Library:To kill a nation/Croatia: new republic, old reactionaries

After breaking away from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Croatia was ruled through most of the 1990s by the White House's man-of-the-hour, President Franjo Tudjman and his party, the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ, "the party of all Croats in the world"). A close look at Tudjman is less than comforting. In a book he wrote in 1989, Wastelands of Historical Truth, he claimed that "the establishment of Hitler's new European order can be justified by the need to be rid of the Jews," and that only nine hundred thousand Jews, not six million, were killed in the Holocaust. "Genocide is a natural phenomenon," Tudjman wrote, "in harmony with the sociological and mythological divine nature. Genocide is not only permitted, it is recommended, even commanded by the word of the Almighty, whenever it is useful for the survival or the restoration of the kingdom of the chosen nation, or for the preservation and spreading of its one and only correct faith" (that being Roman Catholicism for Tudjman). Pope John Paul II, who never had a harsh word for right-wing autocrats, gave vigorous support to Croatia's independence under HDZ leadership.

During World War II, the Croatian fascist organization, the Ustashe, actively collaborated with the Nazis, as did most of the pro-fascist Roman Catholic hierarchy in Croatia, under Archbishop Aloysius Stepinac, later promoted to cardinal by the Vatican. Stepinac was appointed by the Holy See to be chaplain of the Ustashe's armed forces. In a toast to Adolf Hitler, he spoke warmly of blood, native soil, and love of one's people, concluding, "Here it is easy to see God's hand at work."

From 1941 to 1945, Croatia was a Nazi state, and a fullfledged Axis co-belligerent, officially at war with all the Allies. (It declared war against the United States on December 12, 1941.) Croatia had more men under arms proportionately than any other Axis state, with 160,000 regulars, 75,000 Ustashe militia, and 15,000 police auxiliaries. In addition to its own units, Croatia provided more volunteers for the German Army than any other nation in Nazi dominated Europe: five fullstrength divisions, three Wehrmacht and two Waffen SS, plus a "Croat Legion" of 7,000 volunteers on the Russian front, and an anti-aircraft unit of 500 men serving in Austria.

The Ustashe ran the notorious Jasenovac death camp, one of the largest in Europe, known as the Auschwitz of the Balkans. They slaughtered some 750,000 Serbs, 45,000 Jews, and at least 26,000 Roma, committing acts of mutilation and torture some of which purportedly were too much even for their German overlords. With few exceptions, the Ustashe executioners, torturers, rapists, and murderers were never brought to justice. Immediately after World War II, several thousand of them fled to Austria and Italy, followed by some five hundred Croatian Catholic clergy, including two bishops. "Trunks of gold and precious treasures were carried away in this gigantic exodus," reports one French Catholic author. Millions of dollars in assets, plundered from those who perished in the death camps, were smuggled out of Croatia and sequestered by the Vatican, much of it subsequently distributed to other destinations, as former Ustashe might request. In 2000, legal actions were initiated by Serbs, Jews, Roma, and others against the Vatican in an attempt to recover stolen possessions.

After the war, the most notorious of Ustashe leaders, Ante Pavelic and Andrija Artukovic, hid away in Austrian convents. Both were eventually apprehended by British occupation forces but, through mysterious interventions, were quickly released. Pavelic ended up in Argentina, and Artukovic in California where he lived and prospered for thirty-eight years until he was extradited in 1986; he died of natural causes in a Yugoslav prison in January 1998. Other Ustashe Nazis, assisted by Catholic clerical centers in Europe and the United States, were provided with false identity cards, and allowed to circulate freely across the Western world. Many remained active in various exile communities, publishing their unrelenting cryptofascist anti-Semitic newspapers, tracts, and memoirs. True to form, Tudjman openly hailed the Ustashe of World War II as patriotic independence fighters, and insisted that only thirty thousand people perished in the Jasenovac death camp.

Between 1991 and 1995, the army of the newly proclaimed Croatian republic conducted its own ethnic cleansing operations, replete with rapes, summary executions, and indiscriminate shelling, driving over half a million Serbs from their ancestral homes in Croatia, including an estimated 225,000 Serbs from Krajina in August 1995 during what was called "Operation Storm."' The resistance of the Krajina Serbs was broken with assistance from NATO war planes and missiles. "We have resolved the Serbian question," crowed Tudjman in a speech to his generals in December 1998.

The Croatian government, set up with the help of NATO's guns, named its new currency the kuna, after the currency that had been used by the Ustashe state. The Tudjman government also adopted the Ustashe red-and-white checkerboard insignia for its flag and army uniforms. HDZ supporters pointed Out that the checkerboard emblem had been a Croatian symbol for centuries before the Ustashe used it. But to many Serbs, Jews, and others, it remained a symbol almost as detestable as the swastika, and its adoption by the new republic revealed a bruising insensitivity to Croatia's Nazi past.'

In addition, Croatia's school books were rewritten to downplay any critical anti-fascist perspective, and libraries were purged of volumes that the Croatian government deemed politically incorrect. Thousands of copies of the Yugoslav encyclopedia were burned. The Square of the Victims of Fascism in Zagreb was renamed. Numerous streets were renamed after fascist-friendly nationalist leaders of World War II, including Mile Budak, one of the founders of Croat fascism, who signed the regime's race laws against Serbs, Jews, and Roma. It was Budak who initiated the state's official policy on Serbs to expel one-third, convert one-third, and kill one-third. Over three thousand anti-fascist monuments were destroyed including the one at the Jasenovac extermination camp.

