Croatia's Turn
SCHWARTZ, STEPHEN
Croatia's Turn The death of Franjo Tudjman and the free elections that followed have brought a new generation to power. BY STEPEHN SCHWARTZ Sarajevo A new era in Balkan history dawned on...
...But I consider the concentration of power dangerous...
...Croatia needs a balance...
...Budisa would have represented a cleaner break with the past, especially in economic matters...
...But this was nothing to be proud of...
...Worst of all, Tudjman conspired with Serbian president and Balkan kingpin Slobodan Milosevic to partition Bosnia-Hercegovina...
...Tudjman's party was bested at the polls by an incongruous alliance of former Communists, now styled Social Democrats, under Ivica Racan, and serious free marketeers in the Social Liberal party, led by Drazen Budisa...
...As Croatia's rambunctious opposition paper Feral Tribune put it, "There was a time when Budisa was still a pronounced anti-Communist, and every connection with reformed Communists was an incomprehensible, almost obscene act for him, while to Ivica Racan everything about Budisa's party smelled of 'rotten liberalism.'" Under the pact that joined these disparate parties, Racan had the advantage: He had slyly chosen the prime minister's slot, leaving Budisa to run for president in the election slated for January 24...
...But flags could not fill stomachs...
...And until recently, the two factions cordially despised each other...
...Their disillusionment was not difficult to fathom...
...People living on pensions starved...
...BY STEPEHN SCHWARTZ Sarajevo A new era in Balkan history dawned on December 12, 1999, when Franjo Tudjman died...
...Tudjman sought to reconcile the Ustasha and Partisan traditions, and in this he claimed as his model Francisco Franco, the Spanish caudillo, who supposedly had brought the two sides together after Spain's civil war...
...In Croatia itself, the coalition took 73 seats, Tudjman's machine 39, with the results for 5 seats representing Croats outside the country in dispute...
...With Racan prime minister and Mesic president, former Communists are still in control...
...When Tudjman himself died in December, the Croats celebrated, not by drinking long-hoarded champagne, as the Spaniards had at Franco's passing, but by turning out in their millions in the January 3 parliamentary elections to crush his political machine, the Croatian Democratic Union...
...In addition, some observers, especially in Bosnia-Hercegovina, worried that Budisa might be slow to shake off the legacy of Croatian nationalism...
...Workers grumbled over late paychecks...
...But it is the brutalities inflicted by the Croatian fascists that non-Croats have tended to remember...
...Croatia had not been independent for centuries...
...When his defense minister, an unreconstructed Ustasha apologist named Gojko Susak, died in 1998, one of the eulogists and pallbearers at his funeral was none other than his former American counterpart William Perry...
...Mesic is seen as a sincere friend of Bosnia-Hercegovina, willing to stop Croatia's meddling across the border...
...Racan is wedded to impractical leftist fantasies, such as the inclusion in the cabinet of unpaid volunteers, while Budisa did jail time under the Communists...
...every city, county, party, union, and club has its own...
...But he was personally distant, a librarian by profession, and lacked the common touch...
...leaders tried to overlook his faults...
...If they set the right example, they can make their country prosperous and admired...
...The value of the currency, the kuna, plunged...
...Bosnian president Alija Izetbegovic said he felt as though he faced "a choice between lung cancer and AIDS...
...This may or may not have been the best possible outcome...
...I hated Franco...
...Tudjman, who emerged as semidictator of Croatia after the breakup of Yugoslavia, did little to improve the image of his country...
...Tudjman had squandered state funds on a presidential guard in fancy dress and elaborate symbols and banners...
...A former Communist general, Tudjman had shepherded Croatia to independence from Yugoslavia in 1991 and so considered himself the "father of the nation...
...his slogan—"Have coffee with the president"—sounds silly to outsiders, but worked for Croats...
...When the Spaniard Carlos Westendorp was European boss of postwar Bosnia-Hercegovina, Tudjman is said to have greeted him with the declaration, "I greatly admire your General Franco," to which Westendorp reportedly replied, "That is too bad...
...Almost as soon as the opposition victory in the parliamentary elections was announced, Lukacevic said his vote for president would go to Stipe Mesic, a 65-year-old former Communist who served as the last president of the old Yugoslavia...
...Stephen Schwartz's new book, Kosovo: Background to a War, will be published in Britain next month...
...I do not consider Racan a dangerous man," commented Otto Lukacevic, a Croat media adviser who commutes between homes and jobs in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegov-ina, and who was never a Communist...
...Tudjman may have been the father of the nation, but the Croats were no longer children...
...His army recovered territory seized by Serbs in the 1991-95 war, but gained its own reputation for ethnic cleansing...
...But after the coalition's exhilarating victory in the parliamentary elections, the voters took stock—and demonstrated their political maturity...
...Tudjman was not a programmatic anti-Semite, according to leading Croatian Jewish intellectuals, but he was certainly a crank...
...Mesic leads the Croatian People's party, which, along with three other minor parties, did poorly in the parliamentary elections, despite its intellectual prestige...
...Croat commanders were summoned to appear before the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia in The Hague...
...His weird writings minimize human suffering under the Croatian fascists with arguments over numbers, as if statistics were the issue, instead of genocide...
...They can also help rebuild Bosnia-Hercegov-ina—and possibly even point chaotic Serbia toward salvation...
...Despite this victory, the coalition seemed suspect to longtime anti-Tudjman activists...
...They have assumed a great responsibility...
...Croats seem addicted to flags...
...He put his army at the disposal of Clintonite diplomacy, and U.S...
...Suddenly faced with the prospect of handing both leadership posts to a single slate, albeit a potentially unstable one, they started thinking that Budisa might not be the best choice for president after all...
...Led by an ultranationalist clique, the Ustasha, it sacrificed its Jews to Nazi savagery, turned over the Dalmatian coast to Mussolini, and slaughtered its Serbian minority...
...But he failed to grasp the implications of embracing Franco...
...he had the right ideas but the wrong style...
...Not surprisingly, these policies drove more than 200,000 Croats to join the Communist Partisans under Tito, who was himself half Croat, half Slovene...
...And when the votes were counted after the presidential runoff on February 7, Mesic was Croatia's new president...
...Mesic knows how to reach the man in the street...
...Despite these proclivities, Tudjman was useful to Washington...
...During World War II, it had been an Axis puppet, the putative Independent State of Croatia...
...But they are younger men than Tudjman and more practical...
Vol. 5 • February 2000 • No. 22
