TROUBLES OVER FLIRTING WITH THE NDH
AIM ZAGREB, 5 May, 1997
This year the Jewish national festival, Yom Hashoa, received an unusual attention of the Croatian state media. The central national daily "Vjesnik" dedicated as much as two columns on its front page to this fifty-year old holiday which the Israeli Parliament - the Knesset - had established to mark May 3 each year as the "day dedicated to the memory of all holocaust victims and heroes". The text gave the exact reasons for which this date was chosen as a memorial festival of the Jewish people - it is a date falling between the anniversary of the revolt in the Warsaw ghetto and the Day of Independence of Israel - as well as that according to customs of the country all the activities on that day are suspended so that a silent tribute is paid to all victims of holocaust.
This fair and meticulous text reflects the most recent desire of the official state policy to smooth out - at least regarding the Jews - gross oversights and even more glaring distortions of the facts about the times of suffering of these people under Nazism and Fascism in Europe (and noticeably less here, in Croatia). A part of the state leadership, headed by Tudjman, has dedicated itself to that goal, so that an entire HDZ infrastructure has been created in order to take care of the losses Croatia has incurred in this sensitive field. Last year Tudjman visited Jasenovac for the first time, parts of his book "Hinterlands of Historic Reality" which disregarded and even belittled Jewish war victims were corrected, a renown economist of Jewish nationality (Porges) was appointed Minister of the Economy...
However, in all these instances changes were either superficial or none - nothing more than marking time. Corrections were made only in the foreign edition of the "Hinterlands", while the Croatian one remained unchanged. Occasionally, the highest state officials, especially abroad, boasted of Croatia's rich anti-fascist tradition while at the same time demolition of monuments from the National Liberation Struggle - NOB (although few are left) continued in the country and the pension and disability insurance rights of the participants in the anti-fascist struggle remained at the lowest possible level. Last fall Tudjman visited Jasenovac to pay his respects to the victims of "all crimes", and not of those committed at that place and he did it only after the American Ambassador Galbraith made a "demonstrative" visit to this place of execution (taking with him Milorad Pupovac, which was also a demonstration of sorts).
This year Galbraith did not go to Jasenovac, perhaps because he concluded that Tudjman's relation towards Jasenovac had begun to change - especially after Mate Granic promised that his idea on the burial of the victims from all camps under the Stone Flower monument would not be carried through - so that it is now possible to treat the modalities of this belated and imposed de-Nazification as Croatia's "internal affair". However, in his recent interview to "Feral Tribune" he said that in the USA Ante Pavelic is still considered an "enemy". That means that in its reassessment of history the Croatian leadership should basically remain consistently anti-fascist while the States reserve the right to again "interfere" in the Croatian affairs whenever they catch it flirting with the NDH.
And that is what exactly happened. After a severe
incident with the Ustashi symbols and Nazi salutes at the Split rally of the Croatian Party of the Right (HSP) just before the recent elections, the most prestigious American paper started a veritable avalanche of accusations against the Croatian state leadership. Two fierce texts published by the "New York Times" accused Tudjman and his leadership of openly rehabilitating Fascism and the Ustashis, not only by distorting and falsifying the historic facts, but by actually recognizing them as "patriotic forces and creators of a new Croatia". The description of the genocide committed by the Ustashis in these texts was somewhat blown out of proportions, as was the "revival of Fascism in Croatia" (which is best shown by the fact that the authors themselves thought that even a medium diplomatic pressure - by a lower-ranking official instead of an ambassador - on Tudjman would be sufficient to put an end to this).
However, all facts with which daily events in Croatia are described are true - starting from the mentioned Nazistic incident in Split, forming of an election coalition between the ruling HDZ and the HSP, the introduction of some of the remaining Ustashi officials to Parliament, plans for the return of Ante Pavelic's remains to the country, etc. According to some, there is no sense in believing in the usual empty phrases, as Galbraith put it, about the independent American media so that these two texts should not be interpreted as a dramatic turnabout in the American policy towards Croatia. On the contrary, it is believed that the pressure on Croatia was not greater even at times when Zagreb was being forced to stop the war with the Moslems and to sign the Washington Agreement.
Still, this time the Tudjman's party sent a message that it had no intention of giving in. The HDZ Presidency held a special session at which "untruths about the rehabilitation of Fascism in Croatia" were discussed and completely rejected. Although all papers had published that one HSP member on the HDZ list became a member of the Zagreb Assembly and the other of Parliament, accusations on coalising with the HSP were also repudiated. Admittedly, sporadic "local cooperation" with that party was acknowledged, but with the explanation that this was "the most moderate of the four parties of the right" (the Split incident showed the opposite and was therefore not mentioned). In addition, the HDZ leadership complained that not a single party "of the center" responded to its invitation to cooperate at the elections so that it turned out that these parties and not the HDZ, should be held responsible that the ruling party had ended up in the arms of a radical right-wing organization.
It was intimated that all this was a part of a broader campaign of the Croatian parties "from the left to the right wing" which those "international circles which do not accept such democratic and sovereign Croatia" joined. The aim of the campaign was - what else - but "to overthrow the HDZ majority at any cost and with all available means" and to drag Croatia into "narrower or broader Balkan regional frameworks". In other words, the dispute has become an issue of highest national interest so that it could be claimed that for the HDZ to defend (or at least to tolerate) the Ustashi "achievements" is as important as the reintegration of the Croatian part of the Danube river valley or joining "Partnership for Peace".
Naturally, this is not said in so many words. On the contrary, the ruling party describes itself as the "central Croatian party of the political center", in other words, a party which should be the incarnation of political moderateness. But that empty phrase never sounded convincing and now sounds even more hollow since Tudjman's party had probably never before exposed itself so much in relativizing and justifying the neo-Ustashi movement in Croatia, making in that process two cardinal mistakes which will be hard to rectify. Its first mistake was ensuring the political survival of the HSP at the elections, obviously more for the sake of special errands it will perform for the HDZ than because of some parliamentary partnership, and the second was protecting the HSP after the Ustashi-Nazi incident in Split. And that was the last straw.