When will you break
free from your chains and rise up with one voice, tall and proud? When
will you finally notice the gathering storm and take shelter? When
will you stop thinking like a slave and seize your destiny?
Croatia
is facing its most severe crisis since it won its war for independence
in 1995. During the next few months, the fate of Gen. Ante Gotovina—and
more importantly, that of Croatia—may be decided. Zagreb is launching
an all-out attempt to capture him; the government hopes that this will
facilitate Croatia's entry into the European Union.
Prime Minister Ivo Sanader and President Stipe Mesic have made it
their top priority to send Gen. Gotovina to
The Hague. Both leaders claim they believe the general is “innocent.”
Hence, they argue he should defend himself in court against the
malicious accusations put forth by the tribunal's chief prosecutor,
Carla Del Ponte.
“We
really believe he has a winnable case,” a senior Croatian diplomat
recently confided.
Moreover, it is a common view among
Zagreb's political elite that the voluntary surrender or capture of
Gen. Gotovina will remove the final obstacle blocking Croatia's
accession into the EU. “Gotovina is holding us back from Europe. He is
holding back our prosperity and economic development,” declared
Croatia's former Ambassador to the United States, Ivan Grdesic, at a
2004 banquet in Chicago sponsored by the Croatian American
Association. “If he was really a patriot and a man of courage, he
would surrender to The Hague immediately.”
Mr.
Grdesic, as usual, is wrong. More importantly, Mr. Sanader and Mr.
Mesic are also wrong. In fact, their policies of appeasement towards
Del Ponte pose a mortal threat to
Croatia's national security interests and to the existence of the
country itself. Rather than bringing Croatia into Europe, sending Gen.
Gotovina to The Hague will be the death blow to Zagreb's national
sovereignty; the country will thereby be relegated to third-class
status as a permanent part of “the Western Balkans.” The Gotovina
indictment is the poisoned chalice of Croatian politics. By drinking
from it, Zagreb's elite will be committing national suicide.
Dangers of
Unconditional Cooperation with The Hague
The
first problem with
Croatia's policy of “unconditional cooperation” with The Hague
tribunal is that it violates the legal theory at the core of
international relations for the past several centuries—namely, what
scholars refer to as “territorial exclusivity.” This theory holds that
national governments have exclusive sovereignty over their
territories, especially regarding the prosecution and punishment of
war crimes committed on their soil. The only exception to this
established theory is if a state is unable to pursue war criminals
because of legal anarchy created by a protracted war or because the
national territory is under foreign occupation (such as Germany and
Japan immediately following World War II). The reason national
governments historically have refused to cede sovereignty over war
crimes cases to an outside, international tribunal is that it implies
moral and legal inferiority. It is saying that those governments do
not have the moral legitimacy or the legal capabilities to try cases
in their domestic courts.
This very principle in fact is held so dear by nations around the
world that they are even willing to go to war in order to defend this
right. For example, in 1914 the Serbian government vehemently
objected when the Austrians sent an ultimatum insisting on
investigating the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand within
Serbian territory. The Serbs ceded on every item in that fatal
ultimatum but not on this last one—a point of honor that was
understood and supported by many other foreign nations including
France and Britain.
Also, more recently, the Chilean government was deeply insulted when a
Spanish judge sought to try former strongman Augusto Pinochet in a
foreign court for crimes committed in
Chile during the 1970s and 1980s. Chile rightfully insisted that
Pinochet be tried in a domestic court. The Chilean government
eventually succeeded in its bid. This marked a significant victory for
the country's fledgling democracy.
However, instead of defending
Croatia's territorial exclusivity, Zagreb has frittered away its
hard-won sovereignty and constitutional self-government by allowing
The Hague tribunal to dominate the country's legal jurisdiction. Like
all great statesmen, former President Franjo Tudjman had his strengths
and weaknesses. But one of his greatest mistakes is that, this
supposed arch-nationalist, badly undermined Croatia's international
standing by agreeing to cooperate with the tribunal. Ultimately, he
did so only because Zagreb was facing diplomatic isolation and
economic sanctions. Nevertheless, his decision put Croatia on the road
to becoming a colony of The Hague and more importantly, of Brussels.
By accepting the policy of unconditional cooperation with the ICTY,
Tudjman did what very few leaders have done: He allowed his nation's
democratic institutions to be degraded, and put its civilizational
destiny in the hands of an unelected, foreign tribunal that is neither
accountable nor responsive to the Croatian people.
Most self-respecting democracies would never allow their
constitutional sovereignty to be so arbitrarily and needlessly
violated—no matter how much international pressure is exerted upon
them.
Israel, for example, had numerous wars with its Arab neighbors and
continues to occupy Palestinian territories. Yet Israelis on both the
Left and the Right are united in their opposition to having their
soldiers be subject to the whims of an international court.
Also, despite incessant demands that deposed dictator Saddam Hussein
and his brutal Baathist henchmen be tried by a foreign tribunal,
Iraq's feisty democrats insist the Butcher of Baghdad face his victims
in an Iraqi court. They are not willing to cede their demands for
justice to some obscure, supra-national entity.
Tudjman's Legacy
Yet
it is doubtful that Tudjman would have allowed Gen. Gotovina to be
sold down the river, regardless of the diplomatic consequences.
Although Tudjman sent more Croatian military officials to
The Hague than Ivica Racan, Mr. Sanader and Mr. Mesic combined, their
indictments never threatened the dignity and legitimacy of the
Homeland War. Tudjman was many things—a Central European conservative,
a romantic intellectual, a born-again Catholic and a former communist
apparatchik—but above all he was Croatia's Bismarck: a first-rank
statesman who forged his country's independence through “blood and
iron.”
Tudjman understood that
Croatia fought a just war for national liberation not only from
Serb-dominated Communist tyranny, but from centuries of foreign
repression. He understood that the Homeland War represented the
legitimate aspirations of the Croatian people to affirm their
God-given rights to life, liberty and self-government. He understood
that Croatia's eventual triumph in its war for independence,
especially the spectacular success of Operation Storm, signified a
great victory for the forces of democracy and national
self-determination. Gen. Gotovina's troops liberated large swaths of
Croatian territory that were brutally occupied by Serb paramilitaries;
he also saved tens of thousands of besieged Muslim refugees from being
slaughtered in northwestern Bosnia. Gen. Gotovina's forces delivered a
decisive blow to Slobodan Milosevic's genocidal project of an
ethnically pure “Great Serbia,” which butchered over 250,000 people
(many of whom were the elderly, women and children) and drove nearly 2
million from their homes.
In
Croatia alone, Milosevic's marauders murdered nearly 20,000 Croats,
ethnically cleansed over 180,000, raped countless women (often in
front of their children or husbands to terrorize the population),
pillaged and looted dozens of villages, destroyed entire cities and
towns, and annexed nearly one-third of the country for
three-and-a-half years. Gen. Gotovina's brilliant military leadership
ended
Croatia's long nightmare. And more remarkable still, General Gotovina
achieved this by incurring minimal civilian casualties. If ever there
was a just war and a just military campaign, this was it. Tudjman
understood all of this. That is why he never would have agreed to send
Gen. Gotovina to The Hague to face trumped up charges of “command
responsibility” for the operation because this threatens everything
Tudjman sought to accomplish.
Numerous international law experts and news publications—from Newsweek to the Wall Street Journal to the
Jerusalem Post to my
paper, The Washington Times—have
examined the charges against the general and have rendered a unanimous
and unequivocal verdict: the indictment is weak and deeply flawed. So
why then shouldn't the general voluntarily surrender and fight it out
in court?
Gen. Gotovina Must
Never Surrender
The
answer is simple and it is one that Gen. Gotovina is perfectly aware
of: the indictment is a trap from which he—or for that matter any
other general in human history—can never be found innocent. By
indicting him on the basis of “command responsibility,” which advances
the completely radical notion that senior commanders are responsible
for crimes carried out by their subordinates, even if they did not
actually order or sanction these crimes, The Hague tribunal has set
the legal bar so high that no general of Gotovina's stature could
evade a guilty verdict. The tribunal is essentially accusing him of
not being God. It is claiming that, by virtue of his position, he
should have had the foresight to anticipate and prevent any possible
future crimes committed by his soldiers during Operation Storm.
Yet
the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that the military campaign
was carried out exceptionally quickly, ending within three days;
civilian casualties were minimal (roughly 150 Serb civilians), and
even many of those atrocities were carried out not by Gotovina's
troops, but by returning irregulars bent on revenge. Moreover, during
Del Ponte's prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic, she herself has
revealed that it was the local Serb leadership in Knin, and not
Gotovina's forces, that ordered the evacuation of the civilian Serb
population prior to the commencement of the operation. Recent evidence
has also come to light showing that Gen. Gotovina investigated nearly
300 isolated cases of alleged wrongdoing by his soldiers, and he
punished many of them. Hence, he led a surgical, American-backed
military campaign that minimized civilian deaths, restored his
country's territorial integrity and averted a humanitarian
catastrophe. He deserves the Noble Peace Prize rather than to be
indicted as a war criminal.
According to the rationale being used against Gen. Gotovina, every
military commander since the beginning of human history is a “war
criminal” because atrocities have been committed in every campaign.
For example, George Washington's troops committed numerous crimes,
including rape, indiscriminate murder of civilians and the looting of
Loyalist homes during the American Revolution. Was
Washington also a war criminal according to the ICTY's new definition
of “command responsibility” because he failed to prevent the
barbarities committed by some of his soldiers?
Furthermore, is the commander of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Gen. Tommy
Franks, a war criminal because some of his troops murdered innocent
civilians or did nothing to prevent the mass looting that took place
after Saddam's fall? According to the ICTY's twisted logic, he is. (In
fact, it is precisely the incoherence and legal absurdity of the
ICTY's theory of “command responsibility” that has angered senior Bush
administration officials, such as John Bolton, the President's nominee
to be the next
U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.) But, of course, Gen. Franks or
any other Western commander has not been indicted by an international
court. The anti-American internationalists at the United Nations are
aware of the public outrage it would cause. Gen. Gotovina, however,
has become the laboratory rat for Del Ponte and her fellow activists
at The Hague. Their goal is to rewrite international law; they hope to
pave the way for a utopian global order that seeks to eradicate war
through judicial fiat.
It
is the nature of military conflict that evil acts are committed. What
distinguishes the good side from the bad one is the purpose and
overall conduct of the war. Milosevic's marauders waged an aggressive
campaign based on mass murder and ethnic cleansing. Gen. Gotovina's
forces launched a defensive operation that saved untold numbers of
lives and liberated the region from Milosevic's genocidal grip. Del
Ponte is trying to rewrite the history of the break-up of
Yugoslavia. She is seeking to equate the actions of monsters like
Milosevic, Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic with those, such as Gen.
Gotovina, who defeated them.
Establishing the Basis
for a Greater Serbia
If
Gen. Gotovina is handed over to
The Hague, he will face a rigged trial where he will be found guilty.
An innocent man and a war hero will thus be falsely imprisoned; his
life and reputation will be destroyed. The Gotovina case has
repercussions that are much larger than the fate of one man. Croatia
will be branded in the eyes of the international community as a nation
based on ethnic cleansing and mass murder. This will destroy the
country's international standing, its sovereign legitimacy and its
territorial integrity. In short, a guilty verdict will establish the
moral and legal basis for Belgrade to launch another attempt to
reconstitute a “Greater Serbia.”
In
fact, Serbian revanchists openly acknowledge this, which is why
Belgrade and the Serbian lobby in Washington are adamantly insisting
that the general be sent to The Hague. One of Del Ponte's key sources
of misinformation in her witch hunt against Gen. Gotovina (and other
Croat generals) has been Savo Strbac, a former government secretary in
the rebel Serb self-styled “Krajina” para-state. Investigative
journalist Brian Gallagher has incisively uncovered that Strbac was a
high-ranking official of the RSK (Republika Serpska Krajina). In other
words, Strbac was an important participant in what The Hague itself
has called “a joint criminal enterprise.”
“Our wish is to live with the other Serbs of the former
Yugoslavia,” he told the New York
Times on Dec. 4, 1994. “The Croats never asked us about
secession, and the fact is we don't want to live with them because of
our memories of genocide during World War II. So let us secede from
Croatia the way Croatia seceded from Yugoslavia.”
Mr.
Gallagher has revealed that Strbac, as the head of a non-governmental
organization, known as “Veritas,” which purports to help Serbs
displaced from
Croatia, has been intimately involved in helping the tribunal
prosecute leading Croats. According to Mr. Gallagher, the tribunal's
then-Deputy Prosecutor Graham Blewitt sent out a “Letter of
Endorsement” to help this ex-RSK official to raise funds for Veritas.
Dated March 2, 2000, the letter says that the organization “led by Mr.
Savo Strbac” assists the prosecutor in a “professional, serious and
responsible manner by collecting information about certain events
which occurred during the period 1990-1995 in Croatia.” The letter
goes on to stress that Veritas provides “access” to victims and
witnesses, and that several Veritas projects “if properly funded”
could “advance considerably some important investigations of the
prosecutor.”
It
is scandalous that the tribunal would be relying on a Serbian fascist
and high-ranking official of the RSK criminal enterprise for
assistance in its indictments of Croatian generals. The ICTY is
actively cooperating with murderous gangsters to further its agenda.
This is akin to an international tribunal relying on Saddam's henchmen
to prosecute
U.S. soldiers or senior Nazis to indict prominent Allied military
commanders like Gen. Dwight Eisenhower. This is an egregious abuse of
power and warrants an independent investigation of Del Ponte's office.
If there is an official U.S. Congressional probe of Del Ponte's
activities on Capitol Hill (which seems more likely by the day), the
Strbac affair will be a major component of the investigation.
More importantly, in an interview with Nedeljni Telegraf,
a
Belgrade newspaper, published on
August 15, 2001, Strbac openly admitted that he has been
pushing the indictment against Gen. Gotovina because it is an
“outstanding opportunity” to re-establish the “Republika Srpska
Krajina” by “legal means.” Strbac went on to state that the references
to Tudjman in the Gotovina indictment are “especially important for
the sake of history because all judgments of the ICTY will also at the
same time be judgments against Tudjman. That is especially important
for our history, but perhaps more importantly for our immediate
future.”
“The indictment against Gotovina redefines history, or as Racan likes
to say, 'criminalizes the Homeland War' . . . If the Hague proves the
criminal responsibility of the commander of the most important
Croatian military operation, then that commander will be a war
criminal, and the action that he led will be a criminal operation,”
Strbac said. “Finally, an operation that was criminal in its essence
is not a ‘homeland war’ or a defensive war, but a criminal war and an
aggressive war. Because of this, a state that was established on war
crimes cannot continue to exist, but its makeup must be redefined.
That offers an opportunity for us Serbs to establish through legal and
legitimate means our right to renew the Republika Srpska Krajina.”
Belgrade's
Anti-Croatian Strategy
It
is no accident that
Serbia's largest and most popular political party, the Radical Party,
recently sponsored a motion in Parliament demanding an end to
Croatia's “ten-year occupation of the Serb Republic of Krajina.” The
motion puts forward the revanchist claims that can also be found on
the Radical Party's official Web site
(http://www.srs.org.yu/aktuelno/memo.php)
in its “memorandum on the legal and political impossibility of
maintaining the occupation of the Republic of Serb Krajina.”
The
Radicals maintain in their memorandum that
Croatia is a state “founded on crime and occupation of the sovereign
territory of the free Serbian people,” and that this “occupation is
not legal but a temporary condition.” The memo insists “that the
Serbian national question and preservation of the Serbs on their
territories can be realized only by termination of that occupation and
by assuring the security of and free decision-making to all who lived
on that territory prior to the occupation of Serb Krajina.”
The
memorandum reflects not only the ideological fanaticism and
nationalist extremism of the Serbian Radical Party, but also the
viewpoint of many within
Belgrade's political class. Tomislav Nikolic, the leader of the
Radicals and follower of the notorious Serbian fascist Vojislav Seselj,
came within several percentage points of defeating Boris Tadic in
Serbia's last presidential elections. If the country's economy
continues to spiral downward, it is very likely that the Radicals may
gain power. This will trigger another crisis with neighboring Croatia.
Moreover, the Radicals are not alone in their anti-Croatian racism. It
is well to remember that the domestic anti-Milosevic opposition during
his wars of aggression was fueled by many prominent leaders—Vojislav
Kostunica, Vuk Draskovic, the late Prime Minister Zoran Djindic—who
supported
Belgrade's revanchist aims. They were not opposed to Milosevic's goal
of creating a Great Serb empire that would stretch from the Danube to
the Adriatic; rather, they were simply opposed to the means he
employed in achieving that goal. Hence, it is very likely, if not
inevitable, that in the future Belgrade will demand that Croatia's
borders be altered and that its territories be annexed to Serbia.
In
fact, this anti-Croatian strategy has been the linchpin of
Belgrade's diplomacy since the creation of Yugoslavia in 1919.
Serbia's political elite, whether on the Right or the Left, has
consistently understood that the largest obstacle to Belgrade's
dominance of the region is Croatia—especially, a strong and united
Croatia. Therefore, throughout the 20th century Serbia's policy has
been to prevent the emergence of an independent and viable Croatia.
This can be seen in Belgrade's brutal repression of Croatian national
aspirations during the 1920s and 1930s; the mass murder and expulsion
of ethnic Croats by Draza Mihailovic's racist Chetniks; the slaughter
of hundreds of thousands of Croatian dissidents by Tito's Partisans
and the savage persecution of the Croatian Catholic Church; and
Milosevic's genocidal campaign to smash and dismember Croatia's
fledgling democracy.
It
is naive and wishful thinking, bordering on historical ignorance, for
Zagreb's current political elite to imagine that Belgrade has
abandoned its centuries-old expansionist ambitions. For the moment,
the Serbs are focusing on internal problems (such as the final status
of Kosovo and reviving Serbia's anemic economy). But this will not
last indefinitely. “Nothing has been settled between us and the
Croats,” blurted a political advisor to Serbian Prime Minister
Vojislav Kostunica during a heated discussion with me. “There will
never be lasting peace in the Balkans until Croatia relinquishes its
Serbian territories.”
This is why the Gotovina indictment is the most important issue facing
Croatia today. It is the issue that will define what kind of nation
Croatia will be, and what its future will hold. By sending Gen.
Gotovina to The Hague, Zagreb will in effect be squandering all the
gains and sacrifices made during the Homeland War. Gen. Gotovina's
defeat will represent Croatia's unilateral surrender to Brussels, The
Hague and ultimately, to Belgrade. Croatia's war for independence will
be criminalized and Croatians will have abrogated their national
sovereignty.
The
country will be rendered impotent on the world stage; it will
thereafter lack the constitutional and territorial legitimacy needed
to be an effective, functioning nation-state. The country will be cast
into a Balkan abyss: it will be part of a peripheral European
perimeter characterized by constant ethnic conflict, shifting
territorial boundaries, mass poverty, rampant corruption, the presence
of international peacekeepers and dependence on foreign aid. Rather
than securing
Croatia's destiny within Europe, handing Gen. Gotovina into the fatal
embrace of Del Ponte will ensure Zagreb's exclusion from the
mainstream of European civilization.
Britain's
Opposition to Croatia
Moreover, the claim by Messrs. Sanader and Mesic that surrendering
Gen. Gotovina will pave the way for
Croatia to enter the EU is predicated on a false premise: the vain
hope that Britain will drop its fierce opposition to Zagreb's
membership bid. If the general is handed over to The Hague, the
British Foreign Office will find another reason to block Croatia's
entry. Already, London-based human rights groups and non-governmental
organizations are demanding that Zagreb be denied membership until
other issues—such as refugee resettlement, property compensation,
minority rights and local courts convicting greater numbers of
Croatian soldiers for alleged war crimes—are resolved.
The
British Foreign Office is intractably opposed to
Croatia joining the EU. Zagreb's entry ahead of Belgrade would
undermine Britain's long-standing foreign policy goals in the Balkans.
Since the late 19th century, London's primary objective has been to
provide a strategic bulwark against Germany and Austria.
For
Britain, this has meant strongly supporting Serbia at the expense of
Croatia. The creation of an autocratic Yugoslavia dominated by
Belgrade was primarily a British initiative. During World War II,
Winston Churchill's government threw its full weight first behind the
rapacious Chetniks, and later behind the genocidal Partisans.
Immediately following the end of the Second World War, the British
government played a pivotal role in sending over 250,000 Croats to be
slaughtered by Tito's communists at Bleiburg and in ghastly death
marches. The British Foreign Office led the opposition in Europe to
Croatia's independence in 1991. London emerged as the Bosnian Serbs'
staunchest ally in the West, consistently blocking any attempts to
lift the U.N. arms embargo on the besieged Muslims and Croats in
Bosnia-Hercegovina. Finally, it is the British who are most
vociferously demanding that Gen. Gotovina be handed over to The
Hague—to the point of having sent MI-6 agents into Croatia hoping to
locate and capture him.
The
British Foreign Office does not have
Zagreb's best interests at heart when it insists that Gen. Gotovina be
sent to The Hague. London's goal is to bolster Serbia's hegemonic
ambitions, while weakening and undermining Croatia. Once Gen. Gotovina
is found guilty and the Homeland War has been discredited, Britain
will almost certainly reinforce Belgrade's demands for a new
constitutional arrangement and, eventually, border changes in Croatia
and Bosnia-Hercegovina. Just as in 1919, the British have set a trap:
Croatia's political elites are rushing headlong into it.
Risks of EU Membership
What is most disturbing about
Croatia's current efforts to enter the EU is that Messrs. Sanader and
Mesic are willing to make a pact with the devil. They are not only
willing to blindly betray Croatia's constitutional sovereignty and its
moral and legal basis as a nation, but they are also willing to
sellout the country's vital economic interests. They are like drunken
geese walking in the fog: they have no idea what they are doing or
where they are going. Again, just as in 1919, much of Zagreb's
political class is under the illusion that the country's long-term
interest rests in joining a centralized, multinational superstate—only
this time it is to be run from Brussels instead of Belgrade.
But
even if Croatia can somehow be allowed to join the EU in the near
future (a very doubtful prospect), the country’s bid is currently
being negotiated on terms that will decimate Croatia's struggling
middle class, workers, peasants and small businesses.
Slavonia's agricultural sector will be wiped out by the massive and
heavily subsidized agri-farms based in Germany, the Netherlands and
France. Dalmatia's fishermen will face cut-throat competition from
much more efficient and robust Italian and Spanish fishing boats. The
country's pristine and beautiful coastline will be further exposed to
being gobbled up by wealthy British, German, Austrian and Italian
investors. Croatia's domestic market will be flooded with cheaper EU
products, especially from Eastern Europe, causing even more businesses
to go bankrupt and workers to lose jobs. The country's already very
high debt level will only increase in the face of rising unemployment,
a dwindling tax base and a growing strain on social services.
Croatia
will be transformed into the Puerto Rico of Southeastern Europe: an
impoverished economic and political colony of Brussels, whose main
purpose is to serve as a tourist destination for vacationing
Europeans. Yet as the bulk of the Croatian people suffer, the former
communist, as well as HDZ elites will prosper. They will continue the
Titoist-style cronyism and rampant corruption that is stunting the
country's development. They will make sure to siphon off large chunks
of targeted EU subsidies and foreign aid which will enable them to
preserve their fancy cars, apartments and privileged status.
