Messages to Kostunica Addressed to Local Public

AIM Zagreb, October 16, 2000

As soon as the change of the regime in Belgrade had occurred, the docks of the port of Rijeka were piled up with several hundred tons of bulk cargo - some granite and cables and similar - supplied or purchased by Serbian firms, and in approximately one week the first large deal will already be made. A ship will enter the port carrying seventy thousand tons of iron ore for the steelworks in Smederevo, and in the course of this and next year about 250 thousand tons of ore is expected to arrive for the same customer through this port.

This information came from Rijeka in the end of last week and probably in the coming weeks and months there will be many more like it. For the time being it is an exception which is more a sign of restraint of Croatian entrepreneurs and their waiting for signals from politicians than of an expected renaissance of economic flows interrupted ten years ago. Not even economic experts wish to declare their stand about this, but the opinion of a single one of them was sufficient for this topic to make it to the front page of Novi list from Rijeka.

This newspaper published an article written by economist Gusta Santini from Zagreb who claims that Croatia could draw the biggest economic benefit from Milosevics fall. Santini implies revival of for decades developed economic relations on the territory of former Yugoslavia and hopes that Croatian economy will not make mistakes it had made in Bosnia & Herzegovina. He did not state what would be the reasons - except "logic of geo-economy" - that would speak in favour of expectations that this time it would be better. But his stand is important if for no other reason because Santini is the first one who publicly stated the view that lifting of the sanctions imposed on Yugoslavia was in fact lifting of the "sanctions" on Croatian export to this country.

In majority of other public statements the approach that still prevails is that the sanctions against Yugoslavia are quite unjustly being lifted so quickly and without unconditionally demanding from Kostunica to extradite Milosevic to the Hague. With plenty of pathos it is demanded that Yugoslavia cross the same road of recognition by the international community Croatia had crossed although it is clear that from the very start this road had never been the same (sanctions had never been imposed on Croatia, and they were introduced against Yugoslavia not because of the Hague indictment against Milosevic but because of military engagement in B&H).

Things have gone so far that prime minister Racan recently called the journalists of twelve media and informed them that he was quite concerned because of the impression created among important foreign interlocutors (Albright, Cook,...) that Croatia regretted because of the changes in Serbia. These changes could not be less in the interest of Croatia than of the international community, the prime minister said to the journalists, which sounded as a reproach to some of them and to the part of Racan's colleagues in the leadership of the state, but perhaps most of all to head of the state Mesic. He had made his first international contacts after having come to power with former Yugoslav neighbours (B&H, Slovenia, Montenegro), because of which he was criticised even by a part of the ruling coalition who said that he was keeping Croatia tied to the regional milieu it did not wish to be in for a long time.

But after changes in Serbia Mesic took strikingly bristling stand, declaring, for instance, that he would not go to Belgrade for inauguration of Vojislav Kostunica, because he was ”still treated as a traitor there”. To make matters even worse he seems to have uttered this in fury when he had learnt that Racan had sent his special envoy Paro to Belgrade without having consulted Mesic about it (foreign minister Tonino Picula just informed him about this mission evidently without even asking to hear his opinion about it). It therefore turned out that vanity of the highest state officials was more decisive for taking the stand concerning changes in Belgrade than geo-economic and geo-political interests the initial volume of which, as we heard, is measured by millions of dollars.

Be what may, Mesic joined the smallish orchestra of the highest Croatian state officials (the loudest among whom was chairman of the assembly Zlatko Tomcic) who demand immediate extradition of Milosevic as the eliminating criterion according to which the new regime will be distinguished from the old one. In an ultimatum Tomcic also demands from Kostunica to apologise to Croatia and other victims of Greater-Serbian aggression, which would not be an eyesore if it were not for a big “but”. Tomcic was infuriated mostly by Mesic who declared that Croatia should also apologise for the victims of the war it had caused, and Budisa even accused him of flirting with the allegedly increasingly aggressive “left extremism in Yugoslavia”.

All this seems even more bizarre when one knows that for months already trampling of the radical right is heard all over Croatia, which even managed via Croat Democratic Community (HDZ) to impose a debate in the assembly on “protection of dignity of the Homeland War”. Despite the turmoil raised in the assembly, in the end by consensus essentially HDZ's view of that war was adopted, as virgin-pure with just a few isolated filthy incidents at its margins. It was not even necessary to invest much effort to persuade the ruling six to reach such a conclusion because they were the very ones who have lately stressed the stands which insist on “sacredness” and unsoiled purity of the homeland war.

Nobody has even wondered how the diagnosis of Tudjman's regime as an authoritarian and even totalitarian regime fits into this, nor is not it a historical constant in all countries – except in Croatia – that totalitarian regimes wage dirty wars. In this sense that very Tomcic declared in Vjesnik a few days ago that “Croatia has definitely not been the aggressor” in B&H, and deputy prime minister Goran Granic is sincerely surprised in Feral Tribune how could anybody suspect HDZ of “deliberate ethnic cleansing” of the Serbs in Croatia. It is easy to draw a conclusion from this that had Tudjman been still alive and had anybody demanded his extradition to the Hague, both Tomcic and Granic would have jumped on their hind legs like Kostunica, and moreover, still defend it with pompous stories about war justice, and not by pure political pragmatism.

After that, a man cannot but wonder what is this actually all about. Kostunica will not give Milosevic, Tomcic and Granic would not have given Tudjman, so where is the clutch?! Is this not a silent agreement of initial stands which is just camouflaged by blabbering about noble knighthood of the ones and shamelessness of the others. After all, this conformity will very soon become obvious if the new Belgrade regime will really avoid cooperation with the Hague Tribunal as implied by the initial statements. It is highly probable that Croatia will also start being even more reserved than before or even start openly calculating whether its former co-operativeness with that Tribunal – and even the international community in general – was “profitable” for it. And this means that in near future we might witness a series of re-runs of great Serbo-Croat idyll from the nineties.

Marinko Culic

(AIM)