Elections in Croatia

TUDJMAN'S WAY FROM THE TUNNEL TO THE VATICAN

AIM, ZAGREB, 19.10.1999.

Parliamentary elections in Croatia, which should take place within next hundred days, could become one of the numerous Croatian miracles, promoted again in the speeches of President Tudjman. Although no one, except him, knows the voting date, although the electoral law still has not been accepted in the Parliament and it is not clear how many election constituencies there will be in the country, the election campaign is well under way. The ruling party HDZ and its president, despite evident traces o ss, have launched a heated campaign, which is covered with difficulties even by the enthusiastic Croatian Television. Numerous reports about Tudjman's activities and successes of his party in the prime-time news bulletin "Dnevnik" leave almost no room for the coverage of other events in the country and abroad.

The early stage of the HDZ campaign shows that it will be based on four key elements, which should convince the electorate that only this party is able to preserve "the state stability", namely to resist the attempts of "pushing Croatia back to the Balkans", and thus guarantee "the road from victory to prosperity". In only three days, the head of the HDZ campaign team, President Tudjman himself, confirmed these strategic lines. He first took part in the post-mortem ceremony devoted to Bruno Busic, t famous Croatian emigrant (who was killed in Paris in 1978), whose body was taken to the homeland and buried in Zagreb with a great state pomp. Tudjman's public appearance at the funeral was a message to Croatian emigrants that they were not forgotten and that HDZ was very much concerned for all the people who had had to leave Croatia during the Communist regime. He is very well aware of how much Croatian diaspora, including a part of those who had left the country for political reasons, has lost t rust in H DZ, as the party carried out very few of the promises given while it was collecting funds from emigrants for the first multiparty and later elections in Croatia. The parade with Busic's funeral had another aim: to remind of "the darkness of the Communist hell", in which Yugoslav secret police UDBA was assassinating Croatian patriots, and to suggest to voters - between lines - that the past could be repeated if Racan's reformed communists (SDP party) came again in power.

The second direction of the HDZ campaign, as devised by President Tudjman, focuses on proving its "state-building capacity", which this party treats as its exclusive ownership. It was demonstrated only a day after Busic's funeral by, again, Tudjman himself, in the speech he delivered in Gracac to Croat refugees from Bosnia, who settled there in deserted Serbian houses. Tudjman turned the tragedy of these people, who had left the Sava valley and middle Bosnia as the greatest victims of the Croatian p n Bosnia and Herzegovina, into the HDZ's triumph. He came there to calm them down, saying they "were on their own land" no one "would expel them from anymore", adding that "as a democrat and a humanist" he would however allow the "return of few Serbs" to Croatia. This message aimed to secure the votes of refugees and displaced: the President personally came to visit the refugees and assure them that there was no reason for worrying - the return of Serbs could not endanger them. Meeting with refug ees, Tudjma n did not miss the opportunity to repeat the already many times repeated phrase that HDZ would not allow the return of Croatia to the Balkans, although no one, neither in Croatia nor abroad, seriously considers this. These tough attitudes about Serbs ("The Serbs will never again rule the Croatian state") and the Balkans aim to promote the HDZ party as the guarantee of Croatian sovereignty and independence.

The third element of the ruling party election strategy should present HDZ as the political party which fulfills its promises and is the only one capable of providing welfare and economic prosperity. Although a new tunnel that has recently been built through the Velebit mountain still needs years of construction work in order to be used for traffic, Tudjman rushed to celebrate its cutting through and present it as a "great construction victory". It was to be pictured to the nation as a proof of the ic power of the country, which easily carries out even most complex insfrastructural operations.

The forth element of this strategy will be demonstrated in the next few days (October 28), during the President's visit to the Vatican, where he is going to open the exhibition "Croats

• Christianity, faith, art". As planned, Tudjman will be admitted by the Pope himself. The Holly Father has already been used for HDZ election purposes, often to the degree of distaste, with his picture printed on the HDZ election placards. Tudjman now heals his complex of Tito's communist general by "private visits t oly place of Bistrica God's Mother", flattering to the Church and to Catholics in general. National television dutifully filmed even these "private visits" of the President and his family, intended to mobilize sympathy among believers and present Tudjman as a humble Catholic, with a faith deeply seated in his heart.

However, Croatian reality is very different from the picture Tudjman is trying to present to the public, running his toughly paced campaign from day to day. Croatian diaspora has turned its back to the country, feeling cheated and betrayed by the policy led by Tudjman and his HDZ. Hundreds of refugees, who had bought the HDZ propaganda and invested their hard acquired property in the ruined and plundered Croatian banks, are left without any capital. The number of emigrants who returned to the countr g the HDZ rule is negligible in comparison to the number of those who left the country in a search for a better life. Frightening the nation with the idea that, without HDZ, Croatia will be pushed back to the Balkans is equally futile. It is the very Tudjman's policy which has lead the country to the point that it is not planned for joining the European Union even within next ten years.

Building of the tunnel through the Velebit mountain, which was spectacularly presented, was promised almost four years ago. In the meantime, numerous corner-stones of new constructions sites which were sowed by Tudjman during pervious election campaign - like the one for the bridge on the Drava river near Belisce - have been well covered by weeds. And finally, regarding the treatment of the Church and pretending of religiosity one could say that never in Croatia, before the HDZ rule, there has been h hypocrisy in expressing religious feelings, accompanied with moral decadence in the atmosphere of all-present greed and plundering, social disconcern by the government for the people in need and hasty grabbing of results of the work of generations of workers. Although Tudjman appears on the tube behind any acceptable degree, and his propaganda, which is in control of the most influential media, colors everything pink, a simple glance through the window can easily identify the tragic state of affair s pro duced by a ten-year's rule of the HDZ party.

DRAGO HEDL