Ultimately,
Croatia is not ready right now to enter the EU. In fact, this
single-minded obsession by Messrs. Sanader and Mesic to have Zagreb
join as quickly as possible and at any cost is a reflection of their
utter bankruptcy as leaders. Their EU fast-track policy is a cheap
substitute for the kind of real reforms Croatia needs to undertake if
it is to become a healthy, prosperous and vibrant democracy. The
current leaders are slick Balkan conmen masquerading as statesmen.
“Civilizations perish from suicide, not war,”
wrote historian Arnold Toynbee.
Croatia is on the verge of committing suicide. There is only one man
who stands in the way of this path to destruction: General Ante
Gotovina. The general is offering the last line of resistance to the
disastrous policies of appeasement by both Messrs. Sanader and Mesic.
By preventing Zagreb's bankrupt ruling class from turning the country
into a vassal of The Hague and the EU, Gen. Gotovina is saving Croatia
one more time.
He is in the great
tradition of modern Croatian martyrs and statesmen—from Stjepan Radic
to Cardinal Aloysius Stepinac to Franjo Tudjman—who suffered and were
persecuted for the defense of their country, people and homeland.
Through his perseverance, courage and sacrifice, Gen. Gotovina has
become the rightful successor to Tudjman: a moral and political titan
who towers above the rest. Every day that Gen. Gotovina eludes
capture, he delivers another nail into the coffin of Del Ponte and her
quislings in
Zagreb. He must never surrender. He is carrying the destiny of his
nation on his shoulders. He is Croatia's hero.
- Jeffrey T. Kuhner is a historian and
contributor to the Commentary Pages of The
Washington Times. This essay is adapted from his forthcoming book,
“Fatal Embrace: The Croat-Serb Conflict in the 20th Century.” Mr.
Kuhner would like to give special thanks to Ivana Arapovic for her
invaluable research assistance in the writing of this article. Mr.
Kuhner can be reached at jkuhner@riponsoc.org.
The U.S. State Department has finally
shown its true face regarding its policy toward Croatia. And this face
is an ugly and racist one.
Last week, Congressman Thaddeus McCotter,
Michigan Republican, began to circulate an amendment that expresses
the growing concern among Republicans on Capitol Hill regarding Carla
Del Ponte’s assault on Croatia’s freedom of the press. In particular,
the McCotter Amendment, as it was referred to, focused on Del Ponte’s
recent indictments against Croatian journalists Ivica Marijacic,
Stjepan Seselj, Domagoj Margetic and Markica Rebic. It was to be
introduced in Congress and then attached to the Foreign Relations
Authorization Act, which is the bill that funds the State Department’s
initiatives toward international organizations like the ICTY. The
amendment sought to “withhold U.S. contributions to the International
Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) until the tribunal
dismisses all criminal charges against four journalists who have filed
reports critical of the work of the ICTY.”
“The actions of the ICTY are a direct
threat to the evolution of liberty in the former Yugoslavia, and we
should be more determined in our efforts to defend a strong, free
media as the ferment of every democratic process,” Congressman
McCotter said in the press release sent out by his office.
The amendment, however, was strangled in
its infancy by State Department operatives. Sources on Capitol Hill
said that select members of the House International Relations
Committee, which was overseeing the amendments process to the bill,
were told by State Department officials to vote against the McCotter
Amendment. Fearing that he didn’t have the necessary votes,
Congressman McCotter declined to introduce his amendment—thereby,
effectively killing it.
What is most stunning is not that the
amendment failed (this happens all the time in Congress and is part of
the messy legislative process). But State Department officials were
willing to resort to openly bogus and racist arguments in order to
dissuade congressional members from backing the amendment.
“What people from the State Department
were telling people here in Congress was that these four Croatian
journalists are not ‘real’ journalists,” said a source closely
involved in the amendments process to the Foreign Relations
Authorization bill.
“The State Department was also saying
that journalists in Croatia are not ‘real’ journalists. It was
frankly, unbelievable that they would say such things,” the source
added. “But I guess it worked.”
Hence, according to the State
Department’s logic, because Croatian journalists are not “real”
journalists they are not entitled to basic democratic protections.
Even for the State Department this is a new low. It is no secret that
the State Department has been a staunch supporter of the ICTY. Yet by
actively working to quash the McCotter Amendment the State Department
is showing it is willing to go to any lengths, even if it means
betraying deeply held American values and principles, to prop up Del
Ponte—no matter how many unjust and anti-democratic indictments she
puts forth.
The State Department’s actions reveal the
deep-seated racism and amoral cynicism at the heart of its policies
toward Croatia. The State Department actively defends the rights of
journalists to be free from censorship and intimidation in the Middle
East, Latin America and China. But when it comes to Croatia—and the
peoples of the former Yugoslavia in general—the rights of journalists
are not important. In fact, they are considered impediments to the
State Department’s drive to impose its internationalist,
neo-imperialist ambitions upon the region.
Since the late 1980s, following the fall
of the Berlin Wall, the State Department’s approach to the region has
been characterized by one over-riding objective: maintaining stability
at all costs. This realpolitik amoralism values order above democracy,
and regional stability—as expressed in supra-national states like
Yugoslavia—over national self-determination.
This is why the State Department opposed
the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991, as was clearly dramatized on June
25 when then-U.S. Secretary of State James Baker pronounced that
Washington “supports the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia”—giving
Serb strongman Slobodan Milosevic the green light to launch his
invasions of Slovenia and Croatia. The State Department was extremely
reluctant to recognize Croatia’s independence, despite the
overwhelming evidence of Serb atrocities. Moreover, during the 1990s
it was the State Department that actively supported maintaining the
U.N. arms embargo on both Croatia and Bosnia—in the hopes of freezing
Serb gains on the ground, which would compel Zagreb and Sarajevo to
return into some kind of union with Belgrade. Finally, it was the
State Department—along with the British Foreign Office—that
ferociously opposed Operation Storm.
Even to this day, many within the State
Department are anti-Croatia, hoping to reconstitute some kind of a
loose Balkan union. Hence, this explains Foggy Bottom’s unflinching
support for the ICTY, the indictment against General Ante Gotovina,
and closer “regional integration.” Ultimately, the State Department
believes that Croatians are essentially third-class citizens of
Europe: they are not fit to have their own country and their
democratic aspirations as a people are to be ignored. It is this
racist and condescending attitude that explains why State Department
operatives can, with a straight face, lobby members of Congress to not
protect basic human rights and journalistic freedoms in Croatia.
The State Department’s war against
Croatia will continue until the Croatian press stands up and speaks
out against Washington’s injustices. Croatian journalists are real
journalists. In fact, some like Ivica Marijacic and Josip Jovic
(another columnist facing a possible indictment by Del Ponte for
“contempt of the tribunal”) are outstanding journalists—not only by
Croatian standards, but by the standards of any country in the West,
including the United States.
The most common misperception in Croatia
today is that the State Department is the official policymaker for the
American government. It isn’t. The U.S. government is not a monolithic
entity; it has numerous, competing centers of power, the State
Department being only one of them. Former President Franjo Tudjman,
his principled Defense Minister Gojko Susak and Gen. Gotovina
understood this, which is why they circumvented the career bureaucrats
at the State Department and made their pitch for Operation Storm to
the Pentagon and the CIA. Their brilliant strategy worked, and Croatia
secured its independence as a result.
It is now high time for the Croatian
government and media to do something similar: to begin a concerted
effort to expose the State Department’s backward, anti-democratic and
disastrous policies to other American centers of power, such as
Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill (who control and determine
the State Department’s funding), the Pentagon, the National Security
Council, the CIA and most importantly, the Bush administration. This
public relations campaign should not only focus on Del Ponte’s assault
upon Croatia’s democracy and freedom of the press, but also on the
dangers of the Gotovina indictment, which aims to destroy Croatia’s
foundations as an independent state and will establish the basis for a
Greater Serbia.
Such a public relations campaign worked
in 1995; and it can work again in 2005. But to do so Croatia’s elites
must finally stand up and defend their democracy, their press
freedoms, their Homeland War and ultimately, their country. If they do
not, then they will eventually lose their country and control of its
destiny, as has happened so often throughout Croatia’s long, tortured
history, to foreign powers—whether it is the State Department, the
British Foreign Office, The Hague or Brussels.
Croatia has been asleep for too long. It
is time it arose from its slumber and seized its destiny as a free,
proud and full member of the Western community of nations. This can
only happen, however, if Croatians realize the immense value of their
democratic freedoms and hard-earned national independence. They are
gifts from God. They are not to be squandered or taken for granted. I
only hope that Croatians are up to the challenge.
-
Jeffrey T.
Kuhner is a regular contributor to the Commentary Pages at The
Washington Times.
Croatian President
Stipe Mesic has once again betrayed his country’s vital national
interests. During a recent trip by U.S. Senator George Voinovich to
Croatia, Mr. Mesic told the Ohio Republican that Zagreb
still opposes Washington’s request for American troops to be exempt
from prosecution before the International Criminal Court.
“The Croatian
public will hardly accept to have citizens of another country being
exempt from prosecution before an international court, while at the
same time Croatia is required to extradite its own citizens” accused
of war crimes to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia, Mr. Mesic told Mr. Voinovich.
Washington
rightly opposes the ICC because it will expose U.S.
military officials to politically motivated prosecutions. The
international court is the vehicle by which the anti-American Left
hopes to harass U.S. officials through frivolous indictments. The goal
of the pro-ICC globalists is to use international legal institutions
as a means of curtailing American foreign policy.
A good example of
this was the 2002 decision by a Belgian court to begin proceedings
against U.S. Gen. Tommy Franks on charges of “command responsibility”
for alleged war crimes committed by coalition forces in Iraq. Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld threatened the Belgian government with the
removal of NATO headquarters from Brussels
unless the country amended its self-anointed law of “universal
jurisdiction.” Only after intense pressure did the Belgians finally
agree.
This is why the
Bush administration is determined to have countries around the
world—including Croatia—sign
the Article 98 treaty that would shield U.S.
troops from being extradited to the ICC. So far, Washington
has secured agreement from about 100 nations.
It is an open
secret in Washington
that Zagreb’s refusal to sign Article 98 is the principal obstacle to
Croatia’s entry into NATO. By failing to support the United States
on an issue of such importance, the Croatian government has helped to
alienate senior members of the Bush administration.
Zagreb’s
diplomatic establishment fails to understand that American perceptions
of the world have been dramatically altered by the 9/11 attacks.
Washington is no longer wedded to the realist policies of the
post-Cold War era, saliently reflected during the 1990s by its initial
refusal to support the break-up of Yugoslavia or to stop the Serbs’
war of aggression against Croatia and Bosnia. The Bush administration
has now embraced an idealist foreign policy. The goal is to win the
war against Islamic extremism by spreading democracy and liberal
institutions not only in the Middle East, but throughout the globe.
Washington is looking for reliable allies, whether it is in Asia, Africa,
Latin America or the Balkans.
Croatia
now has a unique opportunity to emerge as a key strategic partner of
the United States. It can become the Israel of southeastern Europe, a
pivotal democratic and pro-American ally in an unstable area of the
world. Zagreb can act as a bulwark against both Serbian expansionism
and resurgent Islam in Bosnia-Hercegovina.
For the first time
in centuries, regional geopolitical forces are on the side of Croatia.
Serbia remains mired in corruption, economic quagmire and the
intractable problem of Kosovo. Macedonia and Albania are internally
unstable. Bosnia-Hercegovina remains an ethnic and religious
tinderbox. Slovenia and Montenegro are too small to project any
meaningful influence in the region. This is why Zagreb’s political
elite would be wise to seize the moment while it still exists. Serbia
will not be weak forever. The longer Croatia dithers, the more likely
and inevitable it is that Western powers will increasingly look to
Belgrade in the future for leadership on issues of regional
security—just as they did for much of the 20th century.
Ultimately, NATO
entry should be the linchpin of Croatia’s geopolitical strategy. A
formal military alliance with the West, especially the United States,
would not only guarantee Zagreb’s security from any future attacks by
its neighbors. It would transform Croatia into a military and
strategic partner of America and Europe, enabling the country to serve
as the leading force for democracy and stability in the region.
Croatia would finally achieve what it has sought since its
independence in 1991: to become a full and respected member of the
European community of nations.
Hence, this begs
the question: with so much at stake for his people and his country,
why is Mr. Mesic so determined not to sign Article 98? Such a decision
only perpetuates Croatia’s exclusion from NATO.
Perhaps it is
because Mr. Mesic is more interested in ingratiating himself with his
fellow internationalists in Brussels, Paris, Berlin and The Hague,
than in securing Croatia’s long-term national interests. He has
repeatedly shown himself to be a dogmatic, anti-American,
anti-Croatian leftist, whose foreign policy is irresponsible and
short-sighted. In the end, it is Croatia that will continue to pay the
price for his intellectual and moral bankruptcy.
-Jeffrey T. Kuhner
is a historian and regular contributor to the Commentary pages of The
Washington Times. He is also writing a book, “Fatal Embrace: The
Croat-Serb Conflict in the 20th century.”
Hrvatski predsjednik
Stipe Mesić je ponovno izdao temeljne hrvatske nacionalne interese. G.
Mesić rekao je američkom republikanskom senatoru iz Ohija Georgeu
Voinovichu tijekom njegove nedavne posjete Hrvatskoj da se Zagreb i
dalje protivi washingtonskom zahtjevu da američki vojnici budu
izuzeti od mogućih optužba pred Međunarodnim kaznenim sudom.
“Hrvatska javnost ne može prihvatiti izuzeće građana druge države od
tužba pred međunarodnim sudom, dok se istodobno od Hrvatske traži
izručenje njenih građana“, optuženih pred Haaškim sudom, rekao je
Mesić Voinovichu.
Washington se
opravdano protivi Međunarodnom kaznenom sudu, koji hoće izložiti
američke časnike politički motiviranim optužnicama. Taj sud je
sredstvo kojim protuamerička ljevica pokušava prozirnim
optužbama progoniti američke vojne dužnosnike. Cilj ovih globalista je
uporaba međunarodnih sudskih ustanova kao sredstva ometanja američke
vanjske politike.
Dobar primjer toga je
odluka jednog belgijskog suda iz 2002. godine o podizanju optužnice
protiv američkog generala Tommyja Franksa zbog „zapovjedne
odgovornosti“ za navodne ratne zločine koalicijskih snaga u Iraku.
Američki ministar obrane Donald Rumsfeld zaprijetio je belgijskoj
vladi da će premjestiti NATO-ov stožer iz Bruxellesa ako ona ne
promijeni taj svoj samoproglašeni zakon o “univerzalnoj jurisdikciji“.
Belgijanci su konačno pristali tek nakon snažnog pritiska SAD-a.
Upravo stoga Bushova
vlada ustrajava na tome da sve države na svijetu, pa tako i Hrvatska,
potpišu sporazum o Članku 98. koji bi štitio američke vojnike od
izručenja međunarodnom sudu. Washington je do sada osigurao pristanak
oko 100 država.
Javna je tajna u
Washingtonu da je hrvatsko odbijanje potpisivanja Članka 98. glavna
prepreka njenom ulasku u NATO. Uskraćivanjem potpore SAD-u o tako
važnom pitanju hrvatska vlada je utjecala na nesklonost viših
dužnosnika Bushove vlade.
Vrh hrvatske
diplomacije ne shvaća da su teroristički napadi na Svjetski trgovinski
centar iz temelja promijenili američki odnos prema svijetu. Washington
više ne pristaje uz realističku politiku razdoblja nakon hladnog rata,
koja se uočljivoiskazala tijekom devedesetih godina odbijanjem
potpore raspadu Jugoslavije ili pak zaustavljanju srpske agresije na
Hrvatsku i Bosnu i Hercegovinu. Bushova vlada danas provodi
idealističku vanjsku politiku. Njen je cilj pobjeda u ratu protiv
islamskog ekstremizma širenjem demokracije i liberalnih zasada, ne
samo na Bliskom istoku, već i u cijelom svijetu. Washington traži
pouzdane saveznike, bilo to u Aziji, Africi, Latinskoj Americi ili na
Balkanu.
Hrvatska danas ima
jedinstvenu priliku postati ključnim strateškim suradnikom SAD-a. Ona
može postati Izraelom jugoistočne Europe, glavnim demokratskim
američkim saveznikom u ovom nemirnom dijelu svijeta. Zagreb može biti
preprekom srpskom ekspanzionizmu i sve jačem islamu u Bosni i
Hercegovini.
Prvi put u nizu
stoljeća regionalne geopolitičke sile na hrvatskoj su strani. Srbija
je trajno ogrezla u korupciji, gospodarskom rasulu i nerješivomkosovskom problemu. Makedonija i Albanija unutrašnjopolitički su
nestabilne. Bosna i Hercegovina je i dalje etnička i vjerska bačva
baruta. Slovenija i Crna Gora su premalene za bilo kakav značajniji
upliv u ovoj regiji. I stoga bi zagrebačkoj političkoj eliti bilo
pametno iskoristiti priliku dok je još ima. Srbija, naime, ne će
zauvijek biti slaba. Što dulje Hrvatska oklijeva, to će se
vjerojatnije i neumitnije zapadne sile ubuduće okretati Beogradu kao
središtu u stvarima regionalne sigurnosti – baš kao i tijekom većeg
dijela 20. stoljeća.
I konačno, ulazak u
NATO trebao bi biti okosnicomhrvatske geopolitičke strategije.
Formalni vojni savez sa Zapadom, posebno sa SAD-om, ne bi samo jamčio
Hrvatskoj sigurnost od budućih napada svojih susjeda. On bi pretvorio
Hrvatsku u američkog i europskog vojnog i strateškog saveznika, što bi
joj omogućilo položaj vodeće snage demokracije i stabilnosti u ovoj
regiji. Hrvatska bi konačno postala ono čemu je težila još od
stjecanja nezavisnosti 1991. godine: punopravan i uvažen pripadnik
europske zajednice naroda.
Pitanje je stoga: ako
je riječ o tolikom ulogu za narod i zemlju, zašto g. Mesić tako
odlučno odbija potpisati Članak 98. ? Ta odluka trajno priječi
hrvatski put u NATO.
Možda je razlog u tome
što se on više želi svidjeti svojim internacionalističkim prijateljima
u Bruxellesu, Parizu, Berlinu i Haagu, nego osigurati hrvatske
dugoročne nacionalne probitke. On se u brojnim prilikama iskazao kao
zadrti antiamerički i antihrvatski ljevičar, čija je vanjska politika
neodgovorna i kratkovidna. Ali na kraju Hrvatska će platiti – kao
što plaća i danas – njegov intelektualni i moralni brodolom.
Jeffrey T. Kuhner je povjesničar i stalni komentator Washington
Timesa. Trenutno piše knjigu “Smrtonosni zagrljaj: hrvatsko-srpski
sukob u 20. stoljeću“.
Of all the news
accounts regarding Pope John Paul II’s funeral and Cardinal Joseph
Ratzinger’s accession to the papacy, the most interesting was the
American liberal media’s attempt to once again smear the reputation of
Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac.
The New York
Times published an article saying that the late Pope John Paul had
“incensed” his critics by the decision to beatify Cardinal Stepinac in
1998. The article went on to claim that Stepinac was the “archbishop
of Zagreb during World War II, when a Nazi puppet regime ruled Croatia
and 700,000 Serbs, Jews and others were sent to death camps.”
CNN’s Christiane
Amanpour also cited the beatification of Stepinac as one of the most
“controversial” acts of John Paul’s papacy. She scolded the pope for
elevating to sainthood a man who was the head of the Croatian Catholic
Church at a time “when the Croatian fascists were almost aligned with
the Catholic Church and had had these terrible pogroms against the
Serbs during World War II.”
It is easy to
dismiss these claims as ignorant statements from reporters who should
know better. But that would be a grave mistake. For the charges
leveled by The New York Times and CNN against Stepinac are the
culmination of decades of effective propaganda by Yugoslav authorities
and Serbian lobbying organizations within the United States.
The essence of
this smear campaign is the allegation that Stepinac, along with the
Croatian Catholic Church, collaborated with Ante Pavelic’s fascist
regime. Moreover, Stepinac’s critics charge that the archbishop either
tacitly supported or at the very least turned a blind eye to the
crimes perpetrated by the NDH, such as mass murder, genocide and
forced religious conversions. Stepinac is largely viewed by America’s
Serbian community and their political allies as a “murderer saint.”
Although many in the U.S. establishment media do not take such an
extreme position, they certainly believe that Stepinac was some kind
of a fascist collaborator.
What is
remarkable about the “Stepinac-was-a-Nazi-quisling” myth is that it is
entirely false. In fact, the allegations are directly contradicted by
the overwhelming historical evidence that has come to light since the
collapse of Yugoslavia. The wealth of information that has emerged
from the newly discovered archives in Moscow, Belgrade and Zagreb has
been especially damaging to Tito’s communist regime. This is
particularly true about Stepinac and the numerous lies propagated
against him.
Stepinac was not
a fascist, nor even an authoritarian right-winger. Rather, he was a
principled constitutional liberal who supported Vladko Macek’s Croat
Peasant Party. In 1938, after he became Archbishop of Zagreb, he
openly declared that he had voted for Macek in the elections.
Nor was he a
Serbophobe as some of his later critics have charged. Instead, the
opposite was true. For much of his youth, Stepinac had been a champion
of South Slav unity. During World War I, he even volunteered to join
the Yugoslav Legion to fight Austro-Hungarian troops on the Salonika
front. But his rapid disillusionment with Royalist Yugoslavia
paralleled that of most Croats. It was Belgrade’s stifling brutality,
its numerous pogroms against Croatian peasants, its imprisonment of
leading Croatian politicians (Stjepan Radic being the most notable)
and exploitation of the Croatian economy that most disturbed him.
In fact, no
other figure in Croatian history—with the possible exception of Franjo
Tudjman—so closely embodied the political evolution of the wider
Croatian public as did Stepinac. When he fell under the spell of South
Slav unity, so did they; when he reached out for Radic’s program of
home-rule and social democracy, so did they; when he drank from the
poisoned chalice of Pavelic’s pseudo-independent state only to recoil
in disgust, so did they; and when he stood up to Tito’s victorious
armies in defense of human rights and national self-determination only
to be crushed, so did they.
Stepinac’s major
flaw was that he was prone to be naïve about politics (and on this he
also reflected the great weakness in the Croatian national character,
which sadly continues to this day). Nowhere was this trait more
clearly on display than during the first several weeks of the NDH.
Following Nazi Germany’s invasion of Yugoslavia in April, 1941,
Stepinac—along with many other Croats—did initially welcome the
creation of the NDH. Yet Stepinac’s reasons were similar to those of
many of his fellow countrymen: It was not a fascist state that he
welcomed, but the end of Croatia’s subjugation under Serb-dominated
Yugoslavia.
However, he
quickly realized that Pavelic’s NDH was an entirely different creature
from what he had hoped and expected. The Ustashe almost immediately
began to erect a racialist totalitarian state modeled on Hitler’s
Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. Moreover, the Ustashe quickly lost
whatever mass appeal they had when the actual terms of this supposed
new “independent” state were made known to the public. Croatia was
truncated into several parts, with much of Dalmatia annexed to Italy
and German and Hungarian troops exercising “spheres of influence” over
large swaths of NDH territory, including Bosnia.
