special report - European Voice

CROATIA
30 May 2013
19
Željko Jovanović Minister of sport,
education and science
In sports-mad Croatia, a minister
for sport does not lack profile.
But Željko Jovanović has a political
prominence in a different
league from his portfolio. There
are two reasons. He is an ethnic
Serb in a post that has required
him to try to cool virulent nationalism
in the stadium, often directed
at Serbs. It is not just hooligans that he riles – the owner of
leading Croatian football club Dinamo Zagreb has insulted him
publicly as someone who by definition works against Croatia
because of his ethnic background. That is quite a charge to level
against a 48-year-old who participated in the Serb-Croat war of
1991-95 on the Croat side – albeit as a medic.
Jovanović himself has a warrior side, of the cultural sort. In the
23 years since he first entered parliament, he has established
himself as a leading liberal within the Social Democrats on social
issues, giving the right (as well as the far-right) an extra reason to
loathe him. The latest clash has been over his introduction of sex
education into primary schools. Jovanović pushed it through
without the usual consultative process, causing fury among
lawyers as well as his political opponents. He has responded with
ad hominem attacks on judges. In the reactions he prompts and
some of his own actions, Jovanovićis a reminder that an
unhealthy hothouse quality persists in Croatian politics.
AG
Neven Mimica European commissioner-designate
When Croatia joins the Union on 1 July, Neven Mimica is slated to
become the country’s first European commissioner. His hearing
before the European Parliament is scheduled for next Tuesday (4
June).
From Split, Mimica is an economist and trade specialist by background.
He served in various diplomatic functions from 1978, both
for Croatia and for Yugoslavia, in an era when the Yugoslav
republics had their own diplomatic relations with foreign countries –
up to a point.
After Croatia declared independence in 1991, Mimica became assistant trade minister and served
in senior posts in Cairo and Ankara before his appointment as chief negotiator for the pre-accession
Stabilisation and Association Agreement with the EU in 2000-01, and as minister for European integration
in the Social Democratic-led government in 2001-03. A technocrat, he joined the SDP in
2004 and was a member of parliament in 2004-11, serving as chairman of the European integration
committee. With Mimica, Milanović’s government will lose a minister who is seen as very capable
and an achiever. He is also very close to Milanović personally.
TV
Ranko Ostojić Interior minister
Born in 1962 in Split, Croatia’s second city, Ranko Ostojić, a lawyer
by training, stood for mayor of Split in 2009 but was defeated by
Željko Kerum, a populist supermarket magnate not affiliated to any
party, who was voted out earlier this month. Ostojić has a strong
local base in Split and is seen as possible leadership material in the
SDP. Before his appointment as interior minister, he was a member
of parliament in 2007-11.
Ostojić’s public career started out in municipal affairs. He was
head of resources for his native city in 1997-2000 and briefly served as head of the regional police
department, before becoming assistant minister and chief of Croatia’s police in the first SDP-led national
government in 2001-04. He worked as an executive of Slobodna Dalmacija, Split’s main daily,
in 2005-07.
(Not to be confused with Rajko Ostojić, the health minister, who is standing for mayor of Zagreb in
a run-off election next Sunday.)
TV
MEPs
Croatia’s 12 MEPs were elected on 14
April, in an election surprisingly dominated
by the centre-right Croatian Democratic
Union (HDZ), Croatia’s main opposition
party and a member of the European
People’s Party. Previously, the country had
had only observer MEPs, sent from its
national parliament, the Sabor.
The HDZ managed to double the number
of observer MEPs it had to six, while
the ruling Social Democratic Party (SPD) –
whose MEPs are part of the Socialists and
Democrats group in the European Parliament
– declined from six to five seats. The
small Labour Party kept its one seat, while
three smaller parties lost theirs. Turnout
was just 20.8%. The new MEPs will serve
until Parliament reconvenes after EU-wide
elections in May 2014. Croatia will then
lose one seat, as will several other member
states, to ensure that the total of
MEPs complies with the provisions of the
Lisbon treaty.
Croatia’s 3.7 million voters were asked to
rank individual candidates on party lists,
rather than voting for a closed party list as
had been the practice before.