Tudjman appointed former Nazi-collaborating Ustashe leaders to government posts. Vinko Nikolic was given a seat in parliament upon his return to Croatia. Mate Sarlija was made a general in the Croatian army. And former Ustashe commander in Dubrovnik Ivo Rojnica just missed becoming ambassador to Argentina when Tudjman withdrew his appointment because of negative international reaction.

Serb-hating was abundantly evident during Tudjman's reign, while anti-Semitism was only thinly disguised. Dunja Sprac, a Croatian Jew who worked with refugees, noted that the Croatian ruling class liked to pretend "they love Jews and want to help us. But it is so transparent...I see all these awful disgusting symbols, the false newspaper articles and the streets and squares being renamed. This country is in great poverty, not just economically but ethically. It terrifies me." Sometimes the Jew-baiting was quite blatant, as when the pro-government newspaper Vecernji List published comments like: "The Jew Soros is using the Jew Puhovski to intervene in Croatia." So too the racism, as when in April 1994, the government demanded that all "nonwhite" UN troops be removed from Croatia, claiming that only "first-world troops" were sufficiently sensitized to Croatia's problems.

One of the former commanders of the Jasenovac death camp, Dinko Sakic, who lived openly under his own name in Argentina for half a century, was paid a friendly visit by Tudjman in 1995. Sakic told a Croatian journalist that he was proud of his wartime record and regretted that more Serbs had not perished at Jasenovac. He was subsequently deported to Croatia where he was indicted in early 1999. As President Tudjman freely admitted, the indictment came only because of pressure from abroad. When Sakic's trial began, many of the witnesses, who originally told of seeing him supervise torture sessions and executions at Jasenovac, suddenly could not recall anything damaging. Questioned later, some of them admitted to changing their testimony after receiving anonymous death threats .

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which includes the United States along with some fifty other nations, has the self-appointed task of overseeing the development of democracy in former Communist nations. In March 1999, it reported: "There has been no progress in improving respect for human rights, the rights of minorities and the rule of law" in Croatia. According to Raymond Bonner, writing in the New York Times, the OSCE report was "astonishing for its lack of diplomatic circumlocution [and] damning details about repression of the media by the Croatian government, about its lack of cooperation with the [International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY)], situated in The Hague and, above all, about the government's harsh treatment of ethnic Serbs."

Tudjman and his HDZ cohorts imposed tight restrictions on the media, far tighter than anything Miosevic was applying in what remained of Yugoslavia. Anyone who openly criticized the Croatian government risked some kind of retribution. Croatian television, which served as the prime news source, "remained subject to political control by the ruling party," according to the OSCE report, which also noted that TV programs were marked by "hate speech." Tudjman's office promulgated a series of state edicts forbidding the media from using certain political terms, and requiring them to refer to Serbs exclusively as "Serb terrorists" and the Yugoslav People's Army as the "Serbo-Communist occupation army," according to Susan Woodward. Urban intellectuals whose political selfidentities were not ethnic but ideological (such as liberal or social democratic) were publicly instructed to identify themselves as either Croat or Serb.

Under HDZ rule, citizens who were not ethnic Croatian were denied employment and faced confiscatory property taxes. Eastern Orthodox clergy were threatened and their churches vandalized. Serbian residents who still lived in Croatia were threatened, attacked, and denied any effective police protection. Their leaders were detained without cause. And there continued a movement to "purify" the Serbo-Croatian language by purging Serbian words and banning the use of Cyrillic characters.

While quick to perceive injustices perpetrated by Serbs, US leaders never looked too unkindly on the human rights abuses committed by the HDZ regime in Croatia. In February 1999, the US State Department belatedly made public a report describing Croatia as "nominally democratic" but "in reality authoritarian." The behaviour here is emblematic of the hypocrisy of US policy in the Balkans (and elsewhere). Secretary of State Madeleine Albright visited Zagreb and delivered a reportedly "tough message" to Tudjman about the need to become more democratic in his dealings with the public and more receptive to displaced Croatian Serb refugees. However, upon returning to Washington, she privately sent Tudjman a friendly letter which so pleased him that he promptly leaked it to the press. One Croatian newspaper described the missive as having the "taste of apology."

Tudjman died in office in December 1999, during his second term as president. He left a legacy of unjust authoritarian rule, at least 20 per cent unemployment, and economic conditions that even the New York Times described as "miserable." "While a few at the top, the political allies of Mr. Tudjman and the ruling party, have acquired fabulous wealth, which they flaunt with flashy cars and expensive clothes," there is widespread poverty below, with the middle class being reduced to an increasingly penurious condition.19One Croat opposition leader criticized Tudjman for having done "more damage to Croatia than good," producing "widespread corruption [and] nonfunctioning state institutions.

Things were even worse for the thousands of Serbs who remained in Croatia, especially the elderly. Many were living under shocking conditions, according to Alice Mahon, a visiting British member of parliament. Serbs encountered discrimination in health care, education, and employment, she found. While homes occupied by Croats benefited from full reconstruction finance, Serbs were unable to get assistance to rebuild their destroyed domiciles.

When it came to producing an inequitable and dysfunctional state, Tudjman had plenty of help from international financial interests. Under a 1993 agreement with the IMF, the Croatian government was not permitted to use fiscal or monetary policy to mobilize its own productive resources. The deep budget cuts mandated by IMF restructuring forestalled the possibility of Croatian-directed investment and production. Government development programs could be conducted only through fresh foreign loans, which would fuel Croatia's already sizable debt for generations to come.

In early January 2000 the HDZ suffered a dramatic drop in support and was voted out of office in favor of a centrist coalition that, while promising to clean up the worst of the HDZ's corruption and abuses was not likely to do much to free Croatia from the financial grip of its Western "liberators."