In short, rather
than securing genuine national independence, Pavelic had transformed
Croatia into a colony of Berlin and Rome. He had simply transferred
his country from one foreign dictatorship to another; only now it was
not the Serbs, but the Germans and Italians who were calling the
shots.
Pavelic’s
dwindling popularity among most Croats was evident from the summer of
1941 and lasted until the end of the war. His regime had alienated
most people in Dalmatia. It was also deeply unpopular in Croatia’s
population heartland of Slavonia, where the overwhelming majority of
citizens retained their loyalty to the Croatian Peasant Party (many of
whose leaders were imprisoned by the Ustashe). Much of the Zagreb
bourgeoisie and intelligentsia were also opposed to him. However,
Pavelic’s lack of support was especially evident in the fact that,
throughout his entire tenure in office, he never managed to
orchestrate the kind of fascist mass rallies common under Hitler,
Mussolini and Franco. The Croatian public quickly understood that
Pavelic was not their liberator, but their slave master.
Stepinac’s
genius and moral greatness lay in that he realized this and sought to
do something about it. In numerous letters and homilies throughout
1941 and 1942, he chastised Pavelic and other senior members of the
regime for the mass killings, rapes and state-sanctioned racial laws
directed against Jews, Serbs and Gypsies. “No one can deny that these
terrible acts of violence and cruelty have been taking place,”
Stepinac wrote to Pavelic in a letter dated Nov. 20, 1941. “The
Croatian nation has been proud of its 1,000-year-old culture and
Christian tradition. That is why we wait for it to show in practice,
now that it has achieved its freedom, a greater nobility and humanity
than that displayed by its former rulers.”
He later
denounced to Pavelic the Jasenovac concentration camp as “a shameful
stain on the honor of the NDH.”
In a powerful
homily delivered from Zagreb Cathedral in the fall of 1942, Stepinac
assaulted the anti-human and collectivist ideologies of Nazism,
fascism and communism.
“Each nation and
each race has the right to life and treatment worthy of man,” he said.
“This is why the Catholic Church has always condemned, and is today
condemning the injustice and acts of violence committed in the name of
theories of class, race and nation.”
Yet Stepinac did
more than speak out against the evils of his time. He also acted,
often at the risk of his own life. The Archbishop directly intervened
to save thousands of lives—Jews, Serbs and anti-fascist Croats—during
the war. Amiel Shomrony, who served under the last Chief Rabbi of
Zagreb, Miroslav Freiberger, has testified that Stepinac rescued
countless Jews by helping to smuggle them to Hungary and then on to
safety in Palestine.
Following
Stepinac’s 1946 conviction by Tito’s Partisans on trumped up charges
of collaboration with the Ustashe, Louis Braier, then-president of the
Jewish Community in the United States, said that the Archbishop was
“one of the few men who rose in Europe against the Nazi tyranny
precisely at the moment it was most dangerous. He spoke openly and
fearlessly against the racial laws. After His Holiness, Pius XII, he
was the greatest defender of the Jews persecuted in Europe."
By the end of
the war, Stepinac had become such a staunch opponent of the NDH regime
that many of his closest aides urged him to flee to the Vatican for
fear that he would be murdered by Pavelic’s secret police. Until the
collapse of Yugoslavia in 1991, the communist authorities sought to
cover up the fact that, for much of the Second World War, Tito’s
Partisans frequently incorporated Stepinac’s speeches in their
propaganda, especially his assaults on fascism, racism and Pavelic’s
violation of human rights.
Upon coming to
power, Tito realized that the Archbishop was his most dangerous
opponent. The communist strongman was determined to destroy Stepinac’s
reputation. Tito also sought to smash the principal bulwark to his
totalitarian rule: the Croatian Catholic Church.
For the
Partisans, Stepinac’s great sin was that he refused to follow the
example of the Serbian Orthodox Church hierarchy, which had become
co-opted by the new regime. Stepinac, however, spurned Tito’s demand
that Croatia’s Catholic Church separate from the Vatican, and form its
own “national” church with the Archbishop as its head.
In the end, the
Archbishop refused to be corrupted by power. His greatness lay in the
fact that, more than any other individual during post-World War II
Yugoslavia, he grasped the entire evil nature of Tito’s communist
empire. Stepinac courageously spoke out against all of the crimes
committed by the communists—the mass murder of hundreds of thousands
of Croatian dissidents; the confiscation of private property; the
restoration of a centralized, Serb-dominated autocracy anchored in
Belgrade; the abrogation of basic human rights and democratic
freedoms; the expulsion of 700,000 ethnic Germans; the destruction of
Croatia’s economy and environment; and the imposition of monolithic
state control over the media and education.
Milovan Djilas,
who was Tito’s right-hand man for much of the 1940s before he became
disillusioned with the brutality and mendacity of the regime, later
admitted that “we communists did not want any opposition, none
whatsoever.”
Stepinac
understood that Tito’s Yugoslavia was a genocidal project that sought
to eradicate Croatia’s distinct culture and national identity. And
that the Partisans’ main thrust of attack was to strangle the cradle
of Croatian civilization, the Catholic Church. This is why the
communists immediately launched a sweeping campaign to persecute the
church. Hundreds of priests and nuns were slaughtered. Church property
was confiscated. Numerous churches were turned into warehouses and
communist “cultural centers.” Compulsory civil marriage was
introduced.
Most
importantly, jurisdiction over education was stripped from the Church
and placed into the hands of the state, thereby enabling the Yugoslav
authorities to systematically indoctrinate the youth. The schools,
along with the media, were the primary vehicles by which the
authorities in Belgrade brainwashed the Croatian youth. The result was
that it produced generations of self-loathing Croats who were taught
to despise their culture, history and religion.
The linchpin of
this anti-Croatian, anti-Catholic strategy was to portray all Croats
who championed national independence as “fascists” seeking to revive
Pavelic’s NDH. As part of this strategy, Tito’s Communists had to
present the Catholic Church as a reactionary, pro-Ustashe organization
complicit in genocide and mass murder. And Stepinac, being the most
famous symbol of the Croatian Catholic Church and the Croatian
national cause, had to be crucified.
His 1946 show
trial in Belgrade was a complete sham. The “guilty” verdict was
decided before the trial even began. Djilas himself confessed that
Stepinac was condemned not for any supposed collaboration with the
NDH, but for his opposition to Tito. “He would certainly not have been
brought to trial for his conduct in the war … had he not continued to
oppose the new Communist regime,” Djilas later wrote.
“"To honestly
tell the truth, I think, and not only I, that Stepinac is a man of
integrity, a firm character, who is impossible to break,” Djilas said
in 1956. “He was really unjustly convicted, but how many times has it
happened in history that just people were convicted out of political
necessity."
Only Stepinac’s
international notoriety saved him from a grisly execution. Still, he
suffered harsh imprisonment, and then later house arrest and internal
exile in his native village of Krasic. Moreover, evidence now shows
that he was slowly poisoned to death by Tito’s secret police.
The real tragedy
of Stepinac is not that he suffered and died on behalf of his people
and his faith. This is the duty of all devout Christians. It is also
not that the Croatian media and diplomatic corps has been weak in its
defense of this great man against the barrage of propaganda emanating
from Belgrade, the Serbian lobby in Washington and their hacks in the
U.S. media establishment.
No. The real
tragedy is that many Croats, especially those on the Mesic-Racan-Pusic
Left, actually believe many of the lies told about Stepinac. They are
the products of decades of Communist social engineering. And while
Tito’s multinational Yugoslavia may be dead, they continue to share
many of its goals and prejudices. For these hard leftists, the
Catholic Church, with its opposition to abortion, euthanasia,
homosexual marriage and sexual permissiveness, continues to be a
reactionary force that needs to be marginalized. They continue to
excuse the numerous crimes of communism. They continue to deride
Croatian patriotism and the existence of a distinct national identity.
And they continue to view themselves as “anti-fascists,” insisting on
perpetuating the Titoist myth that cut-throat Ustashes are lurking
under every corner in Croatia.
In short, they
have retained the self-hating, racist attitudes inculcated by their
former communist masters. They genuinely believe that to be a proud
and authentic Croat is to be some kind of a fascist. This is why their
current political agenda is to de-Tudjmanize and de-Croatianize their
country, and to strip it of all national symbols and content. Their
hope is for Croatia to again plunge itself into an internationalist
project, whether it be a European socialist super state or a
reconstituted Balkan union.
Stepinac’s
enduring legacy is that he offered a distinctly different vision for
Croatia. He understood that God, country and family were the
fundamental institutions of a just society. He saw the evils of
totalitarianism and imperialism. He championed a democratic and
independent Croatia, rooted in its Catholic heritage and based on
human rights, social justice and constitutional self-government.
Stepinac embodied the very best of Croatia—the Croatia of priests and
peasants, princes and poets, knights and kings, professionals and
philosophers. His Croatia was not that of gangsters, opportunists and
cheap propagandists; it was neither communist Red nor fascist Black.
Rather, it was a democratic and patriotic White.
It is this
inspiring vision, along with his principled defense of human freedom
in the face of unimaginable horror, which makes Stepinac one of the
giants of the 20th century. He is Croatia’s saint.
-
Jeffrey T. Kuhner is communications director at The Ripon Society
(www.riponsoc.org), a major Republican think tank based in Washington,
D.C. He is also a regular contributor to the Commentary pages of The
Washington Times. This essay is adapted from Mr. Kuhner’s upcoming
book, “Fatal Embrace: The Croat-Serb Conflict in the 20th Century.”
Mr. Kuhner would like to give special thanks to Danica Ramljak for her
invaluable research assistance in the writing of this article.
Njegova je veličina u tomu što je, bolje nego itko u poratnoj
Jugoslaviji, prozreo svu zloću Titova komunističkog carstva. Stepinac je
hrabro istupao protiv svih komunističkih zločina: masovnih ubojstava
stotina tisuća svojih hrvatskih političkih protivnika; konfiskacija
privatnog vlasništva; povratka centralizirane autokracije ušančene u
Beogradu i pod prevlašću Srba; kršenja temeljnih ljudskih prava i
demokratskih sloboda; protjerivanja 700.000 pripadnika njemačke manjine;
uništenja hrvatskog gospodarstva i okoliša i nametanje monolitne državne
vlasti nad medijima i naobrazbom
Hrvatski mediji i diplomacija slabi su u obrani ovoga velikoga čovjeka
protiv propagandne bujice iz Beograda, srpskog lobija u Washingtonu i
njegovih plaćenika u najmoćnijim američkim medijima. Prava tragedija je
što mnogi Hrvati, osobito oni s Mesić-Račan-Pusićkine ljevice doista
vjeruju u brojne laži koje su rečene o Stepincu. One su proizvod
desetljeća komunističkog socijalnog inženjeringa. I dok je Titova
Jugoslavija možda doista mrtva, oni i dalje dijele mnoge njezine težnje
i predrasude
Zanimljiviji od svih medijskih prikaza pokopa Ivana Pavla II. i izbora
kardinala Josepha Ratzingera za novog papu bili su pokušaji američkih
liberalnih medija da još jednom okrnje ugled kardinala Alojzija
Stepinca.
New York
Times je tako objavio članak u kojemu stoji kako je papa Ivan Pavao
'razjario' svoje kritičare odlukom da 1998. godina beatificira kardinala
Stepinca. U članku se dalje tvrdi kako je Stepinac bio «zagrebački
nadbiskup tijekom 2. svjetskog rata, u vrijeme kada je Hrvatskom vladao
nacistički marionetski režim, a 700.000 Srba, Židova i drugih poslano u
logore smrti».
Christiane
Amanpour sa CNN-a također je navela Stepinčevu beatifikaciju kao jedan
od 'kontroverznih' poteza pape Ivana Pavla. Ona ga je ukorila što je
uzdigao na čast oltara čovjeka koji je bio poglavarom hrvatske katoličke
crkve u vrijeme «kada su hrvatski fašisti bili gotovo svrstani s
katoličkom crkvom i provodili strašne pogrome protiv Srba tijekom 2.
svjetskog rata».
Lako bi
bilo opovrgnuti ove tvrdnje kao neznanje nedoraslih izvjestitelja da to
uistinu nije bila teška pogrješka. Optužbe New York Timesa i CNN-a
protiv Stepinca tek su vrhunac djelotvorne promidžbe jugoslavenskih
vlasti i srpskih lobističkih udruga u SAD-u.
Srž ove
crne legende je tvrdnja kako su Stepinac i hrvatska katolička crkva
surađivali s fašističkim režimom Ante Pavelića. Štoviše, Stepinčevi
kritičari tvrde kako je nadbiskup prešutno podupirao ili barem gledao
kroz prste zločinima NDH, kao što su masovna ubojstva, genocid i nasilno
pokrštavanje. Srbi u Americi i njihovi politički saveznici Stepinca
uglavnom smatraju 'svecem ubojicom'. I mada mnogi vodeći američki mediji
ne dijele takvo ekstremno stajalište, oni zacijelo misle kako je
Stepinac bio neka vrsta fašističkog suradnika.
U mitu o
Stepincu kao 'nacističkom kvislingu' zapanjuje što je on potpuno lažan.
Ovim tvrdnjama, zapravo, proturječe neoborivi povijesni dokazi izašli na
svjetlo dana nakon raspada Jugoslavije. Obilje podataka iz
novootkrivenih pismohrana u Moskvi, Beogradu i Zagrebu osobito je
razorno za Titov komunistički režim. Ovo posebno važi za Stepinca i
mnogobrojne laži koje su se širile o njemu.
Stepinac
nije bio fašist pa ni autoritarni desničar. Naprotiv, bio je dosljedni
ustavni liberal koji je podupirao Hrvatsku seljačku stranku Vlatka
Mačeka. Nakon što je 1938. godine postao zagrebačkim nadbiskupom,
otvoreno je izjavio kako je na izborima glasovao za Mačeka.
Hrvati su slijedili Stepinca, a ne Pavelića
Stepinac
nije bio ni srbofob, kao što su mu neki kasniji kritičari predbacivali.
Istina je suprotna: dobar dio svoje mladosti Stepinac je zagovarao
južnoslavensko jedinstvo. Tijekom 1. svjetskog rata čak je dragovoljno
pristupio jugoslavenskoj legiji u borbi protiv austrougarske vojske na
solunskoj bojišnici, ali se, kao i većina Hrvata, brzo razočarao
kraljevskom Jugoslavijom. Najviše ga je mučilo sirovo beogradsko
nasilje, brojni pogromi hrvatskih seljaka, uhićenja vodećih hrvatskih
političara, u prvom redu Stjepana Radića, kao i gospodarsko
izrabljivanje.
Zapravo, ni
jedno drugo ime u hrvatskoj povijesti – možda s izuzetkom Franje Tuđmana
– nije tako rječito utjelovilo politički razvitak šire hrvatske javnosti
kao Stepinac. Kad je on postao zatočnikom južnoslavenskog jedinstva, i
ona je to bila; kad je pio iz zatrovanog pehara Pavelićeve
nazovi-nezavisne države i zatim ga s gnušanjem odbio, učinili su to i
Hrvati; kad se suprotstavio Titovoj pobjedničkoj vojsci braneći ljudska
prava i nacionalno samoodređenje, plativši to skupo – i Hrvati s bili s
njim.
Stepinčeva
glavna grješka bila je politička naivnost (i u tome je on slika i
prilika te velike mane u naravi hrvatskog naroda, koja, nažalost, traje
do dana današnjeg). Ona je najjasnije iskazana u prvih nekoliko tjedana
NDH. Nakon napada nacističke Njemačke na Jugoslaviju u travnju 1941.
godine Stepinac je – kao i mnogi drugi Hrvati – prvotno pozdravio
stvaranje NDH. Ali njegove razloge dijelili su mnogi njegovi
sunarodnjaci: nisu oni klicali fašističkoj državi nego kraju hrvatske
potlačenosti u Jugoslaviji pod srpskim gospodstvom.
On je,
međutim, ubrzo shvatio kako je Pavelićeva NDH potpuno drukčija tvorevina
od one koju je očekivao i kojoj se nadao. Ustaše su gotovo od početka
gradile rasističku totalitarnu državu po uzoru na Hitlerovu Njemačku i
Mussolinijevu Italiju. Štoviše, ustaše su brzo izgubile i masovnu
potporu koju su na početku imali kad je javnost upoznala stvarne zasade
ove navodno nove 'nezavisne' države. Hrvatska je raščerečena na nekoliko
dijelova: veliki dio Dalmacije pripojen je Italiji i Njemačkoj, a
mađarska vojska držala je vlast u 'utjecajnom području' na velikim
dijelovima zemlja NDH, uključujući i Bosnu.
Umjesto da
osigura istinsku nacionalnu nezavisnost, Pavelić je pretvorio Hrvatsku u
koloniju Berlina i Rima. Jednostavno, svoju je zemlju iz ruku jedne
strane diktature predao drugoj, samo su sada, umjesto Srba, gazde bile
Nijemci i Talijani.
Pisma Paveliću
Sunovrat
Pavelićeve popularnosti među većinom Hrvata bio je očit od ljeta 1941.
godine i takav je ostao do kraja rata. Njegov režim odbacivala je većina
ljudi u Dalmaciji, a bio je vrlo neomiljen u srcu hrvatske Slavonije,
gdje je velika većina građana bila i dalje odana Hrvatskoj seljačkoj
stranci (čije su mnoge vođe dopale ustaških zatvora). I velik mu se dio
zagrebačkog građanstva i inteligencije odupirao. Ali, manjak potpore
Paveliću osobito se očitovao u tome što tijekom cijele vladavine on
nikad nije uspio orkestrirati onakve masovne skupove, uobičajene kod
Hitlera, Mussolinija i Franca. Hrvatska javnost brzo je shvatila kako
Pavelić nije nikakav osloboditelj nego gonič robova.
Stepinčev
genij i moralna veličina je u tome što je to shvatio i pokušao nešto
poduzeti. U brojnim pismima i propovijedima tijekom cijele 1941. i 1942.
godine šibao je i druge visoke režimske dužnosnike zbog masovnih
ubojstava, silovanja i državno sankcioniranih rasnih zakona, uperenih
protiv Židova, Srba i Cigana. «Nitko ne može zanijekati da se događaju
ta strašna djela nasilja i okrutnosti», pisao je Stepinac Paveliću u
pismu od 20. studenog 1941. godine. «Hrvatski narod ponosi se svojom
tisućljetnom uljudbom i hrvatskom tradicijom. Stoga očekujemo da se na
djelu pokaže, danas kad smo postigli slobodu, više plemenitosti i
čovječnosti, nego što su to iskazivali njezini bivši vladari.» (op.
prev.: navodi su prijevod s engleskog).
Kasnije je
Paveliću prokazao jasenovački koncentracijski logor kao «sramnu ljagu na
časti NDH».
U snažnoj
propovijedi u zagrebačkoj katedrali u jesen 1942. godine Stepinac je
napao nečovječne kolektivističke ideologije nacizma, fašizma i
komunizma.
«Svaki
narod i svaka rasa ima pravo na život i postupanje dostojno čovjeka»,
govorio je. «Stoga je katolička crkva uvijek osuđivala pa osuđuje i
danas nepravde i nasilja koja se provode u ime klasnih, rasnih i
nacionalnih teorija».
Ali
Stepinac nije samo propovijedao protiv zala svoga doba. On je i
djelovao, često dovodeći u opasnost i vlastiti život. Nadbiskup se
tijekom rata izravno založio za spas tisuća života – Židova, Srba i
antifašističkih Hrvata. Amiel Shomrony, koji je bio suradnikom
posljednjeg zagrebačkog glavnog rabina Miroslava Freibergera,
posvjedočio je kako je Stepinac spasio bezbroj Židova pomažući im u
bijegu do Mađarske, a zatim i do utočišta u Palestini.
Jedan od najvećih branitelja Židova
Nakon što
su Titovi partizani 1946. godine osudili Stepinca na osnovi namještenih
optužaba za suradnju s ustašama, Louis Braier, tadašnji predsjednik
Židovske zajednice u SAD-u, rekao je kako je nadbiskup bio «jedan od
rijetkih ljudi koji su se u Europi digli protiv nacističke tiranije
upravo u vrijeme kad je to bilo najopasnije. Govorio je otvoreno i
neustrašivo protiv rasnih zakona. Nakon Njegove Svetosti Pija XII. on je
bio najveći branitelj Židova, progonjenih u Europi».
Krajem rata
Stepinac je postao tako žestoki protivnik režima NDH da su ga mnogi
najbliži prijatelji nagovarali na bijeg u Vatikan iz straha da ga
Pavelićeva tajna policija ne ubije. Sve do raspada Jugoslavije 1991.
godine komunističke vlasti pokušavale su prikriti činjenicu da su,
uvelike tijekom 2. svjetskog rata, Titovi partizani često umetali
Stepinčeve govore u svoju propagandu, navlastito njegove napade na
fašizam, rasizam i Pavelićevo kršenje ljudskih prava.
Po dolasku
na vlast Tito je shvatio kako je Stepinac njegov najopasniji protivnik.
Ovaj komunistički diktator odlučio je srušiti Stepinčev ugled
pokušavajući ukloniti i glavni kamen spoticanja njegovoj totalitarnoj
vladavini: hrvatsku katoličku crkvu.
Za
partizane Stepinčev veliki grijeh bilo je odbijanje da slijedi primjer
hijerarhije Srpske pravoslavne crkve, koju je nova vlast vezala uza se.
Stepinac je, pak, s prijezirom odbio Titov zahtjev za odvajanjem
hrvatske katoličke crkve od Vatikana i stvaranjem vlastite 'nacionalne'
crkve s nadbiskupom na čelu.
On je na
kraju odbio prodati se vlasti. Njegova je veličina u tomu što je, bolje
nego itko u poratnoj Jugoslaviji, prozreo svu zloću Titova komunističkog
carstva. Stepinac je hrabro istupao protiv svih komunističkih zločina:
masovnih ubojstava stotina tisuća svojih hrvatskih političkih
protivnika; konfiskacija privatnog vlasništva; povratka centralizirane
autokracije ušančene u Beogradu i pod prevlašću Srba; kršenja temeljnih
ljudskih prava i demokratskih sloboda; protjerivanja 700.000 pripadnika
njemačke manjine; uništenja hrvatskog gospodarstva i okoliša i nametanje
monolitne državne vlasti nad medijima i naobrazbom.
Shvatio je kako je Jugoslavija genocidni projekt
Milovan
Đilas, koji je tijekom četrdesetih godina prošlog stoljeća bio Titova
desna ruka, prije nego što se razočarao grubošću i podmuklošću režima,
kasnije je priznao da «mi komunisti nismo htjeli nikakvu oporbu».
Stepinac je
shvatio kako je Titova Jugoslavija genocidni projekt koji je htio
iskorijeniti posebni hrvatski nacionalni identitet i kulturu pa je
glavna oštrica partizanskih nasrtaja bila kolijevka hrvatske
civilizacije, katolička crkva. Upravo stoga su komunisti odmah pokrenuli
veliku kampanju njezinog progona. Ubijene su stotine svećenika i
redovnica, a crkvena imovina je konfiscirana. Brojne crkve pretvorene su
u skladišta i komunističke 'domove kulture'. Uvedena je obveza
građanskog braka.
Što je
najvažnije, naobrazba je oduzeta crkvi i dana u državne ruke, čime je
jugoslavenskim vlastima omogućena sustavna indoktrinacija mladeži. Škole
i mediji bile su glavna sredstva kojima su beogradske vlasti ispirale
mozak hrvatskoj mladeži. Posljedica su bila naraštaji Hrvata koji su
prezreli svoj identitet, uljudbu, povijest i vjeru.
