By Michael Karadjis
The death of Croatian president Franjo Tudjman was followed by the crushing defeat of his Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) in January's election, losing in nine of 10 electoral districts and receiving only 24% of the vote. The centre-left opposition — led by Ivica Racan of the Croatian Social Democrats, the reformed successor of the old Croatian Communist Party, and Drazen Budisa of the Croatian Social Liberals — have formed a new government with another four former opposition parties.
The defeat was then capped with the victory of Stipe Mesic as new president on February 7. Mesic was a long-time opponent of Tudjman, and was briefly the last president of Yugoslavia, in 1991.
Tudjman had been a Partisan general in World War II, fighting to bring down the Nazi-installed, genocidal Ustashe regime. He subsequently became a leading historian of communist Yugoslavia and in the 1960s advocated more autonomy for Croatia. Years in jail embittered him and by the 1990 Croatian election he was a full-blown Croatian nationalist. In that year, his right-wing HDZ swept to power.
artition
As head of independent Croatia, Tudjman imitated his Serbian mentor Slobodan Milosevic, introducing nationalist state symbolism which alienated the Serb minority. In 1991, Milosevic used this situation to launch a brutal attack on Croatia, devastating its cities and carving out a third of Croatia as a "Serb republic" from which the Croatian majority was expelled.
Tudjman and Milosevic then engaged in more fruitful collaboration over the next four years, implementing their joint plan to rip apart Bosnia into Serb and Croat republics. This partition was then formalised by the US-inspired Dayton Accords of late 1995, dividing Bosnia into two.
Milosevic was willing to connive in Tudjman's recapture of Krajina, the only part of occupied Croatia with a Serb majority. Milosevic considered Krajina economically worthless and territorially outside the Serbian regional sphere; he also wanted the Krajina Serbs to fill the population void in the now "Serb" half of Bosnia, "Republika Srpska", which had both expelled its Muslim and Croat populations, but also witnessed the flight of hundreds of thousands of Bosnian Serbs who had no wish to live in the graveyard "state" assigned to them.
Tudjman's expulsion of 150,000 Serbs from Krajina in 1995 drew no reaction from Belgrade. He was now toasted as a hero for liberating Croatian territory, which could have been achieved less painfully; in reality, he wanted the territory to house similar numbers of Bosnian Croats expelled from Republika Srpska. Such population transfers consolidated the new de facto regional borders.
Tudjman did not formally achieve his dream Croat Republic, "Herzeg-Bosna", in the other half of Bosnia. Rather, the satellite Bosnian wing of the HDZ had to share that half with Bosnian Muslims in a "Muslim-Croat federation" hammered together by Washington.
Tudjman created Western hostility by continually threatening to revise Dayton and annex Croat-dominated regions of Bosnia; in practice, his HDZ constructed an informal "Herzeg-Bosna" in violation of the agreement.
Western hostility was not motivated by principled opposition to partition, which was the essence of Dayton, but rather the fear that a formal Herzeg-Bosna, like Republika Srpska, would leave a poverty-stricken, geographically isolated Muslim state in the heart of the Balkans, bent on re-conquering the territories its populations have been expelled from.
Croatia had to be satisfied with de facto control of half of Bosnia, rather than the more robust nationalist schemes of the HDZ. In its continual drift to the right on Bosnia policy and internal issues, Tudjman's regime more and more found its natural allies in the Ustashe. While only a narrow fringe in Croatia, receiving around 5% of the vote, the Ustashe has been more and more incorporated into the state machine by the HDZ.
Tudjman also refused to fully cooperate with the International War Crimes Tribunal, which is still demanding various Croatian officers charged with crimes against Muslims and Serbs.
For the Western powers, the need for such high level trials is a necessary balance to keep the Bosnian Muslims in check — they lost the most out of Dayton and have threatened to break the agreement and reconquer Bosnian territory if certain minimum conditions are not met.
While the return of Muslim refugees to Serb- and Croat-controlled regions is their main aim, this is also the one least likely to be met, and Western powers have no real interest in pushing for it. Why upset a balance that is now stable? Hence the need for more high-level symbolic actions like trials of war criminals.
Despite the popular view of a Serbo-Croatian rivalry dominating the Balkans, the decade-long Serbo-Croatian agreement survived last year's NATO aggression against Serbia. Making no official comment on NATO's attack, Tudjman invited the G-8 countries to his palace to pose as Milosevic's negotiator, putting forward the Belgrade's preferred solution — the partition of Kosova. Tudjman knew that such a formalised partition would allow him to press for the same within the Muslim-Croat Federation.