The SPD’s Tonino Picula, a sociology professor
who served as foreign minister in
the party’s first government in 2000-03,
achieved the best result by far, with
106,000 votes. He was followed by Ruža
Tomašić, the Eurosceptic and socially conservative
candidate of a small right-wing
party who, as part of an electoral alliance,
Slavko Linić Finance minister
When Neven Mimica becomes
Croatia’s European commissioner,
Slavko Linić will be the only
member of the Croatian cabinet
to have served as a senior minister
in a previous government.
That detail belies a more important
point – that Linić, now
Croatia’s finance minister, has for
years been a leader in his own
right. Indeed, he is perhaps the
most plausible alternative leader,
though not a rival, to Prime Minister
Zoran Milanović among the
Social Democrats. He is not close
to Milanović, either personally or
in age.
At 63, he has behind him a career that includes ten years as the
mayor of Rijeka, a regional power base that served as a springboard
to three years as deputy prime minister to the Social Democrats’
late doyen, Ivica Račan, in 2000-03. In the years between
ministerial posts, he consolidated his political standing
with the chairmanship of two parliamentary committees.
Through those years in local government, national government
and in parliament, he has maintained a reputation for competence.
Now, Linić, whose career began in managing businesses’
finances, faces the greatest test of his financial acumen.
AG
Orsat Miljenić
Justice minister
A lawyer, Orsat Miljenić was
born in Dubrovnik and is a
founding member of Transparency
International Croatia.
As justice minister, he is in
charge of Croatia’s fight
against corruption. In 1996-
2000, he worked for the foreign
ministry and was posted
as a diplomat to the Netherlands.
In 2000-02, he was
head of the government office
managing relations with the
UN war crimes tribunal for the
former Yugoslavia and rose, in
2002-04, to be assistant minister
and then deputy minister
for European integration.
He practiced law from 2004
until his appointment as minister,
without political affiliation.
TV
had been included on the HDZ list.
Tomašić, a former police officer in
Toronto, got the best result on the entire
opposition side, with close to 62,000
votes. Next highest was the HDZ’s Andrej
Plenković, a career diplomat who was
state secretary for Europe in the Kosor
administration, with 36,000 votes.
The HDZ-led coalition also includes
Dubravka Šuica, Davor Ivo Stier, Ivana
Maletić and Zdravka Bušić. Biljana
Borzan, Marino Baldini, Oleg Valjalo and
Sandra Petrović Jakovina are the other
MEPs from the SPD-led alliance. Nikola
Vuljanić is the Labour Party’s MEP; as an
observer, he was affiliated with the S&D
group.
TV
A troubled history
Croatia 1991-present
Croatia declared independence
from the crumbling Yugoslavia in
June 1991, together with Slovenia,
its neighbour to the north-west.
The Yugoslav People’s Army
(JNA), which by then had come
under the sway of Serbian
strongman Slobodan Milošević,
attacked both republics, but withdrew
from Slovenia after a tenday
war to focus on Croatia, with
its sizeable ethnic Serb population.
That autumn, the JNA’s brutal
siege of the towns of Osijek and
Vukovar prompted outrage –
especially in Germany, whose
diplomacy was instrumental in
the EU’s decision in mid-December
1991 to recognise the two
republics on 15 January 1992.
Croatia’s separation from
Yugoslavia was bloody and traumatic,
with the JNA and Serbian
paramilitaries taking control of
large swathes of territory along
the border with Serbia and with
Bosnia and Herzegovina, to which
the war spread in the spring of
1992. Non-Serbs were violently
expelled from those areas, a practice
that brought the term ‘ethnic
cleansing’ back into the political
vocabulary.
In the spring and summer of
1995, after three years of stalemate
in Croatia, the Croatian
army, with US assistance,
launched two lightning offensives
against Serb forces, advancing
deep into Bosnia and forcing
Milošević to the negotiating table
in Dayton, Ohio, in November. The
offensive sent some 200,000
ethnic Serbs fleeing to Serbia and
Serb-held areas of Bosnia and
Herzegovina.
The hard-line nationalist policies
of Franjo Tudjman, Croatia’s
leader, had also wrought havoc in
Bosnia. Croatia initially backed the
Bosnian government but, in 1993,
Tudjman agreed with Milošević to
partition the country, and turned
against his allies in a bid to carve
out a Croatian state within Bosnia.