Najjače
oružje ove protuhrvatske i protukatoličke strategije bilo je
prikazivanje Hrvata, koji su zagovarali nacionalnu nezavisnost,
'fašistima' koji žele oživjeti Pavelićevu NDH. Kao dio ove strategije
Titovi komunisti morali su predstaviti katoličku crkvu kao reakcionarnu,
proustašku organizaciju, sudionicu genocida i masovnih ubojstava. A
Stepinac, kao najslavniji simbol hrvatske katoličke crkve i hrvatske
nacionalne stvari, morao je biti razapet.
Njegovo
suđenje 1946. godine bilo je potpuna prijevara. Presuda «kriv je»
donesena je još prije početka suđenja. I sam Đilas priznao je kako
Stepinac nije bio osuđen zbog navodne kolaboracije s NDH nego zbog
oporbe Titu. «Zasigurno mu se ne bi sudilo zbog njegova ponašanja
tijekom rata da se nije nastavio opirati novom komunističkom režimu»,
napisao je kasnije Đilas.
«Iskreno
govoreći, mislim, i ne samo ja, kako je Stepinac bio častan čovjek
čvrste naravi kojega je nemoguće slomiti», rekao je Đilas 1956. godine.
«On je bio doista nepravedno osuđen, ali u povijesti se često događalo
da se ljude osudi zbog političke potrebe».
Stepinca je
od užasa smrtne kazne spasio samo njegov svjetski glas. Ali, nije ga
spasio od teškog sužanjstva, a kasnije i kućnog pritvora i unutrašnjeg
izgnanstva u rodnom selu Krašiću. Štoviše, ima novih dokaza kako ga je
Titova tajna policija postupno trovala.
Stepinčeva vizija Hrvatske
Stvarna
Stepinčeva tragedija nije to što je stradao i umro za svoj narod i
vjeru. To je dužnost svih vjernih kršćana. Nije ni istina da su hrvatski
mediji i diplomacija slabi u obrani ovog velikog čovjeka protiv
propagandne bujice iz Beograda, srpskog lobija u Washingtonu i njegovih
plaćenika u najmoćnijim američkim medijima.
Ne, prava
tragedija je da mnogi Hrvati, osobito oni s Mesić-Račan-Pusićkine
ljevice doista vjeruju u brojne laži koje su rečene o Stepincu. One su
proizvod desetljeća komunističkog socijalnog inženjeringa. I dok je
Titova Jugoslavija možda doista mrtva, oni i dalje dijele mnoge njezine
težnje i predrasude. Za ove tvrde ljevičare, katolička crkva, sa svojim
protivljenjem pobačaju, eutanaziji, homoseksualnim brakovima i spolnoj
razuzdanosti i dalje je reakcionarna snaga koju treba ukloniti. Oni i
dalje opravdavaju brojne komunističke zločine, i dalje ismijavaju
hrvatsko domoljublje i postojanje zasebnog nacionalnog identiteta, i
dalje doživljavaju sebe kao 'antifašiste' ustrajavajući na titoističkom
mitu kako u Hrvatskoj «ustaša viri iza svakog busa».
Jednom
riječju, zadržali su rasistički stav samoporicanja i mržnje koji su im
usadili njihovi bivši komunistički učitelji. Oni doista misle da biti
pravi i ponosni Hrvat znači biti neka vrsta fašista. Stoga je njihov
politički program detuđmanizacija i dekroatizacija zemlje te uklanjanje
njezinog nacionalnog znakovlja i sadržaja. Nadaju se da će Hrvatska
ponovno uroniti u još jedan internacionalistički projekt, zvao se on
europska socijalistička naddržava ili obnovljena balkanska unija.
Stepinčevo
trajno naslijeđe je njegova drukčija vizija Hrvatske. On je znao da su
Bog, domovina i obitelj temeljne ustanove pravedna društva. Vidio je zla
totalitarizma i imperijalizma. Zagovarao je demokratsku i nezavisnu
Hrvatsku, ukorijenjenu u svojoj katoličkoj baštini i zasnovanu na
ljudskim pravima, društvenoj pravdi i ustavnom suverenitetu. Stepinac je
bio izraz onog najboljeg u Hrvatskoj – Hrvatskoj seljaka i duhovnika,
pjesnika i vladara, junaka i kraljeva, znanstvenika i filozofa. Njegova
Hrvatska nije Hrvatska kriminalaca, beskičmenjaka i jeftinih
propagandista; nije bila ni komunistički crvena, ni fašistički crna.
Prije – demokratski i domoljubno kao snijeg bijela i čista.
Upravo ova
njegova pobuđujuća vizija, kao i dosljedna obrana čovjekove slobode,
suočene s nezamislivim strahotama, čine Stepinca jednim od divova 20.
stoljeća. On je hrvatski svetac.
(Jeffrey
T. Kuhner direktor je komunikacija u Ripon Societyju (www.riponsoc.org),
uglednoj analitičkoj skupini ('think tanku') američke Republikanske
stranke, sa sjedištem u Washingtonu u SAD-u. Redovni je komentator
Washington Timesa. Ovaj esej je prilagođeni izvadak njegove knjige
Fatalni stisak: hrvatsko-srpski sukob u 20. stoljeću, koja je u
pripremi.
Gosp. Kuhner posebno zahvaljuje gospođi Danici Ramljak na njezinoj
dragocjenoj pomoći u pisanju ovog članka.)
The recent indictments by the ICTY against four Croatian journalists
are a stake aimed at the heart of the country’s democracy. The four
journalists—Ivica Marijacic, Markica Rebic, Domagoj Margetic and
Stjepan Seselj—have been indicted for the alleged crime of “contempt
of the tribunal” for publishing the identity and statements of
protected witnesses in the Blaskic case. They face a possible
punishment of a 100,000 Euro fine and seven years in prison.
This situation would be comical if it were not so tragic and serious.
These indictments would be thrown out of any Western courtroom,
especially an American one. The Hague Tribunal’s prosecutor’s office
is seeking to justify these outrageous indictments by claiming that
the witnesses’ statements were given in a “non-public,” secret
proceeding. Hence, by publishing those statements these four
journalists supposedly violated the witnesses’ protection rights
guaranteed by the tribunal.
This is nonsense. It is the responsibility of the tribunal, and not
that of the Croatian or international media, to make sure that secret
witness testimony is not leaked to the public. The prosecutor’s office
is trying to pass off blame to others for its failure to provide
adequate protection for witnesses.
More importantly, this is a clear-cut case of freedom of the press and
the public’s right to information trumping any claims the tribunal may
have about witness protection. It is the role of journalists in a free
society to hold public officials accountable for their actions, and to
reveal sensitive, even privileged information in order to inform the
public. The public’s right to be informed, along with the rights of
journalists to publish their reporting free of any censorship is at
the core of an open, free press. (The sole exception is the
publication of deliberately slanderous material bereft of any factual
basis. This is definitely not the case in this matter, as everyone
agrees the witnesses’ testimony did take place. The only issue is
whether they should have been made public.)
If
I had received information from a reliable source about secret witness
testimony at the ICTY for one of my columns in The Washington Times,
I certainly would have published it. Yet the tribunal would never dare
to indict me for supposed “contempt of the tribunal” because it knows
the firestorm of opposition it would create in the American media. It
would be seen for what it is: a crude attempt to silence a journalist.
Carla Del Ponte is essentially claiming that the institutional
prerogatives of the ICTY are more important than the rights of all
Croatians to free expression and freedom of the press. These
indictments are an assault on the fundamental pillars of a liberal
democracy. Once the sacred principles of freedom of the press and
freedom of speech are violated, then all the other basic rights and
freedoms central to a democracy simply wither away. In short, Del
Ponte is now expressing her outright contempt for Croatia’s democratic
institutions.
This is why Croatians of all political stripes—right, left and
center—should come together and denounce these indictments as
unacceptable intrusions upon the country’s basic liberties. If these
journalists are convicted, what is to stop Del Ponte’s office from
indicting others in the media for “contempt of the tribunal?”
Del Ponte is seeking to determine what can and cannot be published in
the Croatian press. Her goal is to silence any opposition to the ICTY
within Croatia. It is no accident that all four journalists have been
leading critics of Del Ponte. In particular, Mr. Marijacic and his
first-rank magazine, Hrvatski List, have emerged as a leading
intellectual force in defense of Croatia’s national sovereignty and
the Homeland War. For this he is now paying a steep price. But Mr.
Marijacic and his brave band of patriots will be vindicated in the
end.
These indictments may prove to be Del Ponte’s Afghanistan; the point
of imperial overreach that will lead to the collapse of the entire
rotten structure known as the ICTY.
During the next few weeks the fate of John Bolton, who is President
George Bush’s nominee to be the next American ambassador to the United
Nations, will be decided. If he is approved by the U.S. Senate, which
I suspect he will, then Del Ponte’s position as chief prosecutor is in
serious trouble. Mr. Bolton has made no secret of his dislike for the
ICTY, and especially for Del Ponte’s dismal performance as chief
prosecutor.
Previously, Mr. Bolton’s harsh criticisms of Del Ponte have been
downplayed by the Balkanists in the State Department’s Foreign Service
bureaucracy, many of whom are rabidly pro-ICTY and anti-Croatia. As
undersecretary of state for arms control, he lacked the power to rein
in Del Ponte and her fellow zealots at the tribunal. This time,
however, he will have the authority to take action. If confirmed, Mr.
Bolton will be overseeing America’s diplomacy toward the United
Nations—including U.N.-sponsored tribunals like the ICTY.
When he finds out about this latest outrage, he will almost certainly
demand that Washington withdraw its support for Del Ponte and the
ICTY. She has given Mr. Bolton the diplomatic rope he needs to finally
hang her. He now needs to finish her off—once and for all.
-
Jeffrey T. Kuhner is a historian and regular contributor to the
Commentary pages of The Washington Times. He is currently writing a
book, “Fatal Embrace: The Croat-Serb Conflict in the 20th
Century.”
Cilj Carle Del Ponte je ušutkati u Hrvatskoj svaku
oporbu Haškom sudu. Nije slučajno što su sva četvorica novinara njezini
glavni kritičari. Posebno su gospodin Marijačić i njegov prvorazredni
tjednik Hrvatski list izrasli u vodeću duhovnu snagu u obrani hrvatskog
nacionalnog suvereniteta i Domovinskog rata. On sada za ovo plaća visoku
cijenu. Ali na kraju će i on i njegova hrabra domoljubna momčad dobiti
punu zadovoljštinu
Nedavne optužnice Haškog suda protiv četvorice
hrvatskih novinara nož su u srce njezinoj demokraciji. Njih četvorica –
Ivica Marijačić, Markica Rebić, Domagoj Margetić i Stjepan Šešelj –
optuženi su za navodni zločin ‘nepoštivanja suda’, odnosno objavljivanje
identiteta i izjava zaštićenih svjedoka u ‘slučaju Blaškić’. Prijeti im
moguća kazna globom od 100.000 eura i sedam godina zatvora.
Ova bi situacija bila komična da nije ozbiljna i
tragična. Svaki sud na Zapadu, osobito u SAD-u, takve bi optužnice
odbacio. Ali tužiteljstvo Haškog suda pokušava opravdati ove skandalozne
optužnice tvrdnjom kako su izjave svjedoka dane u ‘nejavnom’, dakle
tajnom postupku. Time su četvorica novinara navodno prekršila prava
svjedoka na zaštitu koju im Sud jamči.
Ovo je besmislica. Odgovornost je Suda, a ne
hrvatskih i stranih medija, osigurati da tajno svjedočenje ne procuri u
javnost. Tužiteljstvo, dakle, pokušava prebaciti na druge svoj neuspjeh
da na pravi način zaštiti svjedoke. I, što je još važnije, ovo je jasan
slučaj obrane slobode tiska i prava javnosti na informacije koji potire
svako moguće pravo Suda u odnosu na zaštitu svjedoka.
Uloga novinara u slobodnom društvu je nadzor javnih
dužnosnika i njihova djela, pa i otkrivanje osjetljivih, čak i
ekskluzivnih informacija važnih za obavještavanje javnosti. Njezino
pravo na informaciju, uz novinarsko pravo na objavljivanje svojih
izvješća mimo svake cenzure, srž je otvorenoga i slobodnoga tiska.
(Jedini izuzetak je objavljivanje namjernih
kleveta, bez ikakve činjenične osnove. To bez sumnje nije slučaj u ovoj
stvari jer postoji opća suglasnost kako je svjedočenja doista i bilo.
Jedino je pitanje jesu li trebala biti objavljena).
I ja bih
to objavio, ali mene ne bi smjela optužiti
Da sam, recimo, ja dobio obavijest iz pouzdana
izvora o tajnom svjedočenju u Haagu za moju kolumnu u Washingon Timesu,
zasigurno bih je bio objavio, ali se Sud nikad ne bi usudio optužiti me
zbog navodnog ‘nepoštivanja suda’ jer zna kakvu bi buru prosvjeda to
stvorilo u američkim medijima. Smatralo bi se to onim što jest: grubim
pokušajem ušutkavanja novinara.
Carla Del Ponte u osnovi tvrdi kako su
institucionalne ovlasti Haškog suda važnije od prava svih Hrvata na
slobodu izražavanja i tiska. Ove su optužnice nasrtaj na same temelje
liberalne demokracije. Kršenjem svetih načela slobode tiska i govora
gaze se i sva temeljna demokratska prava i slobode. Ukratko, Carla Del
Ponte ovim izražava izravno nepoštivanje hrvatskih demokratskih
ustanova.
Stoga bi Hrvati svih političkih nagnuća – desnice,
ljevice ili centra - trebali zajednički prokazati ove optužnice kao
neprihvatljivo kršenje temeljnih sloboda ove zemlje. Ako ovi novinari
budu osuđeni, što će spriječiti haško tužiteljstvo da optuži i druge
novinare zbog ‘nepoštivanja suda’?
Carla Del Ponte pokušava naređivati što se smije, a
što ne smije objavljivati u hrvatskome tisku. Njezin je cilj ušutkati u
Hrvatskoj svaku oporbu Haškom sudu. Nije slučajno što su sva četvorica
novinara njezini glavni kritičari. Posebno su gospodin Marijačić i
njegov prvorazredni tjednik Hrvatski list izrasli u vodeću duhovnu snagu
u obrani hrvatskog nacionalnog suvereniteta i Domovinskog rata. On sada
za ovo plaća visoku cijenu. Ali na kraju će i on i njegova hrabra
domoljubna momčad dobiti punu zadovoljštinu.
Bolton će
dokrajčiti Carlu Del Ponte
Možda se, naime, pokaže kako je ovo tužiteljičin
‘Afganistan’– trenutak imperijalne nadmenosti koji će dovesti do
propasti čitavog ovog ‘grijeha struktura’ imenom Haški sud.
Tijekom narednih nekoliko tjedana odlučit će se i o
sudbini Johna Boltona, kandidata predsjednika Georgea Busha za sljedećeg
američkog veleposlanika u UN-u. Ako ga potvrdi Senat SAD-a, kao što
vjerujem da hoće, onda je položaj Carle Del Ponte, kao glavne
tužiteljice, ozbiljno uzdrman. Gospodin Bolton ne taji svoju odbojnost
prema Haškom sudu, a navlastito za njezin bijedni učinak kao glavne
tužiteljice.
Ranije su Boltonove oštre kritike Carle Del Ponte
ublažavali ‘balkanisti’ iz vanjskopolitičke birokracije američkog State
Departmenta, među kojima je mnogo haških zagovornika i hrvatskih
protivnika. Kao državni podtajnik za nadzor naoružanja on nije imao
ovlasti zauzdati Carlu Del Ponte i njezine fanatike u Haagu, ali sada će
ih dobiti. Ako, dakle, bude potvrđen, Bolton će upravljati američkom
diplomacijom u UN-u, pa tako i prema UN-ovom Haškom sudu.
Kada, pak, sazna za ovaj najnoviji skandal, gotovo
sigurno će zatražiti da Washington uskrati potporu Carli Del Ponte i
Haškom sudu. Ona je Boltonu pružila diplomatsko uže koje mu je trebalo.
Sada je samo treba dokrajčiti – i to za vijeke vjekova!
- Jeffrey T. Kuhner je povjesničar i stalni
komentator Washington Timesa. Trenutno piše knjigu ‘Fatalni stisak:
hrvatsko-srpski sukob u 20. stoljeću’.
Croatia has given Europe´s political establishment a massive
cardiac arrest. The Continent´s leftists are in shock following
the country´s recent national elections. Ivo Sanader, the leader
of the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), the main conservative
opposition party, soundly defeated Prime Minister Ivica Racan´s
socialist government.
The HDZ campaigned aggressively, highlighting Mr. Racan´s
inability to improve the country´s sluggish economy. The HDZ´s
electoral triumph was made even more impressive by the fact the
European Union and many in the Western liberal press openly
supported Mr. Racan´s leftist coalition.
Yet average Croatian voters rejected the outside meddling
for one simple reason: They understood Mr. Racan´s economic
policies had failed. Under his leadership, unemployment remained
high at 18 percent, while the public debt soared.
Rather than scoring a "brilliant victory," as Mr. Sanader
claimed on Election Night, the HDZ benefited significantly from
widespread voter frustration with Mr. Racan´s stagnant regime.
Nevertheless, Mr. Sanader has been given a historic opportunity
to transform both his party´s image in the West and to forge
Croatia into a modern, fully functional European nation-state.
The HDZ was denounced in the West during much of the 1990s
for the authoritarian policies of its founder, the late
President Franjo Tudjman. The Croatian strongman also was
criticized for the widespread corruption that characterized his
rule until his death in 1999. But for all his flaws, Tudjman was
a visionary and first-rank statesman, who secured Croatia´s
national independence from Serb-dominated Yugoslavia.
Mr. Sanader, however, lacks Tudjman´s popular charisma and
ideological core convictions. Rather, the HDZ leader is a
pragmatic technocrat, who insists he now heads a revamped,
pro-European party committed to Western-style conservatism. The
centerpiece of his campaign was a Bush-style tax cut and
promotion of Croatia´s entry into the European Union by 2007.
But the true test of Mr. Sanader´s conservatism will come
not in his words, but in his actions. Since its independence in
1991, Croatia has failed to confront its communist past.
Croatia´s economic life remains rife with Titoist-style bribery
and cronyism.
Hence, if Mr. Sanader is serious about leading a
conservative revolution in the Balkans, he must start an
immediate, sweeping decommunization. The massive public
bureaucracy, dominated by former apparatchiks who oppose
economic reform, must be dismantled. A legal framework is needed
to protect private property rights and the rule of law, and
encourage entrepreneurship and creation of investment capital.
Most importantly, the HDZ leader must vigorously campaign
against corruption. He can start by having the Croatian
parliament pass a law making it a criminal offense for public
officials to engage in bribery, kickbacks or have cronies and
family members receive government contracts practices common not
only in Croatia but throughout the region.
Yet perhaps the greatest obstacle Mr. Sanader faces is the
issue of cooperation with the war crimes tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands. Brussels has made it clear
Zagreb´s entry into the EU hinges upon unconditional cooperation
with The Hague tribunal, especially regarding the court´s chief
request to arrest and extradite Gen. Ante Gotovina, who has been
in hiding since his 2001 indictment. Mr. Sanader has pledged
full cooperation with the tribunal.
But any decision to hand over Gen. Gotovina would spell the
end of his ruling center-right coalition. Gen. Gotovina is
rightly viewed as a hero by most Croats for his role in leading
a 1995 military operation that ended the Croat-Serb war.
Extradition of the general would spark mass protests and civil
unrest.
Moreover, the Gotovina indictment has been severely
criticized by The Hague tribunal experts and senior Bush
administration officials. Gen. Gotovina is not charged with
ordering or committing atrocities, but for having "command
responsibility" over purported massacres of 150 civilians.
The Gotovina indictment is an attempt by European leftists
to impose the dangerous precedent of "command responsibility" in
international military law. Earlier this year, a Belgian court
sought to indict Gen. Tommy Franks for "command responsibility"
over supposed atrocities of U.S. forces against civilians during
the Iraq war. The State Department got Brussels to withdraw the
complaint.
But it is now clear the International Criminal Court views
The Hague tribunal´s use of the principle of command
responsibility as a basis for possible future indictments
against U.S. military leaders. A senior administration official
confessed that "the indictments issued by The Hague tribunal
based on the theory of command responsibility risks establishing
the principle in international law."
Mr. Sanader should insist Washington step up to the plate
and demand the Gotovina indictment be amended or, preferably,
dropped. He needs to make the case to the Bush administration
that, just as the United States correctly opposes the ICC for
fear of politically motivated indictments, Zagreb has similar
concerns about the politicized prosecution against Gen.
Gotovina. The principle of command responsibility threatens not
only Croatia´s national interests, but those of America as well.
The HDZ leader should demand a straight swap: Zagreb will
support signing a treaty to exempt Americans from prosecution by
the ICC in exchange for U.S. pressure on The Hague to withdraw
the Gotovina indictment.
The challenges facing Mr. Sanader are immense. Time will
tell if he is up to the task.
Jeffrey T. Kuhner is assistant national editor at The
Washington Times.
Croatia's parliamentary
elections have resulted in a political sea change for the small Central European
nation. The country's Social Democrats were ousted from power by the
conservative Croatian Democratic Union, known by its acronym HDZ. Its leader,
Ivo Sanader, an economic conservative, has an electoral mandate to bring about
much-needed economic reform.
An admirer of President Bush, Mr. Sanader campaigned on a moderate
conservative platform of tax cuts, deregulation, increased public spending for
health care and pension reform. It is important for the HDZ-led coalition
government to kick start Croatia's anemic economy.
Although inflation is under control, the unemployment rate remains
disturbingly high at nearly 20 percent. Also, Zagreb's crushing foreign debt
threatens the country's long-term economic future. If Mr. Sanader wants to
achieve his goal of having Croatia join the European Union by 2007-2008, he will
have to follow through on his election promises to implement economic reforms —
especially his calls to modernize the tax-collection system and shrink the
public sector.
A stable and prosperous Croatia is not only important for the region, but
also for the United States as well. For while Zagreb has a pro-European
center-right government, neighboring countries are slowly sliding back toward
the kind of ethnic and religious extremism that ravaged the Balkans during the
1990s. In Serbia's recent elections, Tomislav Nikolic, a radical nationalist who
loathes the West and longs for a "Greater Serbia," was the biggest vote-getter.
Meanwhile, Bosnia has seen a rise in Islamic fundamentalism and al Qaeda
activities.
Hence, Zagreb can serve as a counterweight to both Serbian revanchism and
Bos-nian Muslim extremism. Croatia needs to become the Israel of southeastern
Europe: a pivotal small, democratic ally that is a Western outpost in a volatile
area of the world.
Mr. Sanader was the only major Croatian politician to support the war in
Iraq. He also has made it clear that his government would back a treaty
exempting U.S. forces from prosecution by the International Criminal Court
(ICC). The HDZ's initiatives should be welcomed by the Bush administration as
good first steps in improving Washington-Zagreb relations, which were damaged by
the previous leftist administration's opposition for the Iraq war and the U.S.
position on the ICC.
