Hope or Dread? Croatia Facing an Uncertain Future

ZAGREB, Croatia — There is a gentleness in the warm, wildflower-sweetened afternoon air. But the calm comes to an abrupt halt when it reaches a bench where five women sit with their needlework in sullen silence.

Needle clicks against needle, and rapid-fire crochet hooks glint ominously in the lazy light. Yarn is unwound furiously. Completed potholders are lobbed, one by one, onto a pile; a delicate doily gets an abrupt final knot, then is tossed aside.

Many of these bitter-born handicrafts carry the red and white colors of Croatian statehood; some are stitched with the red-and-white checkerboard, the history-laced Croatian emblem that would make a Serb’s blood run cold.

Those making the goods are survivors of Vukovar, the eastern city that fell to the Serbs shortly after Croatia gained independence and whose continued occupation in devastating ruin symbolizes an enduring national impotence that leaves Croatia with a third of its territory still in enemy hands.

“I will give you a very simple answer: I will never get used to this life. I live in the past. I live on memories. I bear Vukovar in my heart and in the picture on the wall,” said Marija Smek, a refugee who lost a son in the city’s siege. “But it’s going to get better. We have to have patience, and if we are not going to live to see better times, our children will.”

And so the knitting goes on. As for Croatia--the nation whose departure from the Yugoslav federation in 1991 plunged the region into two years of war--it remains poised at the brink of a future for which its citizens feel, alternatively, hope and dread.

“There is the possibility that Croatia could re-integrate by economic means, could win by buying time and buying an opportunity for Western support . . . by changing the structure of government, opening the media and promoting human rights,” said Slaven Letica, a noted writer and former presidential aide. “But this is the optimistic scenario. We can also imagine a catastrophic one--war lasting forever, without end. The most awful flow of awful events one could imagine.”

Croatia and its 4.7 million residents--including Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox Serbs and merchants and farmers whose labor, rich land and oil wells fed the Yugoslav treasury--emerged from the Communist era with the potential to become Eastern Europe’s most productive nation.

Instead, Croatia is battling inflation that exceeds 30% a month, unemployment of at least 17%, the burden of 500,000 refugees and a ruinous split in its territory; because of Serbian occupation, the prosperous Dalmatian coast has been all but severed from Zagreb, which is empty of tourists and without electricity for 10 hours a day.

In this capital, which once fancied itself the Eastern Bloc equivalent of Frankfurt or Vienna, residents now save used plastic bags, pass old newspapers on to neighbors for perusing and line up before dawn to buy cheaper brown bread. Gardens, of necessity, crop up in vacant lots around the sprawling socialist-style apartment blocks that line the city’s southern edge.

The threat of international sanctions like those imposed on neighboring Serbia--in the view of many, the price of President Franjo Tudjman’s adventures in nearby Bosnia-Herzegovina--has lent a new edge to the growing debate over how high a price Croatia must pay for its dream of nationhood.

“Once there is a political settlement, this country is very rich. More than 80% of the former Yugoslavia’s tourism was here. It has oil. In the future, this country will be a gold mine, the most prosperous Central European nation,” said a Western diplomat here. “But nobody knows when it will happen. There are those who are beginning to wonder whether it will ever happen.”

Croatia as a nation is only marginally viable because of the Serbian occupation of the western Krajina, which divides the Dalmatian coast from Zagreb, the fertile farmlands of Baranja and the oil wells of Slavonia. Croats see the return of these lands as an indisputable national imperative.

But a growing number fear that Tudjman’s support of Croatian fighters in Bosnia and his apparent willingness to deal with Belgrade and the international community in dividing Bosnia threaten Croatia with not only international sanctions but also the possibility that Croatia’s own borders will be redrawn to cede Serb-occupied lands permanently to Serbia.

“People here are frightened with the possibility of sanctions because of our president’s adventure in Bosnia,” said a Zagreb intellectual. “Also, there is a general attitude that once the borders in Bosnia are touched, any kind of change, Croatia will never control the territory held by Serbs.

“If you want to carve up Bosnian territories,” he said, “you will end up without your own territories. That is the fear. And with this fear, Tudjman has a sword hanging over his head. He cannot trade any part of Croatia for any part of Bosnia. He cannot trade the Croatia that was for something that Croatia might be. If he gets Herzegovina and he doesn’t get Baranja, he doesn’t get eastern Slavonia, he is in danger physically. I wouldn’t put a dime on his life.”

The debate has split Croatia’s ruling Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) and the rest of the political spectrum between moderates who favor negotiation and economic development and hard-liners who want to bring Herzegovina--populated with a small percentage of Bosnia’s Croats, but its most adamant--into Greater Croatia and go to war again to drive Serbs out of Slavonia and Krajina.