Perhaps the most poignant symbol
for that bloody struggle is the
divided city of Mostar, in Herzegovina,
whose Ottoman-era
bridge was destroyed by shelling
from units under the command of
a Croatian general, Slobodan
Praljak. Praljak was sentenced to
20 years in prison by the United
Nations war crimes tribunal in
The Hague yesterday (29 May).
The fate of Tudjman’s Croatian
Democratic Union (HDZ), at the
time an extreme nationalist movement
that refused to make any
gesture of accommodation to the
country’s Serb citizens, mirrors
that of Croatia itself. Tudjman’s
death threw the HDZ into an identity
crisis, and it was out of power
between 2000 and 2003. But Ivo
Sanader, its new leader, began
turning the hardline nationalist
grouping into a more mainstream
Christian Democratic party.
Sanader in mid-2009 abruptly
resigned as prime minister in
unexplained circumstances and is
now serving a ten-year prison
sentence for corruption; his
successor, Jadranka Kosor,
continued his modernisation
agenda.
But as important as the HDZ’s
internal renewal were the three
years from 2000 during which
Croatia was governed by coalitions
led by the Social Democratic
Party (SDP) of the late Ivica
Račan. He had been the last
leader of the Yugoslav-era League
of Communists of Croatia, was an
indecisive prime minister, and had
great problems holding his coalition
together. But it was his government
that led Croatia out of its
international isolation and undertook
the reforms that paved the
way for the start of membership
negotiations with the EU in 2005.
Croatia before 1991
An independent mediaeval kingdom
for two centuries until it
came under Hungarian rule in
1102, Croatia was part of the
Habsburg Empire from the early
16th century. For centuries,
Catholic Croatia was on the frontier
with the Ottoman Empire,
which ruled neighbouring Bosnia,
Serbia and Montenegro with their
Muslim and Christian Orthodox
populations, a frontline experience
that has shaped Croatia’s national
identity (and inspired
Samuel Huntington’s notion of a
clash of civilisations). After the
collapse of Habsburg rule in the
First World War, Croatia joined
the other South Slavs (except the
Bulgarians) to form the shortlived
Kingdom of Serbs, Croats
and Slovenes (renamed the Kingdom
of Yugoslavia in 1929).
The kingdom’s dismemberment
by the axis powers in 1941 led to
the creation of the Independent
State of Croatia led by Bosnianborn
Ante Pavelić. “From this
regime,” writes the historian John
Lampe, “sprang the most savage
intolerance seen anywhere in
Europe during the Second World
War outside of the Nazi regime
itself.” Pavelić’s Ustaša regime
and the Jasenovac concentration
camp became synonymous with
the extermination of Jews, Serbs,
Roma and others.
The second Yugoslavia was
founded and dominated by Josip
Broz Tito, partisan leader and perhaps
Croatia’s most famous son
(albeit born to a Slovene mother
in what was then the Habsburg
Empire). Croatia, like the other
Yugoslav republics (Slovenia,
Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia,
Montenegro, and Macedonia)
and Serbia’s two autonomous
provinces (Vojvodina and Kosovo),
had a degree of self-rule,
especially after 1966, within the
confines of one-party rule.
In 1971, Tito purged Croatia’s
liberal leaders in order to rein in
Croatian nationalists who had
benefited from the loosening of
party orthodoxy in the republic;
among those imprisoned was
Franjo Tudjman, who two decades
later would lead the country to
independence following Tito’s
death, and the resurgent Serbian
nationalism it triggered.
Toby Vogel
Ethnicity
The preamble to the Croatian constitution of 1990, amended in 2010,
describes Croatia as “the nation state of the Croatian nation and the
state of the members of its national minorities”, and then goes on to list
22 groups –including Serbs – “and others”. Its adoption in 1990 meant
that ethnic Serbs in Croatia went from being the dominant group in
Yugoslavia to being a minority in Croatia.
In the last pre-war census, in 1991, Serbs made up 12.2% of Croatia’s
population. By the time of the first post-war census, in 2001, the proportion
had dropped to just 4.5%, where its has roughly remained since.
That was largely the effect of the offensive that brought Serb-controlled
territories under government control in the summer of 1995, prompting
a huge exodus of ethnic Serbs.
According to the 2011 census, no other ethnic minority came even
close to 1%, although taken together they made up 7.7% of Croatia’s
population. At the same time, 95.6% of Croatia’s population listed
Croatian as their mother tongue. Just 0.53% of Croatian residents held
foreign citizenship.