Ultimately, the success of the new conservative government will depend upon
its handling of the economy. Croatia's electorate has given Mr. Sanader a
mandate for his tax-cutting, pro-growth agenda. He is already coming under
pressure from within his own ruling coalition and the Croatian leftist media to
water down many of his free-market proposals.
Conservative policies have worked in reviving the economies of Italy, the
Czech Republic, Chile, Ireland, Britain and, of course, the United States under
Mr. Bush. There is no reason why they cannot work in Croatia as well.
The
20th century will be remembered as the bloodiest century in
history. A major reason was the 1917 establishment by Vladimir
Lenin and his Bolsheviks of a Marxist regime in Russia. The
Soviet Union was the epicenter of a communist empire that, until
its disintegration in 1991, spread doctrines of economic
collectivism and class struggle to almost every part of the
globe. From Eastern Europe to Africa to Latin America to Asia,
hundreds of millions suffered the brutality of Marxist-Leninist
dictatorships.
Now, if some in Washington have their way, the memories of
the countless victims of communism will be remembered. Led by
its courageous president, Jay Katzen, the Victims of Communism
Memorial Foundation (www.victimsofcommunism.org) is seeking to
erect a monument in D.C. dedicated to those who perished under
Marxism's murderous reign. Their goal is to have the Memorial
Monument built by October of next year. A monument is
desperately needed because, sadly, communism's crimes risk being
forgotten.
Lenin's project resulted not only in unprecedented economic
and ecological destruction, but more importantly the greatest
system of mass murder ever invented: More than 100 million
individuals were killed at the hands of communist regimes. Yet
many Western academics continue to deny or downplay the full
extent of communist atrocities.
It is common on many campuses in the United States to hear
that Marxism-Leninism, unlike its totalitarian twin, fascism,
was a benevolent ideology that sought to impose universal peace
and social justice — that it was a good idea gone bad. Nothing
could be further from the truth.
From its inception, communism sought to forge a new order
based on genocide and mass murder. Lenin set the precedent,
followed by subsequent Marxist regimes, that to establish a
revolutionary proletarian state, entire categories of humans
needed to be systematically wiped out: the bourgeoisie, kulaks,
counterrevolutionaries and intellectuals who refused to follow
the Bolshevik line. The totalitarian essence of Lenin's vision
was that it sought to erect the perfect society by imposing
one-party rule and smashing all dissent and opposition.
Recent history has been littered with Lenin's evil offspring
— Josef Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, Josip Broz Tito, Ho Chi Minh, Pol
Pot, Nicolae Ceausescu, Fidel Castro. The atrocities committed
by these dictators need to be remembered not only to honor the
dead but because they reveal the seminal lesson of the past
century: Utopianism leads to totalitarianism; the road to Utopia
goes through Golgotha.
The millions slaughtered by communist regimes were not
accidental byproducts of misguided policies, but central to the
Marxist project. For example, during the 1933 terror famine,
Soviet leader Josef Stalin systematically starved to death about
10 million Ukrainian peasants. His genocidal goal was to
eviscerate the Ukrainian peasantry, hoping to crush the heart of
the Ukraine nation and consolidate his iron grip on power.
Stalin's victims also included other captive peoples: the Poles,
Slovaks, Czechs, Hungarians, Romanians, Chechens, Latvians,
Estonians, Lithuanians and the Crimean Tatars (who were
literally wiped off the map after World War II).
The same pattern repeated itself in Asia. The withdrawal of
U.S. power from Southeast Asia in 1973 resulted in unimaginable
horrors for those living in the region. Communist regimes were
installed in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Millions of Cambodians
were slaughtered by Pol Pot, while countless South Vietnamese
risked their lives on the high seas to flee the rampaging North
Vietnamese army.
However, the most brutal communist tyrant was Mao. In 1959,
"the Red Emperor" launched his crash collectivization program,
his so-called "Great Leap Forward," which was supposed to bring
China into modernity. Instead, it led to the deaths of more than
20 million Chinese. Many of the victims were children who were
eaten by starving peasants.
Yet while the crimes of fascism are rightly remembered by
Western academics and journalists, the ghastly crimes of
communism remain largely ignored. This is wrong. The lives of
those who were murdered by Hitler's thugs are not worth more
than those who died at the hands of Stalin. The victims of
communism deserve better. And if Mr. Katzen has his way, they
will finally get the recognition that has been denied to them
for so long.
Jeffrey T. Kuhner is assistant national editor at The
Washington Times.
In his
criticism of Jeffrey T. Kuhner's commentary on Bosnia
("Redrawing Bosnian borders," Oct. 1), High Representative Paddy
Ashdown ("One for all," Letters, Wednesday) shows that he has a
remarkable talent for condescension even when the obvious facts
do not support his lordship's sense of superiority.
Mr.
Ashdown says that, contrary to Mr. Kuhner's assertions, the
Dayton Accords have led Bosnia-Herzegovina toward economic and
political recovery.
The
fact is that Dayton brought a fragile peace to the country, but
not much more than that. After eight years, the billions
invested in Bosnia-Herzegovina (mostly U.S. taxpayer dollars)
under Dayton have provided mainly a meaty carcass for some
50,000 well-paid international "nation builders" to feed on.
Under Dayton, there was supposed to be a one-year transitional
international administration expiring in 1996. Nonetheless, Mr.
Ashdown and company are still being very well-paid in a very
poor country that has a 40 percent unemployment rate. It seems
that Dayton was a first step in the ongoing international
institutional involvement in Bosnia's affairs
The
fact is that despite its high cost, Dayton has failed to achieve
any of its stated major goals, much less impose democracy.
Dayton's main strategy was to integrate the three armies of
Bosnia-Herzegovina into one and use it as a foundation for
imposing a European version of a multiethnic society. Of course,
that has failed, but that has not stopped Mr. Ashdown from
continuing to demand it in his speeches.
What
Dayton has done is solidify Serbian real estate gains achieved
through mass murder under Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic-cleansing
programs. The Serbs occupy 49 percent of the country and are not
about to give up their army, which protects the borders of what
they defiantly named the Republic of Serbia.
Regarding
the contention that Bosnia-Herzegovina is not a breeding ground
for Islamic fundamentalism, his lordship suggests that Mr.
Kuhner should visit the country to see for himself. Perhaps
someone should suggest to Mr. Ashdown that he take a look at the
city surrounding his very own office
building.
About two kilometers to the south of him, the al Qaeda-linked
Saudi Wahhabis have built a massive Islamic center to spread
their brand of fundamentalist Islam. They are building sparkling
new mosques in nearly every Muslim village in the Bosnian
countryside. In the middle of downtown Sarajevo, about 10 meters
from the eternal flame of peace, a cultural center is operated
by the same Iranian government that traditionally has sponsored
terrorism against the West, including the bombing of the U.S.
Embassy in Beirut.
Nonetheless,
Mr. Ashdown still argues that everything is under control in
Bosnia-Herzegovina. He says quite boldly that important steps
have been taken "to ensure that Bosnia-Herzegovina could not in
any way be used as a platform for terrorist attacks of any
sort." Perhaps he should share that remarkable methodology with
Homeland Defense Secretary Tom Ridge and the rest of the world.
There is, of course, a slight problem with that logic. If Mr.
Ashdown sees Bosnia-Herzegovina as tightly controlled enough to
thwart even the most secretive terrorist cells, why haven't
Radovan Karadzic, Ratko Mladic and the other 100 or so war
criminals who are said to be residing comfortably in the country
been arrested?
From 1992-1995, Bosnia was the site of some of the bloodiest fighting in
Europe since the Second World War. Yet since the signing of the Dayton peace
accords, the country remains divided along ethnic lines. Despite massive Western
foreign aid and the presence of American peacekeeping forces, Bosnia's Serbs,
Croats and Muslims are no closer to genuine reconciliation and peaceful
co-existence. The country's Serbs who live in the Bosnian Serb Republic seek to
eventually become part of Serbia. The Bosnian Croats, most of whom live in the
country's second political entity, the Muslim-Croat federation, also would like
nothing more than to join Croatia.
The country's Muslims, however, remain wedded to the notion of a united,
multinational Bosnia based on a strong centralized government in Sarajevo. The
international community also is committed to keeping the country's borders
intact. Yet the problem with that approach is that it overlooks the reality of
what is occurring on the ground.
Bosnia remains an economic basket case, where the unemployment rate is 40
percent. Foreign investment is practically nonexistent. Corruption and crime
remain rampant. Despite nearly a decade of nation-building, Western governments
have failed to forge viable economic and political institutions.
More ominously, the greatest threat to peace and stability stems from the
resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism in Bosnia, which seeks to either wipe out
or convert all Christians in the region. The country now serves as a base for al
Qaeda operatives, where numerous terrorist cells are active and plotting attacks
on targets throughout Europe. In the past, Saudi Arabia has sent millions of
dollars in aid to "humanitarian" agencies that encourage Bosnian Muslims to
promote the doctrines of Wahhabism, a particularly intolerant and puritanical
version of Islam. Mosques have been established throughout the Muslim-Croat
federation, many of whom preach the need for "jihad" against the country's
Catholic Croats and Orthodox Christian Serbs.
The result has been numerous acts of terror perpetrated upon civilians —
especially the Croats. During the past several years, Catholic churches in and
around Sarajevo have been vandalized by Islamic extremists. Cemeteries where
Croats were buried have been desecrated. Many ordinary Catholics are afraid of
walking on the streets of Sarajevo with a cross around their neck for fear of
being attacked.
The most notorious incident occurred on Christmas Eve, when three Croats — a
father and his two daughters — were gunned down in their home by an Islamic
militant near the town of Konjic. Their crime: celebrating Christmas.
The rise of radical Islam threatens to destabilize the Balkans, plunging the
region once again into bloodshed and religious conflict. Rather than forcing the
three constituent peoples of Bosnia to live together against their wishes, the
Bush administration would be wise to develop a realistic and coherent strategy
toward the region.
Washington needs to realize that synthetic states such as Bosnia-Herzegovina
are destined to fail. Recent European history is littered with examples of
multinational countries such as Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union
that disintegrated because they denied the fundamental human aspirations for
democracy and national self-determination. Bosnia is another case in point. The
Bosnian Serbs should be allowed to form a state with Serbia; the Croat
territories — especially those centered around their stronghold of Mostar in
Western Herzegovina — should be incorporated into Croatia. The Bosnian Muslims
would have their own state, with Sarajevo as the capital.
More importantly, the Bush administration needs to foster closer ties with
the Croats in Bosnia-Herzegovina for one simple reason: They are on the
front-lines in the war against Islamic terrorism in the Balkans. The Bosnian
Serbs, meanwhile, are unreliable allies. Many of them are still seething with
resentment against the United States for its decision to use military force to
end the Serbs' campaign of ethnic cleansing and mass murder during the Balkan
wars of the 1990s.
The Croats, on the other hand, view Washington as their strategic partner.
As one high-ranking Bosnian Croat government official told me: "We can act as
the eyes and ears for the West in the Balkans and monitor the activities of al
Qaeda in Bosnia."
The United States should not only support the Bosnian Croats' right to
self-determination, but also provide them with intelligence and military
assistance to contain the growth of radical Islam in the region.
It is ironic that the West should now have to depend upon the Croats in
Herzegovina as a pivotal ally in the war on terrorism. Throughout the 1990s, the
Herzegovinian Croats were demonized in the Western liberal press for their
"nationalism" and passionate attachment to the Croatian cause. They have always
been the most patriotic and courageous of all the Croats, producing some of
Europe's finest fighters. Herzegovina was primarily the site where the Croats
for centuries fought off the invading Ottoman armies. For their ceaseless
resistance to the Turks, Pope Leo X referred to the Croats as "the ramparts of
Christendom."
The Croats in Bosnia can again take up their historic role as a strategic
bulwark against Islamic expansionism on the Continent. However, this can only
happen after Washington realizes Bosnia is not a Balkan Switzerland, but a
smoldering cauldron of ethnic strife where the followers of Osama bin Laden have
found a home to preach their message of hate and religious fanaticism. As an
experiment in nation-building, Bosnia has been a noble failure. The Bush
administration should take heed.
Jeffrey T. Kuhner is an assistant national editor at The Washington Times.
The Serbs are at it again. Once again,
they are playing their role as the perpetual victims of Europe,
complaining about unfair treatment by the international community and
whining about the injustice of it all. If the Serbian mentality was
supposed to have changed since the ouster and war crimes indictment of
former dictator Slobodan Milosevic, this was not evident from the
recent visit of Serbian government leaders to Washington.
It is now just three years since the NATOalliance bombed Serbia to end the
wars of aggression waged by the Serbs against their Balkan neighbors throughout
the 1990s. This was a bloody and at times horrendously brutal conflict, which
raged as the Balkan country of Yugoslavia broke apart to form the countries that
are today Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia and the Republic of Serbia and
Montenegro. Serbia, the dominant and largest republic of Yugoslavia, was forced
to let the others slip from its control, but did so only after military defeat.
Undaunted by the horrors it has perpetrated, Serbia now wants to reclaim its
leading role in the Balkans. While it took the Germans more than two decades
after World War II to raise their heads enough to start playing a role in
Europe, the Serbs are already demanding international recognition and foreign
aid.
Over dinner, brandy and cigars at the Metropolitan Club in Washington,
Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Zivkovic and Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic
expressed their frustration with the government of the United States and the
leaders of the European Union and NATO.
"There are three things Serbs cannot stand," said Mr. Zivkovic." An
independent Kosovo, NATO and the United States." This comes from a country that
wants the help of the U.S. government to get into the EU and the Partnership for
Peace, a U.S.-led military grouping.
From the perspective of Mr. Svilanovic, the failure of Serbia to make
progress on integration into international organization can be blamed primarily
on Washington and Brussels. After meetings with National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell, he accused both of "a lack
of courage" in pushing Serbia's case.
As for leaders in the EU, Mr. Svilanovic proudly says he had berated Javier
Solava and Chris Patten, the EU's primary representatives on foreign policy, for
the "mess" that the EU is in and its failure to deal with the real problems of
Europe, which are in his view Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. No doubt these gents
appreciated the lecture.
The Serbs are particularly indignant that they have not received the
international aid they expected. On this, they blame the fact that they have not
rebuilt the damaged bridges in Belgrade — nor even their own Ministry of
Defense.
Now, both the U.S. government and the EU have welcomed Serbia's new
leadership, which inherited the mantle from the previous reform-minded Prime
Minister Zoran Djindjic, who was tragically assassinated this spring. From the
perspective of Washington and Brussels, however, there are some very specific
and major obstacles to Serbia's rehabilitation.
One is the demand that the Serbs hand over Gen. Ratko Mladic for prosecution
as a war criminal in The Hague. He is one of the architects of the awful ethnic
cleansing campaign that took place in Bosnia in the early 1990s against the
country's Muslim population. Mr. Zivkovic's new line is that his government has
no knowledge of the whereabouts of said general, though there is a "95 percent
chance" that he is no longer in Serbia — a claim about which American officials
are deeply skeptical.
Another rather amazing obstacle is that the Serbs are actually suing eight
NATO countries, including the United States, for bombing Belgrade in 1999. These
countries are all members of the Partnership for Peace, which the Serbs are
trying to join. The present government has refused to drop the suit, initiated
by Mr. Milosevic, apparently hoping to use it as a bargaining chip in exchange
for a genocide case brought against the Serbian people by Croatia and Bosnia.
You probably have to be Serbian to believe you can make progress under these
circumstances.
All of which is a huge shame. The war-torn Balkans is the final piece of
the European continent that needs to build peace and economic stability. Eastern
and Central Europe are well on their way to joining the EU and NATO. Serbia
could be an important part of this project, but until the Serbs experience a
change of attitude about their past and their present, they will cut themselves
off from their future.
The European Union is seeking to restore a greater Yugoslavia. Following
the bloody disintegration of that country in the 1990s one would think the
international community would get the message that the Croats, Slovenes, Serbs,
Bosnian Muslims, Macedonians and Kosovo Albanians no longer wish to live in the
same state.
Yet at a recent "Western Balkans" summit sponsored by the EU in Porto Carras,
Greece, the Europeans are now forcing the peoples of the former Yugoslavia to
embrace another Balkan union.
The EU, which is poised to admit 10 new countries from Central and Eastern
Europe, held out the promise to Croatia, Macedonia, Albania, Bosnia-Hercegovina
and the union of Serbia and Montenegro that those countries could also one day
join its ranks. "The process of European unification will not be complete until
the Balkans have joined the EU," proclaimed European Commission President Romano
Prodi.
But Brussels is insisting that certain conditions need to be met prior to
granting membership, such as completing economic reforms, strengthening human
rights and tackling organized crime and corruption.
The key step, however, toward full membership is that each country in the
region needs to negotiate a Stabilization and Association Agreement with the EU.
Also known as the Balkan Stability Pact, it is an attempt to reconstitute
another Yugoslavia, minus Slovenia plus Albania. The Stability Pact seeks to
create an economic union based on a Balkan free-trade zone, characterized by
close "inter-border" cooperation and loose political links. So far only Croatia
and Macedonia have successfully negotiated an agreement with the EU.
The idea of a Balkan union is deeply unpopular among ordinary citizens in
the area for one simple reason: It is not politically viable. One of the great
lessons of the 20th century is that artificial, multiethnic states incorporating
peoples who do not want to live together are not sustainable in the long run.
Multinational empires such as Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, Austria-Hungary and
Imperial Britain eventually collapsed because they abrogated the democratic
aspirations of their subject peoples.
The break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s enabled countries such as Croatia,
Slovenia and Macedonia to finally achieve their long-sought dreams of
independence, representing a significant victory for the forces of democracy and
national self-determination. Brussels is hoping to reverse this historic
achievement in order to fulfill its goal of creating a Continental socialist
superstate. The proponents of a federal EU hope to dissolve national
sovereignties and impose cultural homogeneity upon the diverse peoples of
Europe. Under the guise of "progress" and "ethnic reconciliation," they are now
planning to end the Balkans' short experiment in national independence and
self-rule.
The formation of a greater Yugoslavia linked to the EU is not a progressive
or liberal project, but a deeply racist policy destined to fail. Brussels is
essentially telling the peoples of the region they are unable to govern
themselves and can only enter the EU as a regional bloc, not on an individual
basis as have the other countries of Europe. This amounts to being treated as
second-class Europeans.
Moreover, a Balkan union is not feasible because it has no mass political
support in the region. So far the political elites in Zagreb, Belgrade, Skopje,
Sarajevo and Tirana have avoided telling their citizens that the cost of EU
membership is agreeing to a larger regional integration that no one wants.
Following the wars of Yugoslav succession, if there is one thing the Serbs,
Macedonians, Croats, Bosnian Muslims and Albanians can agree upon it is that
they do not want to co-exist in the same state.
What is most shocking has been the decision of the ruling leftist government
in Croatia to go along with Brussels' agenda. Under Yugoslavia, it was the
Croats who suffered under Belgrade's iron grip more than any other national
group. After having fought a successful war for independence in 1991, Zagreb is
now on the verge of frittering away Croatia's hard-won national sovereignty.
Composed mainly of former communists who still long for the restoration of
Yugoslavia, the regime of Prime Minister Ivica Racan and President Stipe Mesic
have surreptitiously gone ahead with their plans for making Croatia a permanent
part of the "Western Balkans." As the most economically advanced of the five
nations at the summit, Croatia is hoping to join the EU in 2007 along with
Bulgaria and Romania. Yet most diplomats in Washington and Brussels believe this
is not possible unless the country's living standards and per capita income are
increased significantly. Zagreb will need to achieve an economic miracle to hit
its target date for EU membership — which will not happen under the stagnant
policies of the current socialist leadership.
Mr. Racan and his allies have waged an intense public relations campaign,
making the government's bid to join the EU the centerpiece of their
administration's accomplishments. National elections are expected to be held
this fall or spring 2004 at the latest.
Zagreb's decision to accede to the creation of another Balkan union has
given the surging center-right opposition the wedge issue it needs to topple Mr.
Racan from power. The conservative opposition should make the election a
referendum on whether Croats want to again cede their country's independence.
The opposition should insist that Croatia follow the Slovenia model, in
which Zagreb enters the EU as a single, sovereign country that will aggressively
defend its national interests and cultural identity at the negotiating table
with Brussels. Croatia's conservatives need to form an alliance with the other
countries of Central and Eastern Europe, who along with Denmark, Britain and
Silvio Berlusconi's Italy, aim to transform the EU into a decentralized,
economic free-trade zone that will preserve Europe's distinct cultures and
national sovereignties.
The Croats were instrumental in bringing down Yugoslavia. Hopefully, they
will also bring down Brussels' plans to resurrect the corpse of Yugoslavia from
the grave.
Jeffrey T. Kuhner is assistant national editor at The Washington Times.
I am a 22-year-old university student studying to
become a documentarian, and it was inspiring to see such an
underrepresented subject as the discrimination against and hatred of
Slavic people being explored in The Washington Times ("Acute
Slavophobia," Commentary, June 1).
Jeffrey Kuhner is obviously a journalist of integrity and has a
deep passion for revealing the truth. This is a rarity in his
profession, as mistruths are often reported over and over by those who
work more like sheep than journalists.
If Mr. Kuhner would like to explore the subject further, he could
also research the Bleiburg massacre of 1945, in which an estimated
250,000 Croatian refugees, soldiers and civilians were slaughtered by
Tito's Yugoslav partisans. Croatians are a (conveniently) forgotten
nation when it comes to such subjects.
I cannot thank Mr. Kuhner enough for his bravery and dignity. He
brings to your newspaper a voice that fights to reveal the truth, in
turn giving back a light of hope to those nations that have been
unfairly affected by this problem for over half a century.
It is commonly believed the scourge of racism has been eradicated in the
West. Indeed, significant advances have been made in how Western societies treat
historically discriminated minorities such as blacks, Hispanics and women. Yet
there is one ethnic group that continues to be the victim of widespread
discrimination and even hatred: the Slavs.
For example, this subtle but nevertheless real prejudice against the Slavs
can be seen in academia. Although the Holocaust and the evils of fascism have
been condemned by most scholars, the crimes of communism remain largely ignored.
Marxism-Leninism produced the greatest system of mass murder in history,
resulting in the deaths of more than 100 million people — a considerable
percentage of whom were Eastern European Slavs.
During the 1930s, communist dictator Josef Stalin systematically starved to
death 7 million Ukrainians in one of the most murderous genocides of the 20th
century. Yet the suffering of Ukraine under Stalin's totalitarian empire has
been largely forgotten. The same is true of the other victims of the Marxist
project such as the Russians, Poles, Croats, Slovaks and Serbs who in total lost
millions of people to state-sanctioned murder.
Leon Trotsky, one of the leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution, once stated
that the "Slavs are a historyless people." This comment is not only false, but
more importantly, it reflects the deep-seated racism of many in the West's
political class who continue to view Eastern Europe as a primitive backwater
that is not part of European civilization.
A clear example of this hostility toward the Slavs was the creation of
Yugoslavia following the end of the First World War. The establishment of a
greater South Slav state violated U.S. President Woodrow Wilson's principle of
national self-determination. Forged by Western powers to serve as a bulwark
against Germany and Austria, Yugoslavia was a Serb-dominated, multinational
empire that abrogated the national aspirations of its subject peoples —
Slovenes, Croats, Macedonians, Bosnian Muslims, Albanians and Montenegrins.
