up with the money that one month's bombing of Yugoslavia and Kosovo cost...
...The message will be that a move toward democratic decency in Croatia is necessarily accompanied by a drop in an already dangerously low living standard...
...Even more significantly, the most intransigent anti-HDZ candidate, Stipe Mesic, won the presidency as the candidate of the same coalition...
...Given the pent-up demands of the unemployed, most of whom are young and educated, and of war veterans and union members, many of whom are owed months of pay or have been working without pay merely DISSENT / Spring 2000 n 35 POLITICS ABROAD to keep social insurance, the new government will face mass demonstrations and wide discontent before the year is up...
...MICHAEL WALZER and intellectuals...
...Mesic has been unequivocal in calling for the return of Serbian refugees, for cooperation with the Hague Court, for criminal prosecution of the new tycoons who have ransacked the Croatian economy, for a subordination of the secret services (there are four) to Parliament, and for a reduction of the vast prerogatives of the office of the president, which had reduced Croatia under Tudjman to a caricature of Latin American authoritarianism...
...I would be delighted if one week's cost were provided...
...The SPD is, if anything, excessively moderate, anxious to get Croatia into Europe...
...If the HDZ in Croatia, with control of most mass media, with the army, police, and secret services, with funds legal and illegal, and the support of the local mafiosi and the "diaspora" Croats in Bosnia, can be defeated in a reasonably free election, how secure are the nationalist authoritarians in Bosnia and Serbia...
...Interventionists elsewhere, we have called only for condemnation here and, some of us, for economic sanctions...
...Given the grotesque bureaucracy and slow pace with which the EC moves, that is a very thin hope...
...Five years after the end of the Yugoslav wars of succession, enormous chunks of the budget are devoted to the military...
...The lawlessness of Chechnya after the first Russian war and the terrorist campaign conducted by Chechen ultranationalists might have justified limited military action in Chechnya, but nothing can justify the brutality with which this war has been fought...
...These groups have been isolated by the anti-Milosevic sanctions, which hit the enemies of the Milosevic regime harder than the regime itself...
...Mesic has visited Montenegro and established cordial relations with the anti-Milosevic leadership...
...But something will have to give...
...Big bullies act where and when they want...
...Under Tudjman, Zagreb promoted and appointed Croatian military commanders in Bosnia and supplemented their salaries...
...it has failed to fund courts, judges, and jails, let alone any substantial reconstruction...
...So perhaps tough sanctions would have been the right response...
...Happily, it will be far less ready to use the police and the military to confront strikers and demonstrators than the Tudjman government was...
...Claiming to fight terrorists, Russia has treated the entire Chechen nation as an enemy and guaranteed its enmity for generations to come...
...they must look to Sarajevo and not Zagreb...
...Scorched earth" is usually the policy of a retreating army...
...BOGDAN DENITCH, an honorary chair of Democratic Socialists of America, heads the Institute for Transitions to Democracy, an NGO active in Croatia, Bosnia, and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia...
...300 million a year subsidy, of which only a third shows in the budget, have been told that those days are over...
...Of course, Russian brutality does not extend to genocide or ethnic cleansing...
...Kosovo is a frightening precedent...
Vol. 47 • April 2000 • No. 2
