HUNTING SEASON ON MESIC OPENED

AIM Zagreb, 11 May, 1997

The hue and cry against Stipe Mesic started in the customary way. The Croatian television published in its central daily news program that Vjesnik and Vecernji list would carry the exclusive statement Mesic gave at the Hague Tribunal where he had appeared, it was stressed, as a witness of the prosecution. This very fact would, Vjesnik published the next day, "in the eyes of many Croats, especially the victims of the war, certainly cause serious moral doubts, and even consternation". Vecernji list was even more specific and sharper and already in the title warned that Mesic had stabbed Croatia in the back.

It is true that this phrase, highly popular in all theories of conspiracy, was put under quotation marks, but Vecernji list, daily with a high circulation, nevertheless broke the unwritten rule of being slightly more moderate and ideologically less rigid than Vjesnik. Moreover, on that very same day, parts of Mesic's testimony were also published by Slobodna Dalmacija about which many had until now admitted that it had at least tried not to be merely the spokesman or vulgar ideological instrument of the regime. This made it quite clear that these texts had been dictated from the very top of the state administration, which is in any case the only place where the three dailies forced to disseminate the "wanted" poster of Mesic, could have received records about his testimony. Slobodna Dalmacija was the only one which afterwards tried to save at least a tiny bit of professional honour and published an interview with Mesic the very next day.

In it he denied a few notorious lies which had been intended to convict him in a summary procedure. He declared that it was not true that he had addressed the Hague Tribunal, but that investigators of the Tribunal had visited him in Zagreb as the former president of persidency of SFRY. Mesic did not deny that he had signed that he was willing to be at the disposal to the Hague Tribunal as a regular witness at a trial, but he said that the biggest portion of his statement given to investigators referred to "Milosevic and his brutal war in Croatia and B&H". In the end, he rejected the accusation that he had made up his mind to cooperate with the officials of the Tribunal because he was disappointed by the outcome of recent local and regional elections, in which he and his Croat National Party fared badly, because he had given this statement in the end of last year, that is, long before the elections.

In the statement he had given to some other media (Zagreb Radio 101), Mesic was not so "apologetic", but said that he had indeed agreed to cooperate with the Hague Tribunal in order to do harm to Croatia, but to Croatia personified by extremists and war mongers in the current authorities. With this remark in view, the published stenogram of Mesic's statement can be said to be one of the most comprehensive and the most competent critical texts on the Croatian official policy in the war years that has ever been printed, in a high circulation and at the expense of the state itself. In his analysis Mesic went back to developments before the war and he said that in the beginning the Croat Democratic Community (HDZ) had not been ethnically exclusive, but after the first Serb rebellion, closed meetings were held one after the other at which Tudjman repeatedly claimed that only 3 to 5 per cent of the Serbs would remain in Croatia.

Since the HDZ had done nothing to oppose Milosevic's homogenization of Croatian Serbs, they were pushed into his hands, and this was disastrous. Mesic stressed that it was intended to parry this in the same way, so Tudjman offered Bela Tonkovic the possibility to move the Croats from Voivodina to Croatia, but this was not accepted. In the descriprtion of the developments which preceeded the war in B&H, Mesic said that the talks about division of Bosnia were held on two levels, between Tudjman and Milosevic, and between Boban and Karadzic. At a meeting with Tudjman and the then prime minister Valentic, Mesic said that Boban was a criminal, and Valentic agreed with him, but Tudjman answered that Boban was the only man who understood and implemented his policy.

For the beginning of the Croatian-Muslim war, Mesic blames the Croatian party and says that after the first conflicts had broken out, he himself, as the chairman of the Assembly, ordered that an assembly committee headed by Drago Krpina visit Mostar. But, after return, Krpina informed Mesic that the situation was strained mostly because of massive inflow of Muslim population into the city and that this population should be moved out of Mostar. Later, Krpina talked with Tudjman, and after that the brutal war followed in which, as Mesic specifies, for each shell fired from the Muslim side, thirteen arrived from the Croat. Mesic also mentions the Croat concentration camps in Herzegovina and says that their existence was kept secret, but that he learnt about them from a Croat who lived in Switzerland, who also informed him that demolition of the Old Bridge was being prepared.

As concerning participation of the Croatian Army in the war in B&H, Mesic says that parents of soldiers visited him in the Assembly and complained that their children had not gone voluntarily to fight in Bosnia, as officially claimed, but that they were mobilized. But, when Mesic demanded an explanation from minister of defence Gojko Susak, he answered that he had "confused things". Mesic also describes a meeting with Vico Vukojevic, the then and the current HDZ deputy in the Assembly, who came to inform him that he had been promoted into the rank of a brigadier of the Croat Defence Council (HVO) and when Mesic asked him about developments in Prozor, "he said that we (HVO) had killed so many of them, that they could not load them all on the trucks. He told me that the Croats did not have casualties. I threw him out of the office and we have not exchanged a single word since. I realized that they killed people without any aim or purpose. if his words about casualties were correct".

After the record of Mesic's testimony had been published and after he had answered to accusations in humble possibilities he was offered by the media, a silence seems to have fallen. There was nobody in the opposition to explicitly express solidarity with Mesic or ask the question what was actionable in Mesic's testimony, if promises of Croatia that it would cooperate with the Hague Tribunal were sincere (although these promises were in fact unnecessary because, being a member of the UN, Croatia is one of its founders. Only Novi list from Rijeka reacted, and as if wishing to make up for everything that the others had failed to say, it put the accusing questions in the title: "Who Ordered Mesic's Murder?" (it is claimed that the campaign against him could be understood as an ordered murder). The next day, Vjesnik appeared with a new text about Mesic's "shameful act", which was published under a ghastly title - which can be read as the answer to the title in Novi list - "Mesic's Moral and Political Suicide".

Even in Croatian circumstances, this is an unusual explosion of almost open hatred which is not motivated by facts. Even Vjesnik, which blazes the trail in merciless vivisection of Mesic, does not polemize with what he said (except in unimportant details), but wonders - why he needed to talk in the first place. This is sufficient reason for Vjesnik to manifest scorn, because Mesic accuses his recent colleagues with whom he used to share his state duties. If he had not approved the official policy he could have reacted by submitting his resignation. This is perhaps the only thing which Vjesnik is really right about. But this too was uttered hastily, in order to put an end to the opponent, because if Mesic had reason for resignation it means that everything he is saying now is true.

One can only guess what the motives of this vehement campaign are, just as Mesic himself is doing when he says tthat he believes that this is an attempt to prevent his candidacy at the forthcoming presidential elections. But, his chances in these elections are quite small, and besides he is only one of Tudjman's opponents who are constantly attacked nowadays (along with Ivan Supek, Ivo Banac, Ivan Zvonimir Cicak, Feral Tribune...). Most of them have no ambitions in these elections and are not rivals to Tudjman. But they are known for systematically revealing blemishes in his curriculum vitae which his supporters are now trying polish and adorn - among other by a pompous celebration of his 75th birthday - so that it will glitter even when the Leader and the Commander will be no more. Mesic is just one of those who are in the way.

MARINKO CULIC