Subsequently, while Western leaders as diverse as Franklin Roosevelt, Pierre
Trudeau and the first George Bush championed the right to self-determination for
peoples in India, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, they were reluctant
to grant the same rights to the enslaved nations of Yugoslavia and the Soviet
Union. As late as August 1991, on the eve of Ukraine's historic vote for
independence, Mr. Bush warned Ukrainians of the dangers of "suicidal
nationalism."
As Yugoslavia began to fall apart in the 1990s, the West at first refused to
grant diplomatic recognition to the breakaway republics of Slovenia and Croatia,
then watched passively as Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic waged ethnic
cleansing campaigns against the Croats, Bosnian Muslims and Kosovar Albanians.
It took the death of nearly 250,000 people and the displacement of 2 million
civilians before NATO finally decided to intervene to stop Mr. Milosevic's
genocidal rampage.
This contrasts sharply with the eagerness of Western governments to
recognize the independence of India in 1947; the myriad African nations in the
1960s; Bangladesh in 1971; the Baltic States and East Timor during the 1990s.
Apparently, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Croats and Bosnians are not as worthy of
statehood as other non-Slavic peoples.
Modern-day Slavophobia can also be seen in the recent indictments issued by
the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Its chief
prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, is seeking to prosecute leading Croatian generals
on trumped-up charges that would be laughed out of any Western courtroom.
Take the case of Gen. Ante Gotovina. He led the 1995 military operation that
ended the Croat-Serb war. The general is being prosecuted not for having
committed or ordered war crimes, but for failing to have prevented isolated
atrocities by individual soldiers during the three-day offensive. This is the
equivalent to holding Gen. Wesley Clark legally responsible for the deaths of
civilians during NATO's 1999 bombing campaign against Serbia.
The ICTY is determined to indict leading Croatian generals in order not to
appear biased against the Serbs. This means innocent Croats are being sacrificed
for the sake of a policy of ethnic balance. Not only is this an unacceptable
manner to run a court, but worse, it reflects the Western dismissal of the
rights of individuals in the Balkans. Are individual Croats mere cattle that can
be exchanged in order to propagate the myth that the ICTY is evenhanded?
A similar indictment against Gen. Clark — or any American — would rightly be
unacceptable to Washington. It would demand that the charges be dropped
immediately. But in the case of Gen. Gotovina, the State Department is insisting
that Croatia hand him over to the tribunal. Ironically, even Serbian
human-rights activists have stated that the general is innocent.
Gen. Gotovina is obviously the victim of a racist judicial witch hunt. Too
bad he is a Croatian. Otherwise, Western leaders might actually care.
Jeffrey T. Kuhner is an assistant national editor at The Washington
Times.
Allied commander Gen. Tommy Franks is now the target of war crimes
charges. A Belgian lawyer representing 10 Iraqis is preparing to ask a
Brussels court to indict Gen. Franks for having "command responsibility"
over purported war crimes committed by coalition forces. Among the crimes
listed in the complaint are the bombing of a marketplace in Baghdad, the
shooting of an ambulance and the failure to prevent the mass looting of
hospitals.
The complaint has proven to be a great embarrassment for the Belgian
government.
In 1993, Brussels gave its courts the power to try non-Belgian citizens
for war crimes committed anywhere in the world. The law of "universal
jurisdiction" has been used by numerous groups — most of whom are
anti-American and anti-Israel — to try world leaders for war crimes.
Complaints are pending against former President George Bush and Secretary of
State Colin L. Powell over the 1991 Persian Gulf War, as well as Israeli
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Although the law has been amended in order to make it more difficult
for indictments to be issued against top-level political leaders, it does
not provide protection for U.S. military officials. If the complaint
proceeds against Gen. Franks, there is the possibility that he could be
tried, convicted and imprisoned, should he have the misfortune of entering
Belgium.
The case has outraged Washington, which has threatened Brussels with
diplomatic retaliation if the complaint goes forward. One option is to have
NATO headquarters moved from Brussels.
But the complaint against Gen. Franks should not be dismissed as simply
a case of a nutty statute and excessive judicial activism. It shows that the
Bush administration was correct in its skepticism of the new International
Criminal Court that came into being last year. The United States has refused
to sign the treaty on the grounds that American officials would be subject
to politically motivated prosecutions.
The administration has also rightly criticized the principle of
"command responsibility" that is being used as the basis of the complaint
against Gen. Franks. The theory of "command responsibility" stipulates that
political and military leaders are legally culpable if they fail to do
"everything possible" to prevent isolated acts committed by individual
soldiers in battle. Under that logic, Winston Churchill and Franklin D.
Roosevelt are war criminals for the allied bombings of Dresden, or Gen.
Norman Schwarzkopf and Gen. Wesley Clark should be indicted for mistakes
committed in the Persian Gulf War and NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia.
The result of codifying such a principle in international law will make
waging war all but impossible without risking exposing U.S. leaders to
criminal prosecution.
However, while the administration criticizes the theory of "command
responsibility" in the complaint against Gen. Franks, it continues to turn a
blind eye to its application by the Balkans war crimes tribunal in The Hague
against generals in the former Yugoslavia. The most notable case is that of
Croatian Gen. Ante Gotovina, who has been indicted on charges of "command
responsibility" for a 1995 military operation that effectively ended the
Croat-Serb war.
Supported by the United States, Gen. Gotovina led a sweeping military
offensive — known as Operation Storm — that enabled Croatia to restore its
control over territories annexed by local Serb forces loyal to Yugoslav
dictator Slobodan Milosevic. The operation not only was instrumental in
preventing Mr. Milosevic from achieving his goal of a "Greater Serbia," but
it also averted a humanitarian nightmare in neighboring Bosnia. By the
summer of 1995, Serb paramilitaries had encircled Bihac and were
relentlessly shelling the city. Hundreds of thousands of Bosnian Muslim
refugees were trapped inside. Gen. Gotovina's forces smashed the Serb lines
and prevented atrocities from occurring — atrocities that would have made
the massacre at Srebrenica pale in comparison. The general is a hero; not a
war criminal.
However, The Hague tribunal's chief prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, under
pressure from Belgrade and Brussels to not be "biased" against the Serbs,
has issued a bogus indictment against Gen. Gotovina on charges of "command
responsibility" for failing to prevent isolated attacks on civilians and the
mass looting of homes. Mrs. Del Ponte is looking for a Croatian scapegoat so
that her office can appear even-handed in its prosecutions of Serbian war
criminals. The indictment against Gen. Gotovina has rightly outraged the
Croatian public, who view it as a politically motivated prosecution against
one of their country's leading war heroes. The general has refused to hand
himself over to the tribunal, and is hiding in an undisclosed location.
The Gotovina indictment is a dangerous precedent that could be used
against U.S. officials in the future. One senior U.S. official has warned
that "the indictments issued by The Hague tribunal based on the theory of
command responsibility risks establishing the principle in international
law."
The American government has been slow to respond to the precedents
established by the Gotovina case. Now, it is reaping the bitter fruits of
its indifference and is exposing to the world that it holds high standards
for its generals, but supports flimsy indictments against foreign generals.
The Bush administration is justified in its outrage at the complaint against
Gen. Franks. Yet, by the same token, how can it continue to insist that this
ludicrous policy of "command responsibility" should be applied to the heroes
of other nations?
Loredana Vuoto is an editorial writer for The Washington Times.
The victory by Jean Charest's Liberal Party over the separatist Parti
Quebecois in Quebec's recent provincial election raises the important question:
Is the province's nationalist movement dead?
Mr. Charest's win was impressive. The provincial Liberals captured 45
percent of the vote, compared to 33 percent for the Parti Quebecois and 18
percent for the center-right Action Democratique du Quebec. Mr. Charest is an
economic conservative, who during the campaign called for tax cuts, balanced
budgets and improving the province's faltering health-care system.
His great achievement was that he denied Premier Bernard Landry and the
Parti Quebecois a third term in office. A victory by the Quebec separatists
would have most likely resulted in another referendum on whether the
French-speaking province of 6.7 million should declare independence from Canada.
In the last referendum held in 1995, Quebec nationalists came within 1
percentage point of winning a vote on secession.
Mr. Charest declared on election night that Quebec had given itself a
21st-century government. "It is a mandate for change that we have received and a
mandate for renewal," he told cheering Liberal supporters.
The new federalist premier's task will be a difficult one. Following 30
years of constitutional wrangling with Ottawa over Quebec's status within
Canada, the province's economy has plummeted. It has a bloated public sector,
the highest tax burden in North America and one of the lowest standards of
living in the country. Quebec nationalism has come with a high cost for the
province's citizens.
Yet as Mr. Charest tackles Quebec's economic problems, he will also need to
focus on the nationalist question. For the defeat of the Parti Quebecois was in
fact the best thing that could have happened to the province's nationalist
movement at this time.
After 10 years in power, the party was seen by many Quebecers as complacent
and out of touch with the economic trends prevalent in the rest of North
America. The leftist Parti Quebecois remained wedded to social democracy, high
taxes and strong public spending, while most other English-speaking Canadian
provinces made painful decisions to improve their competitiveness in the global
economy.
The result is that the separatist party lost the confidence of many voters
in its ability to manage bread-and-butter issues such as jobs, health care and
education. The relentless erosion in Quebec's standard of living threatened to
undermine the nationalist project. Many voters asked themselves if Quebec City
cannot get its economic house in order, how then will it forge a viable,
French-speaking independent state?
The irony is that if Mr. Charest succeeds in passing his sensible economic
agenda, it is almost inevitable that a prosperous economy will serve as the
basis for the renewal of Quebec nationalism. Canada is not one but two
countries, consisting of an English-speaking nation and French Quebec.
As an expatriate Canuck from Montreal, I believe in the dream of a
binational country from sea to shining sea. Canada is one of the greatest
multicultural democracies in the world. Its breakup would be a tragedy for the
forces of civilization, signaling the victory of ethnic tribalism and
intolerance.
Yet the reality is that French Quebec has legitimate grievances that need
to be addressed. Prior to the Second World War, most Quebecers had little
contact with the federal authorities in Ottawa.
However, with the rise of the welfare state — unemployment insurance,
old-age pension checks, nationalized health care — the federal government's
influence in Quebec society has increased dramatically. The emergence of a
centralized national state in combination with economic globalization, in which
English has become the international language, threatens to undermine Quebec's
cultural identity.
This is why despite the billions of dollars in federal transfer payments
from Ottawa to Quebec over the past several decades, a national policy of
official bilingualism and a succession of French prime ministers, the province's
nationalist movement remains strong. Quebec secessionism will continue to haunt
the Canadian political landscape until the province is given the full tools it
needs to protect its French cultural heritage.
Mr. Charest recognizes that Quebec's constitutional status within Canada
must be changed. He has long been a proponent of devolution, ceding more powers
from the federal government to the provinces — Quebec in particular
Most Quebecers do not want to secede from Canada; independence is a last
option. But they do want greater political and cultural autonomy within a
decentralized Canadian federation. Ironically, French Quebec's hostility to the
Trudeau liberal vision of a centralized, bureaucratic federal state is also
shared by Canadians in the West and most blue Tories in Ontario.
If Mr. Charest can secure a new constitutional arrangement for Quebec, he
will ensure that Canada remains a unified and viable country for the 21st
century. He will also be paving the way for a potential national conservative
majority, an alliance of French Quebec, the West and Ontario Tories. This new
conservative coalition will be based on lower taxes, small government and a
decentralized federation that recognizes the country's regional differences.
Mr. Charest hopes to one day become prime minister. If he can slay the
Quebec separatist dragon and propose a bold new national vision, it is only a
matter of time before he emerges as Canada's next great leader.
Jeffrey T. Kuhner is an assistant national editor at The Washington
Times.
The spate of well-organized and violent anti-American
protests in Iraq betrays the guiding hand of Ba'ath extremists or "agents
provocateurs" from Iran. Not unexpected. But in years to come, the future
sponsors of such hate-America rallies might well come as a shock, if the nation-
building foreign aid experience in the Balkans provides any lessons.
As elsewhere in Europe, we find here the same motley mash of anti-war
protesters — anarchists, anti-globalists, greens, Marxist peaceniks — shouting
"smash capitalism" and "Bush is Hitler." While rallying little support in a
Croatia fresh with memories of Serbian aggression, these radicals compensate for
their small numbers with anti-American fury, culminating in one march to the
U.S. Embassy with a ritual burning of an American flag defiled with swastikas.
The rub is that this hate-America crowd is sponsored by the U.S. taxpayer.
Protest organizers — Anti-War Campaign, Green Action, women's group BaBe
and others — are a who's who of U.S. foreign aid grantees who, for a decade,
have received millions of dollars, ostensibly to strengthen democracy. In fact,
aid has been grossly misallocated to a marginal and extremist nexus of former
communists, anarchists and extreme feminists that represent the core of
anti-American political activity in the Balkans.
Anti-War Campaign (ARK) fronts for numerous anarchist-Marxist groups,
offering them office space, equipment, funds and training. They include Zagreb
Anarchist Movement, anarcho-feminists ANFEME, Croatian Anti-Globalists and
others. Its ZaMirNet (PeaceNet) is a regional Internet link that is part of a
global alliance to wage "netwars" against Western institutions. Radicals use it
to coordinate activities, inform members on anti-capitalist and anti-NATO
rallies, access donors and provide a steady diet of radical literature. Though
ZaMirNet's manager is a self-described "anarcho-feminist," she also works for
USAID clients Urban Institute, MercyCorps, CARE and others. CARE alone granted
ZaMirNet $335,000, part of a larger sum received from the U.S. government.
Following September 11, BaBe leader Vesna Kesic circulated a petition,
signed by most aid recipients, denouncing the U.S. war on terrorism as
"institutional terrorism," echoing the musings of their ideological mentor Noam
Chomsky. No surprise, as Ms. Kesic counts amongst her other friends Katha
Pollitt, the Nation columnist that berated her daughter for flying the American
flag in solidarity with the victims of September 11 because "the flag stands for
jingoism, vengeance and war." Another BaBe principal is the last director of the
Museum of Communist Revolution! Nonetheless, this year, the group and its
offshoots continue to receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in U.S. aid and
they help write embassy reports sent to Washington.
Green Action takes every anti-U.S. position possible, opposing membership
in NATO, imports of genetically modified food, even railing against McDonald's
as that evil symbol of global corporate reach. Nevertheless, in 1999, its
director, Toni Vidan, coordinated the U.S. Embassy's $3.5 million subgrants
program that significantly expanded this anti-American (un)civic nexus. One
grantee, Osijek Greens, lamented how "American imperialism is in full bloom."
Under the rubric of promoting youth civic engagement, these U.S. aid
recipients finance counterculture initiatives as recruiting vehicles for new
generations of anti-U.S. activists. One, Attack, is a joint project of ARK, BaBe
and Zagreb Anarchist Movement. Another, Net Club Mama, celebrated the
anniversary of the publishing of the Communist Manifesto. Donor agencies and
contractors hire local staff from these groups, ensuring a steady stream of
taxpayer financing of anti-American initiatives.
In large part, we are paying the price for past policy that defined not
communism as the threat to regional peace, but rather a vaguely defined
nationalism. In turn, support was channeled to so-called anti-nationalists with
little regard to what they actually believed. Pro-Western groups were
disqualified from aid from the start because they were considered "too
patriotic."
The anti-American tenor of these groups is no secret though, and they are
very public about their views. Nevertheless, our embassy continues to finance
them. But the problems do not stop at funding those who despise America and its
values. Last September, the U.S. Embassy undercut a unique German-American
initiative to win U.S. government funding for a pro-America conference on
terrorism to commemorate the September 11 terrorist attacks. One-hundred-seventy
officials and civic leaders from 23 countries participated in a rare display of
pro-Americanism, yet embassy officials boycotted it, considering the whole
affair "unimportant."
Besides congenital incompetence of our aid agencies, this also reflects a
cynical preference among some of our diplomats to want to co-opt former regime
elites because "it is better these people work for us than against us." Of
course, co-option has helped restore the communist aristocracy's past prominence
— on our dime. Indeed, as plans for rebuilding Iraq now stand, the Balkan
"example" will most likely prevail there. So, in five years time, don't assume
that those you see protesting American imperialism are necessarily sponsored by
the Ba'ath Party.
Max Primorac advises U.S. and foreign officials on postwar
democracy-building on the Balkans.
The recent assassination of Serbian
Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic has plunged the small Balkan country and the
entire region into political chaos.
Djindjic was gunned down in downtown Belgrade several weeks ago in
broad daylight just outside the main government building. The assassins are
widely suspected to be a mafia group called the Zemun, named after the
Belgrade municipality. The man thought to be the mastermind of the hit is
Milorad Lukovic, the former head of Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic's
special police unit known as the "Red Berets."
Djindjic's murder shocked many leaders in the West; this is the first
assassination of a European head of government since Swedish Prime Minister
Olof Palme was shot in Stockholm in 1986. Yet the Serbian technocrat's death
should have come as no surprise.
Djindjic was a courageous pro-Western reformer. He was one of the
leaders of the Serbian democratic revolution that toppled Mr. Milosevic from
power in October 2000. Djindjic sought to transform his country from a
Balkan pariah state into a full-fledged member of the European Union. During
his two years in power, he championed free-market and democratic reforms,
arguing that a German-style technocracy would enable Belgrade to reverse its
plummeting standard of living.
In confronting the country's rampant corruption, Djindjic made numerous
enemies — especially among loyal Milosevic supporters who retain a strong
influence over Serbia's economic and political life. His administration was
characterized by policies that placed him on a collision course with the
country's entrenched criminal elements.
Djindjic waged a war on the mafia. Hence, he became public enemy number
one for prominent gangsters such as Lukovic. However, his greatest act of
courage was his decision to hand Milosevic over to the international war
crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The move was deeply resented by
many Serbs. Vojislav Kostunica, Milosevic's successor as the president of
Yugoslavia, opposed the decision. The rift between the moderate nationalist
Kostunica and the liberal Djindjic caused profound divisions within the
reformist ruling coaliton. It also earned Djindjic the undying hatred of the
Red Berets and other pro-Milosevic extremist groups, who feared they might
be indicted and sent to The Hague.
More recently, Djindjic had come under intense pressure from the State
Department to deliver three suspected war criminals to the tribunal, the
most famous being Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb commander who oversaw the
massacre of 7,000 Muslim civilians at Srebrenica. He is believed to be
hiding somewhere in Belgrade. American officials insisted, that once the
three men were captured, Congress would authorize badly needed foreign aid.
The result is that Djindjic was thrust into an impossible political
situation. If he continued cooperating with the tribunal, he risked losing
broad-based electoral support; however, if he failed to deliver Mr. Mladic
by the March 31 deadline, he would alienate his major sponsors in Washington
and Brussels. Ironically, the assassin's bullets absolved Djindjic from
making the most difficult choice of his career, in which whatever decision
he made risked undermining his credibility and prestige.
Djindjic's death reveals the dangers faced by liberal reformers in the
Balkans who support The Hague's tribunal. The overwhelming majority of
Serbs, Croats and Muslims agree that the tribunal has been a dismal failure.
Originally created to bring war criminals to justice and to help establish a
lasting peace in the region, it has become a force for instability. The
Serbs view it as biased against them. The Croats are rightly angry about
recent weak indictments issued against the country's leading generals. And
the Bosnian Muslims have concluded that meaningful justice will never be
achieved — especially in light of The Hague's scandalous decision to
sentence Biljana Plavsic, a former senior adviser to Bosnian Serb leader
Radovan Karadzic and a self-confessed war criminal, to only 11 years in
prison.
Rather than compelling the nations in the former Yugoslavia to
cooperate with an international tribunal that is unpopular and increasingly
ineffective, Western governments would be wise to demand that cases
involving suspected war criminals be ceded back to the domestic courts in
Belgrade, Sarajevo and Zagreb. Such a move would show that the West is
serious about protecting the national sovereignty of countries in the
region, as well as encourage the development of the rule of law by
empowering local courts to deal with sensitive war crimes issues.
It will also enable another reformer such as Mr. Kostunica to succeed
Djindjic as Serbia's next leader. Mr. Kostunica has made it clear that he
opposes The Hague. A democratic Serbia is pivotal to establishing stability
and prosperity in the Balkans. Djindjic began the painful process of putting
his country on the path toward rejoining European civilization. It can only
be completed after tribunal at The Hague is dissolved.
Jeffrey T. Kuhner is an assistant national editor at The Washington
Times.
Terrorists linked to the al Qaeda network are operating in Bosnia,
according to the Croatian member of the country's tripartite presidency.
"Al Qaeda cells are active in Bosnia," President Dragan Covic
said in an interview with The Washington Times. "The Bush administration
needs to deal aggressively with this problem. If nothing is done about this,
Islamic extremist groups could in the future destabilize the entire region."
Radical Islamist groups in Bosnia are plotting terrorist attacks, said
Mr. Covic, who was elected in October and shares power with representatives
of the country's Serbian and Muslim populations.
"In Bosnia there are many 'humanitarian' agencies that are in reality
fronts for terrorist groups from the Middle East," he said Friday, adding
that the most prominent are those linked with al Qaeda leader Osama bin
Laden.
The radical Islamist cells are funded from countries all over the Middle
East, including Saudi Arabia, Mr. Covic said.
"We believe that our security forces, along with U.S. intelligence
personnel, have this information and are working to deal with the problem,"
he said.
Mr. Covic, 47, was in Washington for a two-day trip, in which he met with
aids on Capitol Hill.
The proliferation of Islamic extremist groups threatens to undermine
Bosnia's fragile peace, he said. He urged the Bush administration to take
action to stem the tide of Islamic fundamentalism in the Balkans.
"These terrorist cells are very dangerous not only to peace and stability
in the Balkans, but to European and American security interests," Mr. Covic
said. "The failure by the United States during the 1990s to deal with the
threat posed by the al Qaeda network based in a country as far away as
Afghanistan resulted in the horrific consequences of September 11. Just
imagine the devastation that can be unleashed from the growth of Islamic
extremism in the heart of Europe."
The past several years have brought sporadic attacks by Muslim extremists
on Catholic churches around Sarajevo. Three Croats a father and his two
daughters were gunned down Christmas Eve in their home by an Islamic
militant near the town of Konjic. The reason: The family was celebrating
Christmas.
Bosnia's constitutional system also needs to be reformed, said Mr. Covic,
who is vice president of the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), a party that
enjoys the strong support of ethnic Croats.
Now is the time to revise the 1995 agreement reached in Dayton, Ohio,
which ended the war in Bosnia, Mr. Covic said. The Dayton accords divided
the country into two entities, the Muslim-Croat federation and the
Bosnian-Serb republic.
"Dayton was a major accomplishment because it established the peace in
Bosnia. However, the internal structure of the state devised by the
agreement was only a short-term solution," Mr. Covic said.
He said Croats are denied full political and cultural rights throughout
Bosnia, especially in areas with Muslim or Serbian majorities. The smallest
of Bosnia's three main ethnic groups, Croats constitute roughly 18 percent
of the population. Muslims are the largest group, with 44 percent; Serbs
make up 31 percent.
Because Muslims are in the majority in the Muslim-Croat entity, Mr. Covic
said, Croats are denied positions in many government ministries.
"This amounts to discrimination against the Croats," he said, adding that
their minority status means they cannot influence implementation of many
laws.
"The Croats in Bosnia have not resolved the question of their national
status within the country. They should be granted the full and equal rights
that are applied to the Bosnian Serbs and Muslims," Mr. Covic said.
