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Mesic Video Revives Row Over Croatia’s Turbulent Past

14 12 2006  President’s forgotten speech is latest salvo in battle over country’s recent - and not so recent - history.

By Davor Konjikusic in Zagreb (Balkan Insight, 14 Dec 06)

Croatia’s centrist president has become embroiled in a political scandal following the release of a video in which he appeared to bless the memory of the country’s Nazi-style independent state during the Second World War.

A popular internet portal, Index.hr, released its controversial footage on December 9, showing Stjepan Mesic addressing Croat emigrants in Sydney in 1991 and referring to the creation of the Independent State of Croatia, NDH, as a “victory”.

The film shocked many for whom the twice-elected president is a moral force with a proven record of reconciling historic national divisions.

But the video represents only the latest salvo in a battle over the legacy of Croatia’s 1991-5 war and follows hot on the heels of the drama over the release of the former Croatian general, Branimir Glavas.

Glavas’s opposition to his investigation for war crimes against Serb civilians in 1991 in the besieged eastern town of Osijek led to him going on hunger strike for 37 days, as a result of which a judge ordered his release from pre-trial detention on December 2.

The trial has angered many in Croatia’s nationalist quarters, triggering high-profile protests. Their characterisation of the Glavas case as an attack on the legacy of the “Homeland War” is widely thought to explain the increasingly defensive tone of Prime Minister Ivo Sanader, hitherto known for his moderate and pro-European outlook.

Last week, he bitterly criticised the European Commission’s representative in Zagreb, Vincent Degert, for asking to see details of the court decision to release Glavas from pre-trial detention.

Worried by the moves of right-wing parties to mobilise support on the basis of the Glavas case, Sanader’s Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ, last week launched a “Council for Publishing the Truth on the Homeland War”.

The timing of the launch of the council, whose goal is to “preserve the truth about the war”, and which has rallied some 30 of Glavas’s army comrades, was seen as suspect, coming three days after Glavas’s release and not long after the establishment of a political party by another faction of former high-ranking military staff.

“Sanader has rounded up this bunch of generals not because he thinks they will entice an avalanche of votes but because he fears not having them as allies,” said Ivica Djikic, an editor of Feral Tribune.

Djikic condemned the decision to release Glavas as proof of the fundamental failings of the judicial system.

“The Croatian judiciary collapsed in the early 1990s when all politically and ethnically inconvenient staff were expelled and party-loyal cadres were appointed instead,” he said

Denis Kuljis, of the weekly Globus, said all the main parties in Croatia were attempting to gain the high ground with a flood of unrealistic promises and other initiatives in the run-up to the election.

“The parties are in a state of panic over the elections because they have driven away the voters with their activities in the past few years,” he said.

“The Social Democrats are looking to win over HDZ voters while the HDZ has turned to those who rally around Branimir Glavas.”

Many saw Sanader’s lambasting of Degert as a sign of his determination to look tough in the eyes of electors.

Sanader also accused Degert of misinforming Europe’s enlargement commissioner, Olli Rehn, over a decision last week to finally launch a long-planned ecological protection zone in the Adriatic Sea, known as ZERP.

In fact, the ZERP issue is unlikely to cause a serious breakdown in negotiations with the EU. Since announcing the ZERP, the premier speedily backed off from plans to put it into action, saying it would not take effect until 2008.

He also moved to enlist the support of opposition parties and Mesic in establishing a consensus on the issue.

Although international law gives Croatia every right to unilaterally declare an ecological zone in its waters, Rehn is adamant that such moves may not be made at the expense of prior commitments to the EU Adriatic members, Slovenia and Italy.

The attempt to protect fast-diminishing fish stocks in the Adriatic from over-fishing by Italian and Slovene trawlers is popular at home.

But analyist Davor Gjenero says Sanader’s reaction was a thoughtless attempt to win over voters and has ended up humiliating him.

“Croatia has been given a timely reminder… that pre-election circumstances do not exonerate a country from living up to its European commitments,” said Gjenero.

While Europe seems keen to defend its fishing rights in the Adriatic, Mesic’s words in Sydney about the NDH have caused less of a stir abroad.

At home, people voiced their support for the president, including representatives of anti-fascist, Jewish and Serbian organisations.

The footage is at variance with the line taken by Mesic at every opportunity since winning the presidency in 2000 to put as much distance between Croatia and its fascist epoch as possible.

However, Djikic, author of a biography of the president, says it was no secret that Mesic had a compromising past. “Mesic surfed the nationalist waves in the early 1990s and provided the rhythm to the nationalism that then epitomised official policy in Croatia,” he said.

“Mesic is neither completely black nor entirely white” and should be “judged on the basis of his overall political activities”, he added.

Speaking about the 1991 speech, Mesic said he made it to a “heated” crowd in the middle of a war that then raged in Croatia.

“I had to call it [the NDH] a victory because we had got rid of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia,” he said. “[But] the NDH was a crime… as were fascism and Nazism,” elaborated Mesic.

The international community has taken little interest in the issue. Nor is it much concerned with the government’s populist rhetoric over the Homeland War in the run-up to the election.

“As long as Sanader enjoys the support of the Serbian parties in Croatia … and insists on non-interference in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s internal affairs, it is irrelevant what kind of songs he sings, or when,” said the Balkan analyst Augustin Palokaj.

Davor Konjikusic is a regular BIRN contributor. BIRN is Balkan Insight’s online publication.