Capitalist restoration
On economic policy, Tudjman's Croatia closely parallels Milosevic's Serbia — capitalist restoration proceeds at a faster pace unofficially than officially. This allows the ruling parties and their mafia allies to seize control of strategic assets for themselves and their children, squeezing out potential competitors in a more "free market".
These new crony capitalists are then subject to less regulation than if their ownership was formalised; yet this lack of formalisation imposes no limitations on their ability to be capitalists. Both countries are abound with stories of government ministers who "manage" "state" industries, fleecing them and passing assets along to their own or relatives' privately owned operations.
Political and economic power is shared by some 200 families, headed by Tudjman's family. Prominent among them are the "Herzegovina lobby", i.e., Bosnian Croats whose mafia connections made them loads of money during the Bosnia war. Their prominence reveals the mercenary aims of Tudjman's chauvinist policy in Bosnia — keeping control of business operations is as important as "Greater Croatia" mythology. In return, the Herzegovinan mafia made sure that Bosnian Croats voted in Croatian elections for the HDZ — and their fixed quota allowed a gerrymander that until now kept the HDZ in power.
Interestingly, while Tudjman used anti-communism against his social democratic opponents, the HDZ has 60,000 former "communists" in its ranks, more than all the other parties combined. This reflects its nature as the chosen party of former bureaucrats wishing to restore capitalism via grabbing state property.
This is mixed with selling strategic national assets to imperialist powers. Milosevic's sale of half of Serbian Telecom to Italian and Greek capital in 1997 was followed by Tudjman's sale of a third of Croatian Telecom to German capital two years later.
In contrast to the wealth of the HDZ cronies, unemployment in Croatia is nearly 21%, the foreign debt has hit US$10 billion and economic output is half of that of 1990.
The nakedly chauvinist ideologies of the regimes of Tudjman and Milosevic, and of their ultra-right allies, reflect the needs of the crony capitalist classes which destroyed the Yugoslav federation and aim to extend their control in the region. Imperialism went along with this, as it had an interest in capitalist restoration, while Tudjman and Milosevic's nationalist ideologies were preferable to the officially working-class, internationalist ideology of communist Yugoslavia.
However, sometimes the narrow chauvinist aims of these crony classes bring them into conflict with imperialism's broader needs for regional stability for investment. Now that the conquering and destruction has been achieved, it is searching for more rational wings of the new capitalist classes, willing to settle down and peacefully exploit what they have got, rather than threatening stability through an unrealistic quest for more.
Thus, Croatia has been excluded from most of the blossoming European and Euro-Atlantic institutions. Turkey was the only country to send a head of state to Tudjman's funeral. Western powers strongly backed the electoral victory of the Croatian opposition. In the recent past, the entire opposition bloc was officially invited to Washington, an invitation not extended to Tudjman.
New agenda?
In turn, the new Croatian regime has expressed its desire to join the European Union and NATO. It has made all the right moves demanded by the West — renounced Tudjman's Bosnian policy, cut off support to Herzeg-Bosna, planned to cut down the Croatian president's enormous powers and implement democratic changes, announced that it will facilitate the return of Serb refugees, and called for an investigation into corrupt privatisation deals.
Some leading HDZ cronies have already been arrested. The government has also drastically cut ministerial salaries.
Regardless of the more pro-Western direction of the new regime, the end of Tudjman and his HDZ can only mean progress. This victory opens more possibilities for left and for working-class mobilisations against the new regime's "free market" direction, already being dictated by the International Monetary Fund.
Interestingly, in the world of mafia-style crony capitalism that connected the destinies of Tudjman's Croatia and Milosevic's Serbia, an important link was "Arkan", the alias of Serbian nationalist militia leader and mass killer Zeljko Raznatovic. Arkan engaged in legal and illegal business operations in partnership with Croatian firms in the Slavonia region, not the least in the massive drug trafficking that passes through the region.
On January 15, Arkan was gunned to death in broad daylight at the Intercontinental Hotel in Belgrade. This was followed within a couple of weeks by the similar slaying of Pavle Bulatovic, Yugoslavia's defence minister, and a leader of Montenegro s opposition party.
While both killings appear connected to turf wars among the Belgrade mafia, they also both have an intriguing link to the ongoing crisis between Serbia and Montenegro, likely to be the next Balkan flashpoint. In particular, Arkan's business links to the Montenegrin government also reveal something about the nature of that government which the Western powers have been keen to promote as "moderate".