For Bosnia to achieve long-term political stability, he said, it must
devolve power from the central government, allowing greater authority and
freedom to the three ethnic groups at the local level.
"The model should be that of Switzerland or Belgium," Mr. Covic said.
The leader of a Croatian opposition party has called for the Bush
administration to switch its support from the elected socialist government of
Prime Minister Ivica Racan to a center-right coalition committed to economic
reform and the war on terrorism.
"Unfortunately, Croatia currently has a left-wing government, in which a
key role is being played by the former communists," said Ivic Pasalic, the
leader of the Croatian Bloc Party, during an interview this week.
Mr. Pasalic, who has been dogged by charges of corruption, said his visit
to Washington was part of a strategy to convince the Bush administration that
the ruling center-left coalition in Zagreb has failed to implement necessary
free-market reforms.
He also said that Mr. Racan's government has not been effective enough in
prosecuting the war on terrorism — especially in neighboring Bosnia-Herzegovina,
where there are "dangerous trends in which the strong influence of Islamic
fundamentalists is on the rise."
"My message to the Bush administration is a simple one: Croatia can be a
stable partner in the fight against terrorism," Mr. Pasalic said, adding that
during the 1990s Zagreb played a key role in providing the Clinton
administration with information about Islamic terrorist cells operating in
Bosnia.
Mr. Pasalic, a former adviser to the late President Franjo Tudjman, is
seeking to forge a center-right coalition of conservative and Christian parties
that will challenge Mr. Racan's government in upcoming national elections
expected later this year.
The former communist Social Democratic Party (SDP) was elected in early
2000 on a platform of opening Croatia's economy and forging closer links with
NATO and the European Union. But recent opinion polls have shown the popularity
of Mr. Racan's SDP has plummeted in the face of an economic crisis.
The primary beneficiary has been the main opposition party, the Croatian
Democratic Union (HDZ), led by Ivo Sanader, which now enjoys about 30 percent
voter support, compared with 20 percent for the SDP. The Croatian Bloc is in
single digits, ranging between 3 percent and 8 percent.
Mr. Pasalic, 42, hopes that by leading a broad array of small conservative
parties, the Croatian Bloc may enter into power as a junior partner in a
coalition government with the center-right HDZ.
However, its prospects are clouded by constant accusations of corruption
against Mr. Pasalic dating from the mid-1990s. Viewed as the "Dr. No" of
Croatian politics, Mr. Pasalic has been attacked in the Croatian media for his
purported role in masterminding shady privatization deals during the Tudjman
regime, when the HDZ economic elite plundered the country's public assets.
There is still no evidence proving that Mr. Pasalic committed any financial
misdeeds. Yet the former Tudjman aide has been politically wounded by the
negative publicity, dimming the chances of an alliance with the resurgent HDZ.
"In politics, formal accusations are as important as substantial ones,"
said Slaven Letica, a political analyst and economics professor at Zagreb
University. "The Croatian public believes that he was involved in the corruption
of the 1990s and that hurts him politically."
By Grace Vuoto, Professor of European history
at Howard University
President Bush has thus far done an admirable job in the war on
terrorism, but in the Balkans he is asleep at the wheel. The president has been
so preoccupied with combating terrorism and attempting to revive a sluggish
economy, that he has neglected an area of strategic necessity which has revealed
twice in the 20th century that it will be ignored only at dire peril.
The problem in the Balkans is that the war-crimes tribunal at The Hague,
Netherlands, for the former Yugoslavia is running roughshod over the basic
principles of justice and fair play it was mandated to enforce. Instead of
restoring calm and order by patiently identifying those who committed war crimes
during the Croat-Serb conflict (1991-95), the tribunal is behaving in a sloppy
and high-handed manner likely to spark tensions once again.
Carla Del Ponte, the chief prosecutor, is presiding over an office that is
out of control and drunk with power. Rather than undertaking the slow, difficult
and painful process of identifying each and every soldier or paramilitary
fighter who committed an atrocity, the prosecutor's office has issued broad and
vague indictments against leading Croatian generals such as Ante Gotovina and
Janko Bobetko. These men are not accused of a specific crime but simply of
"command responsibility" for isolated crimes that took place during major
military operations. This is akin to indicting a police chief for an act of
police brutality perpetrated by a subordinate simply because the chief has
"command responsibility" over his unit. This prosecutor would be laughed out of
every courtroom in the Western world.
Furthermore, The Hague is treating Balkan countries as though they were
second-rate fiefdoms. In an attempt to stifle the groundswell of criticism that
is emerging against Mrs. Del Ponte's office, members of her staff such as
spokeswoman Florence Hartmann have sought to influence and intimidate news
agencies in Croatia in order to prevent publication of condemnatory articles —
especially if these articles are written by Western journalists.
The Hague is thus failing to respect the national sovereignty of this newly
independent nation and is badly damaging all efforts to establish freedom of the
press in this young democracy.
Moreover, The Hague is now rearing its ugly head toward the United States.
Investigators have begun to make inquiries into the American role in Operation
Storm, the August 1995 offensive launched by Croatia that effectively ended the
Croat-Serb war.
Despite the recent denials by the State Department, it is well known by all
who have observed this scene closely that the United States had ultimate
"command responsibility" over Operation Storm. Washington gave the operation the
green light and provided Zagreb with vital military and intelligence assistance
such as the use of unmanned drones and encryption gear. Does this mean we will
soon face the humiliating prospect of American officials being dragged before
the tribunal? Will our generals be treated with the same contempt? Will our
journalists be intimidated when they criticize The Hague? If this scenario is
unacceptable to Americans, then why should the Croatian people accept it?
And of course, we must ask Mrs. Del Ponte: Who has "command responsibility"
over her office? How do we obtain redress for the incompetence and misuse of
power committed by her staffers? It is clear that Mrs. Del Ponte must resign;
the charges against the generals must be dropped immediately; and a mechanism
must be established to curtail the arbitrary power of The Hague.
American leadership is required. Mr. Bush came to power pledging humility
in foreign affairs: he must demonstrate this by protecting the rights of weaker
nations and calling to account this arrogant court. If the Bush administration
does not act soon, nationalist sentiment will be inflamed in the Balkans once
again. Furthermore, the president's indifference is alienating allies who will
be vital in the war on terrorism.
Also, by allowing Mrs. Del Ponte and her staffers to run wild,
international law is being undermined.
Finally, America's reputation is at stake: Are we so self-centered that we
appeal to the principles of international law and seek international cooperation
only when we are in desperate need or do we genuinely care to establish a fair
and just community of nations based on protecting the innocent and punishing the
guilty?
Grace Vuoto is a professor of European history at Howard University
The Bush administration is now demanding that the chief prosecutor for
the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia,
Carla Del Ponte, bring her prosecutions to an end.
Washington is insisting that war crimes cases relating to the Balkan
wars of the 1990s — including Operation Storm — be tried either in
domestic national courts or be given a general amnesty. This shift not
only marks a dramatic change in Washington’s policy toward the ICTY,
but more importantly, it is a fatal blow to the power and credibility
of Mrs. Del Ponte.
In an exclusive interview with The Ripon Forum magazine earlier this
summer, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton said to
me that Washington is deeply concerned that the ICTY, rather than
fostering ethnic reconciliation, has emerged as a threat to regional
stability. “There is a very real risk that the ICTY prosecutions will
not resolve the situation in the Balkans,” the senior Bush
administration official said, “but will create new animosities that
lead to tensions in the future.”
He emphasized the Bush administration is demanding war crimes cases at
The Hague be sent back to national domestic courts. Mr. Bolton and
other leading State Department officials are finally realizing what
Mrs. Del Ponte and her fellow left-wing globalists have refused to
acknowledge: the ICTY has degenerated into a politicized tribunal that
has failed to live up to its original mandate. Ironically, it was the
United States under the Clinton administration that created the ICTY.
However, Washington now realizes that it has unleashed a Frankenstein
monster. Instead of being an impartial body that seeks to punish those
who committed or ordered war crimes, the tribunal has become a vehicle
by which Mrs. Del Ponte has sought to rewrite the history of the
Balkan wars. She has abused her office by issuing deeply flawed and
weak indictments, the most obvious one being against Croatian Gen.
Ante Gotovina.
As Mr. Bolton notes, the problem with the ICTY is that it has no
democratic accountability. Hence, there are no checks or balances
against the misuse of power by an out-of-control chief prosecutor.
Therefore, the Bush administration has concluded the only solution is
to kick most cases back to national, domestic courts.
“That is why our strategy with respect to the ICTY is to bring these
prosecutions to an end and to return responsibility to Serbia, Croatia
and to the other nations, because after all, many of the alleged
crimes were carried out in their name and they need to confront that
reality. They need to make the decisions whether to prosecute or not
to prosecute Serbs or Croats respectively,” Mr. Bolton said. “They
need to make the decision whether granting amnesty is something they
want to have to live with or whether they think prosecution is best. I
am not trying to prejudge what the right result is, but to say
responsibility should rest on the shoulders of the people who have to
live with the decisions they make.”
Ultimately, the United States
rightly believes that the ICTY is not only an undemocratic
institution, but its existence is a direct threat to the development
of democracy itself. Its greatest flaw is that, by virtue of being an
international tribunal with little accountability, it is retarding the
development of independent judicial institutions and the rule of law
within the countries of the former Yugoslavia. It is denying Croatia,
for example, its legitimate sovereign right to try major cases
involving alleged war crimes committed on its own soil. The result is
to stunt the maturation of domestic legal institutions, which are
pivotal to erecting a viable democracy.
“
One of the downsides of any distant court is that it takes away
responsibility, and I don't think that is conducive to the political
maturation of societies that we hope will become democratic and
realize that they have to confront actions that their prior
governments took,” Mr. Bolton said. “So that is why our approach to
the ICTY and with the Rwanda tribunal is to make and create
institutions in the respective countries and to turn that authority
back over to them.”
The record is now clear: the ICTY has been a dismal failure. The trial
of former Serb strongman, Slobodan Milosevic, continues to drag on.
Notorious Bosnian Serb war criminals Gen. Ratko Mladic and Radovan
Karadzic remain at large. Mrs. Del Ponte refuses to withdraw the bogus
indictment against Gen. Gotovina, which is not only a shameful attempt
to frame an innocent man. More importantly, the indictment seeks to
criminalize Operation Storm and with it the legitimacy of Croatia’s
Homeland War.
Yet in the face of all of this, Croatia’s dogmatic neo-communists
continue to tenaciously defend Mrs. Del Ponte and her cronies. Which
begs the question: Why?
The answer is that Croatia’s
Left hitched their political star to ingratiating themselves to the
“international community,” without any concern for their country’s
national interests or the cause of democracy and justice. Leaders such
as President Stipe Mesic and former Prime Minister Ivica Racan were
hoping that, by blindly adhering to the policy of “unconditional
cooperation” with the ICTY, Brussels
and Washington would reward them with massive foreign aid and
diplomatic support. Instead, they are finding out that the
international system is not based on quixotic slogans, but on
something more fundamental: power and national self-interest.
“Unconditionally cooperating” with the ICTY was never in Croatia’s
national interests — or of any other self-respecting, fledgling
democracy for that matter.
Ivan Grdesic, then-Croatia’s ambassador to the United States, in a
remarkable statement, told me in a room full of people at the Croatian
American Association banquet in Chicago earlier this year, that
“Croatian democracy was too immature to handle the Gotovina case. Our
country’s courts are not capable of overseeing a fair and impartial
trial.” Hence, he argued that Zagreb had “no choice” but to follow the
ICTY. This, of course, is nonsense. Whether you are for or against the
ruling, the fact is that the conviction of Gen. Mirko Norac by a local
Croatian court proves one thing: the country’s judiciary is more than
capable of trying a high-profile war crimes case. Moreover, Croatian
courts have successfully tried and prosecuted nearly 300 war crimes
cases over the past several years.
Yet there is no amount of evidence that can convince Mr. Grdesic, Mr.
Mesic and their fellow leftist allies that Croatia is indeed capable
of functioning like every other democracy on Earth. They are
self-hating Croats, who have been nurtured for decades by Titoist
propaganda to despise liberal democracy and Croatia’s legitimate
national aspirations. They are neither genuine democrats nor patriots.
They are internationalists, who believe their country’s rightful place
is to be a province of a larger multinational empire – whether it is
communist Yugoslavia or a European socialist superstate. Yesterday,
they served Tito and Belgrade. Today, it is Mrs. Del Ponte and
Brussels.
Ultimately, however, leftist internationalism is an illusion, for it
seeks to deny the fundamental realities of the natural moral order –
the desire of human beings to live in freedom, both as individuals
(best represented by democracy and free markets) and as nations (best
represented by patriotism and self-determination). The world came
crashing down around Croatia’s leftists when Tito’s Yugoslavia
disintegrated into the dustbin of history. It is about to come
crashing down once again.
Jeffrey T. Kuhner is editor of the
Ripon Forum magazine and
communications director at the Ripon Society, a Republican think tank,
in Washington, DC. He can be reached at
Except in Fidel Castro's
island prison and in the hermit Stalinist state of North Korea, it is widely
acknowledged today that Communism is a spent force. This view is especially
accepted with respect to Europe, where most would agree that the implosion of
the Soviet empire swept Marxist-Leninism into the dustbin of history. Yet as
Karl Marx himself once observed: "History repeats itself — the first time as
tragedy, the second time as farce."
Nowhere is this more true
than in modern-day Croatia. As most of Eastern Europe continues to progress
toward free-market reforms and Western-style democracy, this small Balkan state
is even today making a return to Communism.
Socialist prime minister
Ivica Racan came to power in early 2000 on a platform of economic reform,
democratic renewal, and an end to the authoritarian policies of Croatia's
previous president, the late Franjo Tudjman. But instead of ushering a Quiet
Revolution, the current leftist government has returned the country to a neo-Titoist
dark age.
The ruling coalition is
full of former Communists who served under the old Yugoslav regime. Tito's
police state persecuted the Croats and was responsible for the mass murder of
hundreds of thousands of peasants, priests, intellectuals, and pro-democracy
dissidents; long-term economic and environmental devastation; and the loss of
basic freedoms and human rights. Both Mr. Racan and President Stipe Mesic were
lifelong members of the Communist party; and, to this day, they retain a Marxist
mindset.
Hostile to their
country's successful bid for independence from Serb-dominated Yugoslavia, Racan
and Mesic are promoting Croatia's entry into the Balkan Stability Pact — an
attempt to reforge a Balkan union, minus Slovenia and plus Albania.
Racan and Mesic have
never forgiven Mr. Tudjman for what they regard to be his greatest sin: breaking
up Yugoslavia and forging an independent Croatian state. For the past three
years there has been a systematic campaign in the state-run media (including
television) to vilify Croat patriots. Prominent anti-Communist writers and
journalists have been fired from newspapers and replaced with pro-leftist hacks,
who spout the government's line on almost every issue.
A classic example of this
is the country's preeminent weekly magazine, Globus. Globus
regularly publishes articles and editorials that are more reminiscent of the
Communist flagship, Pravda, in the Cold War years than of a modern,
Western news magazine. Writers at Globus often inject their articles with
factual inaccuracies and fabrications of statements in order to wage smear
campaigns against government opponents. As one journalist in Zagreb told me:
"They will frequently call someone for an interview and regardless of what that
person says, they will print the story that they want — never mind about the
truth."
Gordan Malic, one of the
magazine's prominent neo-Stalinists, has stated that the Mesic-Racan regime
should fire every conservative from the state-run media. Sadly, his views are
echoed by many other leftists, both in the press and in the government, who seek
to impose an ideological uniformity like that of the Titoist era, when
journalists were expected to act as mouthpieces for the Communist party.
The attachment to
old-style Communist practices can also be seen in Mr. Racan's economic policies.
The government has vowed to bring Croatia into the European Union by 2006. Yet
it has no viable plan on how to achieve that goal. Rather than implementing an
aggressive pro-growth agenda of tax cuts, deregulation, and free-market reforms,
the ruling leftist coalition remains wedded to statism and massive government
intervention in the economy.
The powers that be have
made only tepid efforts at privatization — while doing nothing to scale back the
bloated public bureaucracy that is stifling entrepreneurship and private
investment. Moreover, they have also failed to clamp down on the economic
culture of cronyism and corruption passed down from the Communist era. Bribery
and payoffs to public officials remain a prominent fixture of business in
Croatia. Rather than waging a war on corruption and providing an attractive
climate for foreign investors, Racan's economic team has remained paralyzed.
Having looked to Belgrade for decades to bail out inefficient state-run
companies, Zagreb's former Titoists have based their economic strategy on
milking international aid out of Brussels and Washington. Yet contrary to their
expectations, significant Western financial assistance has not materialized.
The country is now an
economic basket case. The unemployment rate is over 23 percent — a significant
increase since the anemic Tudjman years. Zagreb is also saddled with a nearly
$10 billion foreign debt. Its annual per capita income is slightly more than
$4,000 — half that of neighboring Slovenia and only 60 percent of what it was
before Croatia became independent, in 1991. The government's dismal economic
record — combined with its inability to defend the country's leading generals,
such as Janko Bobetko and Ante Gotovina, from deeply flawed and weak indictments
by the Balkans war-crimes tribunal — has led to a substantial loss of support
among the electorate.
Mr. Racan is likely to
lose the national elections to be called sometime this spring. Yet his greatest
asset is the fractured conservative opposition, which remains mired in bitter
infighting and which has been unable to coalesce around a unifying message or
candidate. The main opposition party, the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), is
surging in the opinion polls. But its leader, Ivo Sanader, is a vacuous
technocrat who has failed to articulate a coherent economic platform. Mr.
Sanader's bigger problem is a political one: He fails to understand that in
order to attain an electoral majority he needs to forge a broad, center-right
coalition capable of assuming power. Rather than reaching out to potential
allies, he remains obsessed with consolidating his hold over the HDZ by waging a
nasty purge campaign against all opponents within his own party. The result is
that the HDZ has peaked at 30 percent in the polls — a significant political
force, but one that remains unable to attract a majority of voters.
Meanwhile, other rightist
parties led by Tudjman's son, Miroslav, and Sanader's arch-enemy, Ivic Pasalic,
are championing a xenophobic nationalism which does not appeal to the mainstream
of the electorate. The danger is that the country's political landscape will
become increasingly polarized between the governing hard Left and the
right-wing, nationalist opposition, leaving Croatia paralyzed and unable to
confront its economic crisis. The Bush administration rightly views Zagreb as
pivotal to helping the region recover from the devastation caused by the violent
dissolution of Yugoslavia during the 1990s. Croatia's slide into economic and
social turmoil remains a threat to the long-term stability of the Balkans.
Yet instead of
cultivating a viable alternative to the neo-Communists in power, policymakers in
the State Department continue to insist that Racan's brand of leftist
internationalism is precisely what the region needs following a decade of ethnic
conflict. They are wrong. The problem in the Balkans is not the persistence of
nationalism, but the emergence of imperialist ideologies that foster ethnic and
religious hatred. The savage wars in the former Yugoslavia were unleashed by
Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic's genocidal desire to forge an ethnically
pure Great Serb empire stretching from the Danube River to the Adriatic Sea.
Today, the greatest threat to peace stems from the resurgence of Islamic
fundamentalism in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which seeks to either wipe out or convert
all Christians in the region. The country now serves as a base for al Qaeda
operatives. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, continues to send millions of dollars in
aid to "humanitarian" agencies that encourage Bosnian Muslims to promote the
doctrines of Wahhabism, a particularly intolerant and puritanical version of
Islam. The result has been numerous acts of terror perpetrated upon innocent
civilians — especially Catholic Croats. During the past several years, Catholic
churches in and around Sarajevo have been vandalized by Islamic extremists. The
latest incident occurred on Christmas Eve, when three Croats — a father and his
two daughters — were gunned down in their home by an Islamic militant near the
town of Konjic, for celebrating Christmas.
As the Bush
administration remains focused on Iraq, North Korea, and other trouble spots, it
has overlooked the fact that Bosnia is gradually becoming a haven for Saudi
mullahs and the fanatical followers of Osama bin Laden. If unchecked, the growth
of radical Islam will destabilize the Balkans, plunging it once again into
bloodshed and religious conflict. Because Zagreb shares a long, porous border
with Bosnia, it, more than any other regional power, has a profound stake in
ensuring that Muslim fundamentalism does not emerge as a serious force.
A stable and prosperous
Croatia is vital to Western security interests because it is a pivotal
front-line state in the war against global terrorism. For centuries, the Croats
served as the ramparts of European Christendom, protecting Rome and Vienna from
invading Ottoman armies. Washington would be wise to demand that Zagreb again
take up its historic role as a strategic bulwark against Islamic expansionism on
the continent. But that can only happen after the reign of Racan and his allies
has ended.
—
Jeffrey T. Kuhner is an assistant national editor at the Washington Times.
He is currently writing a book on the history of the Croat-Serb conflict in the
former Yugoslavia.
Since ancient Greece, one of the central questions in Western
political life is: "Who guards the guardians."
This is especially pertinent regarding the
international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at
The Hague. The tribunal was created in 1993 by the United Nations
Security Council; it was charged with the responsibility of bringing
to justice those who committed war crimes during the violent break up
of Yugoslavia. Sadly, The Hague has been a disappointment: The
prosecutor's office has engaged in abuses of power and issued flawed
indictments that pose a threat to U.S. national interests.
The most obvious example of the tribunal's
incompetence is the current trial of former Serb strongman Slobodan
Milosevic. This has been a public relations disaster for The Hague, as
Mr. Milosevic has put the prosecutor's office on the defensive,
charging that he is the victim of a Western smear campaign.
Despite the overwhelming evidence that the
Butcher of Belgrade masterminded the ethnic-cleansing campaigns in
Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, the prosecution has so far failed to
document Mr. Milosevic's numerous crimes. These include the
destruction of Vukovar, the massacre of more than 7,000 civilians at
Srebrenica, the savage shelling of Sarajevo, and the murder of
countless ethnic Albanians, whose graves are now being discovered all
over Serbia.
The tribunal's chief prosecutor, Carla Del
Ponte - like most
European leftists -
is uncomfortable with the notion of moral absolutes. She refuses to
acknowledge that Mr. Milosevic in particular, and the Serbs in general,
bear the brunt of responsibility for the war crimes committed in the
Balkans. Hence, she is looking for an ethnic scapegoat to offset the
complaints from Belgrade that her office is demonstrating "bias"
against the Serbs. Mrs. Del Ponte believes she has found it in the
Croats.
In June 2001, the prosecutor's office issued
an indictment for Croatian Gen. Ante Gotovina on charges that he
exercised "command responsibility" over a 1995 military operation in
which Zagreb recovered territories seized by rebel Serb forces during
Croatia's successful drive for independence in 1991. The operation
resulted in the mass exodus of 150,000 ethnic Serbs from Croatia. The
United States supported the offensive because it rightly concluded
that Croatia was pivotal to altering the strategic balance of power in
the Balkans. The operation not only restored Croatia's territorial
integrity, but also paved the way for the Dayton peace agreement that
ended the war in neighboring Bosnia.
The Gotovina indictment is deeply flawed; it
is also revolutionary in its implications for international criminal
law. The theory of "command responsibility" violates the basic tenet
of the definition of a war crime -
the principle of personal responsibility for one's actions. The
Croatian general is not accused of individually committing or ordering
atrocities; he is simply guilty of being in "command" when alleged war
crimes were committed. The ultimate goal of the indictment is not only
to punish the Croats for exercising their legitimate right to
self-defense, but to make war itself a crime.
