Without Tudjman, Things Are Looking Up in Croatia

Croatians will mourn Franjo Tudjman, who died last Friday, as the president who led their country to independence and military victory. Others will remember him less kindly.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Richard Holbrooke called Tudjman the most dangerous man in the Balkans for his unconcealed ambition to create greater Croatia at the expense of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Human rights advocates rightly hold Tudjman responsible for the atrocities that followed Croatia’s 1995 conquest of the country’s Serb-held Krajina region.

Tudjman was often his own worst enemy. In 1991, his insensitive policies toward Croatian Serbs helped obscure the fact that Croatia was the victim of a premeditated attack by Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, whose forces seized nearly 30% of Croatia’s territory and brutally expelled ethnic Croats. Tudjman retook the Krajina only after its Serb leaders began an attack on the adjacent Muslim-held Bihac enclave. Since the Croatian offensive seemed the only way to stop the massacre of Bihac’s population, the United States did not object. Sadly, Tudjman then ignored my strong warning that harming Serb civilians would affect his relations with the West for as long as he was in power.

While contemptuous of Bosnia as a state and racist in his views on the Bosnian Muslims, Tudjman did make key decisions in 1994 that paved the way to the Dayton peace process: He ended a Muslim-Croat war in Bosnia, gave up demands for a separate Croat republic in Bosnia and agreed to form the Muslim-Croat Federation.

At home, Tudjman’s leadership was authoritarian in style but less so in effect. Croatian courts and public opinion stymied his repeated efforts to close hostile publications and take over Zagreb’s independent station, Radio 101. He did manipulate state television to his party’s advantage: In the 1997 presidential election campaign, the main evening news gave Tudjman 300 times the coverage of his nearest rival. In reaction, Croatian journalists, including leading figures from state television, began a vigorous campaign for media independence.

Tudjman ran a country whose politics and culture are substantially more democratic than he was. The coming months could bring changes that augur well for Croatia’s ambition to begin the process of European integration and for stability in the north Balkans.

Tudjman’s Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) party seems all but certain to lose upcoming parliamentary elections to a coalition of former Communists and Liberals. Both parties have sharply criticized Tudjman’s promotion of Croat separatism in Bosnia and are committed to democratic reforms in the media and electoral system. Reflecting the diminished electoral appeal of Tudjman’s brand of Croat nationalism, the HDZ appears likely to nominate Croatia’s popular foreign minister, Mate Granic, as its presidential candidate. Granic, who has an impressive record on humanitarian issues, was the key figure in persuading Tudjman to make concessions to achieve peace.

Unlike Tudjman, who never concealed his long-term goal of breaking up Bosnia even as he made tactical concessions to win Western support, most Croatians see these Bosnia ambitions as a liability that has led the West to treat Croatia as an outcast. Tudjman’s likely successors do not share his dream of greater Croatia and almost certainly will reduce material and political support for Bosnian Croat nationalism. Tudjman’s death thus eliminates one of the major threats to the survival of a single Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The greatest stain on modern Croatia is its treatment of its ethnic Serb minority, and politically this may be the wrong of the Tudjman era that is most difficult to right. Of the 600,000 Serbs who lived in prewar Croatia, fewer than 300,000 remain. In 1995, nearly 200,000 fled the advancing Croatian army, which then proceeded to burn down Serb homes to prevent them from returning. Under U.S. pressure, Croatia rescinded laws that stripped departing Serbs of their citizenship and property, but bureaucratic obstacles to the return of Serbs remain. As recently as the past few months, Croatia has moved to disenfranchise its Serb minority by eliminating parliamentary seats reserved for them by the constitution and by denying the right to vote to Croatian citizens who are ethnic Serbs living in Yugoslavia.

With wartime memories still fresh, protecting Serb rights is not popular among Croats. Yet Croatia’s next government cannot expect its country to be treated as a democracy unless it is prepared to treat all Croatian citizens equally, without regard to their ethnicity.

Tudjman’s death closes a difficult chapter in Croatia’s history. His successors now have an opportunity to make Croatia a full member of the West. By so doing, they will contribute greatly to the Western interest in a durable peace in the Balkans.