Domovina uredništvo
Croatian patriots and those who fought for the independent Croatia in 1990’s are living a political nightmare.
What Croatia is seeing these days more than few years back when minority governments started entering into coalition with rebel Serb minority leaders in order to form a government is that the representatives of rebel Serb political minority have been given the lion’s share of power in Croatia, including the position of a Deputy Prime Minister.
The Serb minority (rebel Serb or Croatian Serbs that vie more for Serbia than Croatia) are almost ruling the country. Andrej Plenkovic’s HDZ minority government evidently finds no fault with Milorad Pupovac, Boris Milosevic etc even though they use every moment to criminalise the Croatian Homeland War, or at least degrade it or make it irrelevant. The same Homeland War in which the Serbs were the aggressors, mass murderers and ethnic cleansers of Croats from their own lands and homes!
But also, the same war that with Croatian victory solidified and founded modern independent Croatia.
To be clear, Croatians do not have a problem with Serbs living in Croatia as an ethnic minority and ensuring the minority is protected and afforded due care and respect. After all, many Croatian Serbs fought with Croats on frontlines to defend Croatia from Greater Serbia onslaught in 1990’s. What Croatians don’t want is the rebel Croatian Serbs who fought with those Serbs and the former Yugoslav Army or stood behind the Greater Serbia politics of expansion and control over Croatia. The latter were the ones who did not want an independent Croatia no matter what the cost to achieve that. The cost was horrifying for Croats and, despite that, their courage prevailed, and victory was magnificent.
The political nightmare in Croatia is that the Croatian Serbs who align with the Greater Serbia politics rather than independent Croatia form that part of the Serb minority in Croatia that has achieved a high-status in Croatian government. The ruling HDZ party is in coalition with them and in this we are no longer talking about the protection of minorities by a government but about minorities taking an upper hand in legislature, in government – in the direction Croatia is going.
To put it bluntly, the murderer (rebel Serbs and former communists) are now, almost thirty years after they lost the war in which they tried to prevent the creation of an independent Croatia, are sitting in the parliament and in the government of Croatia! That would not be so devastating if their politics aligned with the values stemming from Croatia’s Homeland War, but their politics are those that Croats fought against, defended Croatia from Serb aggression and paid with rivers of blood.
This is as macabre as politics could possibly get in a country still grieving its victims of war, still pursuing to locate and bury its missing civilians and soldiers perished in the Serb aggression, still nursing their wounds from torture at the hands of Serb aggressor, still living among the rubble of the devastating war. No wonder barely 16% of the eligible voters in Croatia voted for Plenkovic’s HDZ, that is now a minority government collaborating with rebel Serb minority! The brewing of anger and bitter disappointment within the silent majority must be debilitating for if it was not so, and masses from the silent majority turned up at elections the result would most likely have been different.
So, one must ask: how far should society go (even by standing still) to accommodate the wishes or aims of minorities? And if the relatively largest minority is the one that attacked, ethnically cleansed the absolute majority, mass murdered and persecuted, plundered and devastated their belongings, mass raped their women and girls, men and boys, should that minority be accommodated for anything bar just condemnation and rejection?
Judging by the current official political climate in Croatia forged by the HDZ minority government, the answer to above would appear blatantly clear: yes the minorities should be accommodated in everything bar condemnation of their crimes and compensating Croatia for the grave damage done during the Homeland War of the 1990’s through sheer viciousness of local rebel Serbs and their comrades in Serbia. The way the starkly leftist, or former communist-moulded Croatian government collaborates with the anti-Croatia Serb minorities the answer to above is “yes, give the rebel Serbs anything they want in Croatia!”
I don’t buy this from any perspective whatsoever, not even from the forgiveness or reconciliatory perspective because the rebel Serb minority in Croatia simply do not acknowledge that they have done anything wrong and, yet, they devastated Croatia and its people with the help of their Greater Serbia political strongmen.