Rather than dropping the charges against Gen.
Gotovina, Mrs. Del Ponte's office is now examining whether to expand
the indictment to include high-ranking U.S. officials — such as former
President Bill Clinton -
on the grounds that they exercised ultimate "command responsibility"
for the operation.
Troubled by the implications of the Gotovina
indictment, the State Department has asked the prosecutor's office to
transfer cases involving Croatian military officials back to the
domestic courts in Zagreb. But Mrs. Del Ponte continues to thumb her
nose at the United States, demanding that Gen. Gotovina be arrested
and sent to The Hague to face trial.
Furthermore, the prosecutor's office is
abusing its powers. ICTY spokesman, Florence Hartmann, has directly
lobbied journalists and media outlets in Croatia, demanding that
pro-Gotovina coverage be dropped. She has sought to bully and
intimidate reporters asking about the ICTY's basis for the Gotovina
indictment.
Mrs. Del Ponte is now requesting that her
mandate as chief prosecutor be extended past its September 2003
expiration deadline until Mr. Milosevic's trial is over. Instead of
renewing her mandate, the Bush administration should demand an
independent investigation of Mrs. Del Ponte's office for its abuses of
power, its unethical indictment of Gen. Gotovina and its utter
incompetence in prosecuting the greatest mass murderer of the
late-20th century.
At the very least, the United States should
use its veto at the U.N. Security Council next year to block Mrs. Del
Ponte's reappointment. Washington must hold The Hague accountable for
its actions. If it doesn't, who will?
Bill Clinton -
war criminal?: U.S. backed Croatian general`s offensive
byJEFFREY KUHNER,
assistant national editor at The Washington Times.
Croatia is in the midst of a political and economic crisis. The current rulers,
a centre-left coalition elected in early 2000 on a platform of economic reform,
have been a disappointment to most Croat voters. The popularity of Socialist
Prime Minister Ivica Racan has dropped dramatically in recent months, leaving
many analysts here predicting that early elections will be called this fall or
next spring at the latest.
Many observers hoped that the election of Racan`s leftist coalition would lead
to a Quiet Revolution in Croatia. The current government was swept into power,
riding a wave of popular enthusiasm that sought to end the country`s growing
international isolation during the 1990s, when it was governed by the late
President Franjo Tudjman.
But Racan`s regime has failed to implement the free-market reforms needed to
stimulate the sluggish economy. In fact, the economic situation has worsened
since the Tudjman years.
Unemployment has doubled to nearly 25 per cent, foreign investment has dried up
and the government has failed to scale back the bloated public bureaucracy.
But more important for many voters has been the coalition`s decision - not yet
implemented - to hand a Croatian general over to the Balkans war-crimes tribunal
in The Hague.
General Ante Gotovina`s case has been largely overshadowed by the trial of
former Serb strongman Slobodan Milosevic, but it could in the end be far more
consequential.
It has already caused mass outrage here and triggered a political crisis, and it
raises the possibility that former president Bill Clinton and other top U.S.
officials will be facing war crimes charges as well.
Gotovina was indicted in June 2001 by the prosecutor`s office at The Hague on
charges that he exercised "command responsibility" over a 1995 military
operation that resulted in the expulsion of 150,000 ethnic Serbs from Croatia.
On Aug. 4, supported by the Clinton administration, Croatian forces launched a
massive, three-day military offensive known as Operation Storm, which recovered
territories that had been occupied by rebel Serbs after the Croatia`s drive for
independence from Yugoslavia in 1991.
Gotovina is not accused of committing or ordering war crimes, but simply of
being in charge when alleged atrocities were committed. By this standard, the
United States, which provided military and technical assistance to Operation
Storm in order to deliver a decisive defeat to Milosevic`s genocidal goal of
forging a "Greater Serbia," is also guilty.
Washington`s involvement in the operation was not only legitimate, but
significantly advanced U.S. interests in the region by putting an end to
Serbia`s expansionist ambitions.
Yet American support and approval for the military offensive means the
indictment against Gotovina could lead to the prosecution before The Hague
tribunal of Clinton and other high-ranking U.S. officials on charges of having
command responsibility for alleged war crimes that were committed during the
operation.
The prosecutor`s office is now examining whether to investigate Clinton and
former ambassador Richard Holbrooke for their role in Operation Storm.
The Bush administration has become increasingly concerned with the implications
of the Gotovina case for U.S. officials.
They are now urging that the tribunal`s chief prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, send
back cases involving Croatian military officials to the domestic courts in
Zagreb. But Del Ponte has refused to co-operate, demanding that Gotovina be
arrested and sent to The Hague. That would be a mistake.
Gotovina is not a war criminal, but a patriot who helped to secure Croatia`s
territorial integrity from the clutches of Serbian revanchism. Even Serbian
human-rights activists who have looked into Operation Storm believe that the
indictment against the general is unjust.
Most of the crimes that were committed - the murder of 500 civilians, the
looting of property and the burning of 40,000 homes and barns - happened after
the operation, when the recovered territories fell under the control of local
police forces.
Moreover, the local Serbs who remained behind after the operation have testified
that most of the crimes were perpetrated by returning civilians seeking revenge
- not by the Croatian army.
Contrary to its expectations, Zagreb`s decision to hand Gotovina over to the
tribunal has not bolstered its pro-Western credentials; rather, it has shaken
the Croatian public`s confidence in the government`s ability to defend the
country`s war heroes.
Vowing to protect the general at all costs, nationalist parties have been making
substantial gains in the polls in recent months.
Racan would be wise to reverse himself and demand that Del Ponte drop the
Gotovina indictment.
If not, he faces the possibility of spending the rest of his political career on
the opposition benches.
- Jeffrey Kuhner is an assistant national editor at The Washington Times.
The Bush administration is now demanding that the chief prosecutor for
the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Carla
Del Ponte, bring her prosecutions to an end.
Washington is insisting that war crimes cases relating to the
Balkan wars of the 1990s be tried either in domestic courts or be
given an amnesty. This shift not only marks a dramatic change in U.S.
policy toward the ICTY, but more importantly, it is a fatal blow to
the power and credibility of Mrs. Del Ponte.
In a recent interview, Undersecretary of State for Arms Control
John Bolton told me Washington is deeply concerned that the ICTY,
rather than fostering ethnic reconciliation, has emerged as a threat
to regional stability. "There is a very real risk that the ICTY
prosecutions will not resolve the situation in the Balkans," Mr.
Bolton said, "but will create new animosities that lead to tensions in
the future."
He emphasized the Bush administration is demanding war crimes
cases at The Hague be sent back to national domestic courts. Mr.
Bolton and other senior State Department officials are finally
realizing what Mrs. Del Ponte and her fellow left-wing globalists have
refused to acknowledge: The ICTY has degenerated into a politicized
tribunal that has failed to live up to its original mandate.
The irony is that the Clinton administration was largely
responsible for creating the ICTY. Washington, however, now realizes
that it has unleashed a Frankenstein monster. Instead of being an
impartial body that seeks to punish those who committed or ordered war
crimes, the tribunal has become a vehicle by which Mrs. Del Ponte has
sought to rewrite the history of the Balkan wars. She has abused her
office by issuing deeply flawed and weak indictments. The most obvious
example is the bogus indictment against fugitive Croatian Gen. Ante
Gotovina, the commander of a 1995 military operation that effectively
ended the Croatian-Serbian conflict.
As Mr. Bolton notes, the problem with the ICTY is that it has no
democratic accountability. Hence, there are no checks or balances
against the misuse of power. Therefore, the Bush administration has
concluded the only solution is to kick war crimes cases back to
national domestic courts.
"That is why our strategy with respect to the ICTY is to bring
these prosecutions to an end and to return responsibility to Serbia,
Croatia and to the other nations," Mr. Bolton said, "because, after
all, many of the alleged crimes were carried out in their name and
they need to confront that reality. They need to make the decisions
whether to prosecute or not to prosecute Serbs or Croats
respectively."
The senior Bush administration official emphasized that
"responsibility" for trying alleged war crimes "should rest on the
shoulders of the people who have to live with the decisions they
make."
Ultimately, the United States rightly believes that the ICTY has
become not only an undemocratic institution, but a direct threat to
the development of democracy throughout the former Yugoslavia. Its
greatest flaw is that, by virtue of being an international tribunal
with little accountability, it is retarding the growth of independent
judicial bodies and the rule of law within Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia.
For viable democracies to take root in the stony soil of the Balkans,
it is imperative to cultivate fully functioning legal institutions.
"One of the downsides of any distant court is that it takes away
responsibility, and I don't think that is conducive to the political
maturation of societies that we hope will become democratic and
realize that they have to confront actions that their prior
governments took," Mr. Bolton said. "So that is why our approach to
the ICTY and with the Rwanda tribunal is to make and create
institutions in the respective countries and to turn that authority
back over to them."
The record is now clear: The ICTY has been a dismal failure. The
trial of the former Serbian strongman, Slobodan Milosevic, continues
to drag on with no end in sight. Notorious Bosnian Serb leaders Gen.
Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic remain at large. The Gotovina
indictment threatens to destabilize Croatia. Bosnian Muslims and
Kosovo Albanians feel they will never receive justice. Serbs perceive
the tribunal as being biased against them.
Mrs. Del Ponte has managed to accomplish what no other person has
before: Temporarily unite the warring peoples of the former Yugoslavia
in their opposition to her. She is the Lady Macbeth of the Balkans, an
unscrupulous political climber with delusions of grandeur. And like
Lady Macbeth, Mrs. Del Ponte's lust for power has led to her downfall.
Washington is right to yank her off the stage.
Jeffrey T. Kuhner is editor of the
Ripon Forum magazine and
communications director at the Ripon Society, a Republican think tank.
After the fall of the
Berlin Wall, American conservatives celebrated the defeat of
communism. Confident their victory was complete, they turned their
guns on other issues such as Iraq, Bill Clinton and the rising
threat of China.
The prevailing assumption among conservatives is that the
break-up of the Soviet empire signaled the death knell of
Marxist-Leninist ideology throughout Eastern Europe.
Their
assumption is wrong. Communism may be dead, but the prevailing
communist mindset continues to live on.
President Vladimir Putin's re-election reveals an increasingly
authoritarian Russia. The former KGB chief seeks to reconstitute a
Great Russian Imperium composed of former Soviet republics. Belarus
is ruled by Stalinist strongman Alexander Lukashenko, who imposed a
one-party police state.
Meanwhile, in Ukraine, Bulgaria and Serbia, neocommunist
reactionaries have sought to derail their countries' efforts to
enter NATO and become full members of the West. In all these
nations, the Red old guard continues to exercise a predominant
influence over the media, the military and the political class.
The result is that the former communist bloc is slowly being
divided into two camps: those who share the West's moral values and
those who do not. Nothing crystallized this emerging geopolitical
fissure more clearly than the recent war in Iraq. For while much of
New Europe — Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia
and the Baltic States — supported the U.S.-led military campaign,
crucial states such as Russia, Belarus and Serbia actively opposed
it.
In fact, the dirty little secret of the Iraq war is that former
communist diehards in Moscow, Minsk, Kiev and Belgrade played a
pivotal role throughout the past decade in supplying Saddam
Hussein's regime with military and intelligence assistance. During
the 1990s, Russia provided Saddam with vital missile technology.
Even Serbia's democratic ruling coalition was implicated last
year in an arms-for-Iraq scandal. Jugoimport, a Belgrade state arms
export agency, was involved in brokering radar systems and weapons
to Baghdad from Bosnia, Ukraine and Russia. A report by the
International Crisis Group (ICG) policy institute concluded close
allies of Vojislav Kostunica, Serbia's current prime minister,
visited Baghdad in 2001 for a conference aimed at undermining U.S.
policy in the Balkans and the Middle East. "The conference
resolution unanimously condemned 'American imperialism and
hegemony,' and everything the United States was doing in
Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq, and had done in Yugoslavia," the
ICG reported.
In East Europe, a fault line emerges, separating Eastern, Slavic
civilization from the largely — although not exclusively — Catholic
civilization of Central Europe. The centuries-old divide between the
Austro-Hungarian Empire and czarist Russia slowly reappears.
This civilizational chasm, however, has now taken a modern
guise, pitting democratic capitalism against authoritarian
pan-Slavism. The Westernizers tend to be pro-American, reform-minded
and eager to join institutions such as NATO and the European Union.
The Slavophiles, on the other hand, champion an anti-American,
anti-Western foreign policy and long for the return of communism.
Yet there is nothing inevitable about the unfolding division on
the European Continent. The Bush administration should foster closer
ties with reformists in the Balkans and Ukraine, and provide them
assistance to dismantle the old communist structures and carry out
real democratic reforms.
Moreover, the United States needs to provide greater support for
pivotal democratic allies, such as the new conservative government
in Croatia. A good first step is the administration's commitment to
support Croatia's fast track entry into NATO.
Croatia, however, will never become a full member of the West so
long as its dogmatic neocommunists continue occupying positions of
power. An obvious example of this is the country's ambassador to the
United States, Ivan Grdesic.
The former Titoist apparatchik has been undermining Zagreb's bid
to join NATO. At an official Croatian Embassy reception in
Washington in February, Mr. Grdesic, in a speech before numerous
dignitaries and State Department officials, proclaimed Croatia's
desire to enter NATO an "impossible dream," said a Croatian Embassy
official who was there. "The entire embassy staff was shocked and
deeply disturbed by the fact that the ambassador was openly
disparaging our efforts to promote Croatia's entry into the Western
military alliance," the official said on condition of anonymity.
In fact, Mr. Grdesic has made no secret of his contempt and
hatred for his own country. At a recent banquet reception in Chicago
sponsored by the Croatian American Association, Mr. Grdesic
denounced Croatia as a "strategically irrelevant" country that "has
nothing" to offer the United States.
His outrageous comments should come as no surprise. For decades,
Mr. Grdesic and his leftist allies were nurtured by communist
propaganda to despise NATO, the democratic West and Croatia's
legitimate national aspirations. The real scandal is not that the
ambassador betrayed his country and violated his public office but
that many in Zagreb's media and diplomatic corps share his
reactionary brand of neocommunism.
The sooner Washington's conservatives realize East Europe
remains rife with consequential individuals such as Mr. Grdesic, the
sooner they can begin helping those nations overcome the crippling
legacy of communism.
Jeffrey T. Kuhner is communications director at the Ripon
Society and editor of the Ripon Forum. The views expressed here are
solely his own.
Ne vjerujem da će SAD dostaviti Haagu materijale o Oluji. Mi u Americi
štitimo i branimo naše ratne heroje. Mi ih ne napuštamo kad se oni suoče s
iskrivljenim optužnicama - Ako su vojnik i general riskirali život u pravednom
ratu, onda je njihova vlada dužna braniti ih od lažnih optužnica. Ako se takav
društveni dogovor sruši, tko će više riskirati život za domovinu
Urednik i novinar Washington Timesa Jeffrey Kuhner u posljednje vrijeme
vjerojatno je jedan od najviše spominjanih američkih novinara u našoj javnosti.
Zbog njegovih tekstova o Haagu, neki su hrvatski mediji objavili i priču o
samom autoru, povezujući ga s desnicom u Hrvatskoj, napose s Ivićem Pašalićem.
U razgovoru za Slobodnu Kuhner je to najodlučnije demantirao, najavljujući
ujedno tužbu protiv onih koji su ga prozvali "Pašalićevim zaštitnikom",
naglašavajući da je odlučio reagirati putem suda zato što je takvim tekstovima
nanesena šteta njegovu ugledu i od sudske parnice ne namjerava odustati.
Američki novinari protiv optužnice
Urednik Kuhner ističe da voli Hrvatsku, s kojom ga ne vezuje samo porijeklo,
nego tvrdi da ga zanimaju hrvatska povijest i politika, s naglaskom na 20.
stoljeće. Iako se njegovi tekstovi o našoj zemlji redovito prenose u hrvatskim
medijima, Kuhner naglašava da se on većinom bavi američkom unutarnjom i
vanjskom politikom.
U hrvatskim medijima objavljeno je da Washington Times nije uopće utjecajan
kako se želi predstaviti i da se prodaje u skromnih 55 tisuća primjeraka?
To je potpuna neistina. Ako novinari koji to objavljuju ne mogu dobiti tu,
vrlo lako dostupnu informaciju o našoj prodaji i utjecaju, onda je jasno da su
u pitanju nečije novinarske kvalitete i temelji novinarstva.
Da budemo načisto: Washington Times prodaje se u 115 tisuća primjeraka samo u
području Washington D.C.-ja, a naše nacionalno izdanje čita još tisuće i
tisuće ljudi. Izdajemo i tjednik. Naš dnevnik nalazi se i na Internetu i
zabilježeno je stotine tisuća ulaza samo iz Sjedinjenih Država. Washington
Times je nacionalni konzervativni dnevnik. Redovito nas čitaju članovi Bushove
administracije, uključujući i samog Predsjednika, kao i republikanci i
demokrati na Capitol Hillu. Oni koji kažu da nemamo utjecaja očito ne znaju o
čemu govore.
Smiješne
su mi izjave bivšeg veleposlanika Petera Galbraitha o našem utjecaju, kada bi
trebao samo slušati ono što je njegov bivši šef Al Gore kazao; on je javno
rekao da su demokrati izgubili kontrolu u Kongresu nakon rezultata nedavnih
izbora upravo zahvaljujući golemu utjecaju Washington Timesa, Fox Newsa i
radijske emisije Rusha Limbaugha. No, ako meni ne vjerujete, obratite se
glasnogovorniku Bijele kuće i pitajte ga čitaju li naše novine predsjednik
Bush, potpredsjednik Cheney, ministar obrane Donald Rumsfeld ili savjetnica za
nacionalnu sigurnost Condoleezza Rice.
U kakvim ste odnosima s odvjetnikom Lukom Mišetićem? U hrvatskim medijima
pisalo se da Vas upravo Mišetić koristi kako biste u američkim medijima
progurali tezu da je SAD pomagao Oluju i da zbog toga snosi dio odgovornosti,
kao i hrvatski generali?
Poznajem gospodina Mišetića. S njim sam razgovorao nekoliko puta. Smatram da
je talentiran i bistar odvjetnik koji, u ovim okolnosti, nastoji voditi
efikasnu obranu generala Ante Gotovine. Ipak, morate znati da mediji na Zapadu
ne funkcioniraju po načelu o kojemu ste pitali. Ja nisam glasnogovornik
gospodina Mišetića, generala Gotovine ili bilo koga drugoga. To bi bilo
potpuno neprofesionalno, neetično i nemoralno. Nikada nisam upoznao generala
Gotovinu niti sam ikada s njim razgovarao. Ali, jasno je da se na temelju
sadržaja optužnice protiv njega može zaključiti da je ta optužnica iskrivljena,
neetična i nepravedna. To nije samo moje mišljenje nego i mišljenje drugih
zapadnih novinara koji su slučaj Gotovina istraživali za Newsweek, Jerusalem
Post i Wall Street Journal. To je loša optužnica od koje bi se odmah trebalo
odustati.
Vjerujete li da će Sjedinjene Države surađivati s Haagom kada je u pitanju
Oluja, odnosno da će dostaviti tražene materijale koji bi o tome jasno
posvjedočili?
Ne, ne vjerujem. U Americi mi štitimo i branimo naše ratne heroje. Mi ih ne
napuštamo kad se oni suoče s iskrivljenim optužnicama koje je donio
Međunarodni tribunal, sastavljen uglavnom od neameričkih građana i koji nije
nikome odgovoran. Sjedinjene Države u suglasju su s onim društvenim dogovorom
koji vrijedi u svakoj demokraciji koja želi osigurati svoj opstanak: ako su
vojnik ili general riskirali svoj život u pravednom i domoljubnom ratu u
obrani svoje zemlje, onda je njihova vlada moralno obvezna braniti ih od
lažnih optužnica. Ako se takav društveni dogovor sruši, pitanje je tko će onda
stavljati svoj život na kocku zbog obrane svoje zemlje? A to je upravo ono što
će se s vremenom dogoditi u Hrvatskoj ako prođe optužnica protiv generala
Gotovine. Ured glavne tužiteljice ne provodi priznato međunarodno pravo; više
je angažiran za jedan sociološki zamišljen eksperiment po kojemu su Južni
Slaveni neka vrsta zamoraca. Haaški sud nije zbog toga nastao; njegov je cilj
procesuirati one koji su izravno činili ili izravno naredili ratne zločine na
području bivše Jugoslavije.
Nakon svega što ste kazali na račun Haaga, ispada da njegov rad uopće ne
podržavate?
Ne, ja još uvijek podržavam rad Haaga. Mislim da bi njegova misija trebala
biti pravedna i neophodna, a to je da imenom i prezimenom sudi onima koji su
počinili ratne zločine. Krivci moraju platiti za ono što su učinili jer pravda
i ljudsko dostojanstvo to zahtijevaju. Međutim, držim da je ured Carle del
Ponte zloupotrijebio svoje moći i što je dulje ona na toj funkciji, veća je
šteta za vjerodostojnost Haaškoga suda. Zbog toga mislim da ona treba
odstupiti sa svoje funkcije, a optužnica protiv generala Gotovine mora biti
odbačena.
Šokantan rascjep politike i građana
Budući da je protiv njega podignuta optužnica, general Ante Gotovina, tvrde
u Haagu, mora se pojaviti pred Sudom i to je jedino mjesto na kojemu može
dokazivati svoju nevinost. Kako Vi to komentirate, treba li se Gotovina
predati?
Ne, apsolutno ne. I sam general Gotovina prije je govorio kako bi, u slučaju
da se mora predati Haagu, proveo nekoliko godina svoga života boreći se protiv
nemoralne i lažne optužnice protiv njega. Haaški sud ne smije se baviti
izdavanjem takvih optužnica koje su slabe, neetične i iskrivljene i očekivati
da će se ti ljudi pojaviti pred Sudom, iako je njihov ugled oštećen, obitelji
razorene. Carla del Ponte treba objaviti dokaze koje njezin ured ima protiv
generala. Ako oni ne postoje, a ne postoje, onda se optužnica mora povući.
General ovako pokazuje da se radi o orkestriranoj kampanji Haaškoga suda ne
samo protiv njega nego protiv cijeloga Domovinskog rata. Svakim danom dok se
krije to je poraz za Carlu del Ponte i njezine saveznike u Mesićevoj i
Račanovoj Vladi.
Kontaktirate li s hrvatskim političarima? Možete li navesti konkretno s kojima?
Kontaktirao sam s velikim brojem hrvatskih političara, s jako puno članova SDP-a
i vladajuće koalicije, ali i s predstavnicima oporbe. Intervjuirao sam ili se
susretao s ministrom vanjskih poslova Toninom Piculom, Draženom Budišom, Ivom
Sanaderom, županom Branimirom Lukšićem, Ivićem Pašalićem, Miroslavom Tuđmanom
i drugima. Nisam baš oduševljen većinom osoba u hrvatskom političkom životu; u
vašoj političkoj eliti jasno se vide ostaci komunizma, jer osobni interesi i
moći dominiraju nad potrebom općega dobra. Svaki put kada posjetim Hrvatsku,
šokiran sam rascjepom političke klase i običnih građana Hrvatske.