Tudjman is caught in the middle, imposing an increasingly iron fist to balance the two sides, his own political survival perhaps depending on acting as their fulcrum. Tudjman the old activist--historically an anti-fascist whose nationalist sentiments got him jailed by the Communists--today draws criticism for imposing strict controls on the press, silencing dissidents and failing to safeguard the rights of Croatia’s shrinking Serbian population.

He is, many who know him say, a historian, writer, the best-educated of the new generation of East European leaders. But he is also a man so bent on building a Croatian nation that he may have neglected what to do with it after it was born.

“Sometimes I compare (Tudjman) with craftsmen who make pots,” a Zagreb journalist said. “They’re involved with the making of the pots, and they’re not really concerned with what goes in their pots afterward. He’s in love with making a state, but he doesn’t stop to realize that what you have inside that state is democracy.”

Croatians complain that the government, using the war as justification, has taken over most of the major daily newspapers and complete control of Croatian television. At a time of economic liberalization, only 8% of the economy is in private hands; many business executives complain it is because lucrative privatization opportunities go to a handful who are close to the HDZ. Corruption scandals are rising. One opposition party says it has been the target of at least three political assassinations.

The most widespread complaint is that Tudjman’s policies in Bosnia, counter to public opinion, are dictated by a cadre of hard-line Herzegovinans within the government, including Defense Minister Gojko Susak.

A recent newspaper poll showed that 87% of Croatians favor Bosnia as an independent and sovereign country. The government’s official policy also calls for an independent Bosnia and has deplored the recent Croat-Muslim fighting that has resulted in allegations of Croatian atrocities in Bosnia.

“We want independent Bosnia as one state, but all three nations must have equal rights, and all three must be constituted,” said Tudjman’s spokeswoman, Vesna Skare-Ozbolt.

But many Croats believe that Tudjman is the architect of Bosnian Croat leader Mate Boban’s military achievements in Bosnia; many believe that a Serb-Croat plan to divide Bosnia into ethnic enclaves will result in the effective or eventual annexation of Bosnian Croat territories to Croatia--a recipe, they fear, for losing part of Croatia to the Serbs.

“It was necessary to help Bosnian Croats to defend themselves. But some of their leading politicians are trying to establish their own state, and Croatia is accused of helping these separatist tendencies. If we insist on non-violation of our borders, then we are not allowed to violate Bosnia’s borders,” complained Bozo Kovacevic of the leftist Social Liberal Party.

Both the left and the right have come down on Tudjman for holding discussions with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, the left because they fear the Serbs will outwit Tudjman, the right because they believe that guns are the only answer to the Serbs.

At the small offices of the Croatian Party of Rights in downtown Zagreb last month, there were pictures of the party’s Croatian Defense Force fighters, still active in Bosnia, lining the walls.

The posters on the walls urged such things as the immediate ouster of U.N. peacekeeping forces stationed in Bosnia and Croatia. Many carry a slogan, Za Dom Spremni, identified with the Ustashe, the World War II movement aligned with the Nazis. The slogan became famous when a leader would shout, “For Home!” and a crowd would scream back, “Ready!”

Dobroslav Paraga, the youthful leader of the party, admits the phrase might be a daunting reminder of Nazi days, but he insists the slogan came from an 11th-Century Croat leader in Zadar.

Paraga faces trial in Zagreb on charges of amassing a huge weapons stash with which to overthrow the government and a second trial on charges of giving false information about the government in connection with his recent American trip, during which he labeled Tudjman a fascist in front of the Congress.

In Croatia, nearly everyone calls everyone else fascists, and it is sometimes difficult to tell why. Paraga paints himself as a victim of a dictatorial government for his defense of free speech and human rights. The government says he’s the 1990s version of the Ustashe, and on Wednesday, police raided the party headquarters, barring Paraga and other officials from the offices. He bitterly protested the action.

As for Serb-occupied Krajina and even Bosnia-Herzegovina, Paraga said recently, “We only believe in military means. We should never negotiate with Belgrade. I am sorry to say these peace plans are not going to defend us. We have to fight it out with weapons, and we wish America would help us.

“I have talked like this for two years, and this is why I’ve been proclaimed to be a fascist,” he admitted. “But Tudjman is responsible for the occupation of Croatia. He killed the Croatian people’s will to fight and defend themselves. How is he going to stop the Serbs when he has killed the morale of his own people?”

But some Croatians say Tudjman has been responsible for a difficult period of healing the wounds left from World War II and still not healed when Tudjman was elected in May, 1990.

“There was during World War II a civil war in Croatia between anti-fascists and the Ustashe,” said Stanko Juzbasic, a young Zagreb composer. “After the war, those who lost the war were condemned, and their children were condemned, and the children of their children were condemned and there was never a chance to give the hand of conciliation. That’s one of the most important things Tudjman did; when he came he said, ‘Let’s put an end to this.’ Tudjman is the first politician who showed the goodwill to put an end to it.”