Croatian mainstream media has currently created the situation when the silent majority opposing such politics living in Croatia are afraid to open a newspaper or turn on the TV or the radio in fear of the Serb minority representatives, headed by the twisted anti-Croatia Milorad Pupovac, jump out at them, bashing them up just because they love Croatia, fought for Croatia, fought for independence and self-preservation. The Serbs and Serbia have one way, or another, been oppressing and torturing Croats for at least one hundred years, never losing sight of their determination not to permit Croats to rule over their own land and destiny.
The other part of the silent majority that’s sick and tired of the political impasse Croatia is in, primarily because of refusing to decommunise the anti-democratic and corruptive ways of leading the country inherited from former Yugoslavia, have been leaving Croatia in droves.
Those of us that are fortunate to have lived and are living in a civilised liberal democracy of the West, know that majorities owe certain things to harmless minorities: tolerance, civility, and the rights affirmed in the Constitution — freedom of speech, assembly, right to work and establish private business, right to education, etc. However, we also know and see that minorities owe something to the majority in return: mainly, a proper respect for their tastes, beliefs and sensibilities, and a decent restraint in challenging them, if there are some reasonable grounds for challenging them.
Take the case where Croatian Serbs, those that belonged to the rebel groups and aggressors against Croatia’s independence and mass murdered for that, insist that the Croatian town of Vukovar (the symbol town of Croatian suffering at the hands of Serb aggressor) must be bilingual. That is, Milorad Pupovac has insisted recently, yet again, that Serb Cyrillic must be introduced on public buildings etc signs in Vukovar. That Cyrillic must come to Vukovar, well, because a Serb minority lives there or has returned there after it had devastated the town in 1991 and mass murdered hundreds of its Croatian civilians. While the relevant legislation in Croatia does state that such two-language signage needs to exist if the minority population reaches at least around 32% of the general or majority population, even seeing the Cyrillic writing opens the terrifying and terrible Homeland War wounds to the Croatian majority there. The census of Vukovar has not been done for several years, it is estimated that the Serb population actually living there, as opposed to having their residence registering there but actually living in Serbia, is much lower than 32%. And the Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic with his government do absolutely nothing to shut Pupovac up on the matter.
One, particularly the leftist lot, could say that it would be a great convenience for all the minorities, including the Serb one, if the government did everything multilingually as there are a number of minorities in Croatia – Serb, Italian, Hungarian, Roma etc. Is that an accommodation we — we, the Croatian-speaking majority — should make? Why not? Where’s the harm in it? The harm is, that every time we make an accommodation of that kind, we lose a bit of the common thread of norms that people who have organised their lives around the Croatian identity (Croatian meaning and independent nation) don’t want to lose their national identity for which they paid for in rivers of blood.
Take the case of the Victory (over Serb aggressor) celebrations on 5 August when Croatian rebel Serb insist that commemoration of their dead must be held at the same time with the presence of Croatian government officials!
Croatian rebel Serb minority simply will not permit Croatians to celebrate and live their victory over the blood-thirsty Greater Serbia onslaught. They are systematically running down the Croatian state through their roles in the coalition government, their NGO’s funded by the Croatian taxpayer, their media and staunch support from Serbia for the pursuit of Greater Serbia.
This is where the modern political concept or reality of Minoritarianism has its players as the rebel Serbs’ representatives in Croatia are given a high degree of primacy in decision-making for Croatia. And yet, these representatives were voted into the parliament with barely a handful of votes, thanks to the ridiculous legislation that permits minority representatives to secure a seat in parliament even with a handful or just one vote!
How will all this end with the rebel Serb clan being given the lion’s share of power in Croatia? I don’t have an answer for that, but I do hold grave fears. I am reminded that Greater Serbia nation-building politics have always involved ethnic cleansing! It was so in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina during the 1990’s and judging by the impetus of Serb-agenda wielded around in Croatia not much ground is visible for the Croatian nation-building. Unless, of course, that invisible ground is solid within the silent majority realms of aspirations. Without a doubt, the time of final reckoning wit former communists, with rebel Serbs in Croatia is on the horizon and HDZ government will have a great deal to answer for. Ina Vukic
