Commentary by Jeffrey T. Kuhner
On November 25, Croatia is facing an
historic watershed. Voters in the
nation's parliamentary elections will
answer the central question confronting
this small Balkan country: should they
punish leaders who openly break their
promises and betray the electorate's
trust?
This is not a theoretical issue.
Political accountability and public
integrity lie at the core of a
functioning democracy. During the bloody
break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s,
Croatia paid a terrible price in order
to liberate itself from decades of
Serb-dominated, communist rule. Over
20,000 people were killed and hundreds
of thousands ethnically cleansed. Yet
following independence, Croatia has
struggled to make the transition to a
Western-style free-market society.
The current government led by Prime
Minister Ivo Sanader and the
conservative Croatian Democratic Union
(HDZ) has been a dismal failure. Sanader
has proven to be an incorrigible liar:
he has deliberately deceived the
Croatian people in order to mask his
government's incompetence. His
administration is full of spin and
little substance.
Sanader and his
HDZ came to power in 2003 promising to
enact tough economic reforms, propel
Croatia into the European Union and
NATO, and defend the country's leading
generals from politicized indictments by
the International Criminal Tribunal for
the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
He failed on
all three counts.
Rather than tackling Croatia's
bloated public sector and anemic
economy, Sanader has implemented
superficial reforms. The result is that
unemployment hovers at 14 percent,
government spending is worth
52 percent of the country's gross
domestic product, and corruption remains
rampant. During the 1990s, the HDZ
ruling elite plundered state assets in
shady privatization deals, in which
billions of dollars were stolen. It was
precisely this kind of cronyism and
economic malfeasance that disgusted
voters. This enabled the former
Communists, led by the Social Democratic
Party (SDP), to sweep into power in
2000. Following the HDZ's comeback in
2003, Sanader vowed to clean up
corruption and "modernize" his party.
Instead, he brought with him many of the
kleptocrats who had bled Croatia white.
The most notorious of these was the
former Croatian ambassador to the U.S.,
Miomir Zuzul, who was eventually forced
to resign as Sanader's foreign minister
following allegations of influence
peddling and bribery.
Yet Sanader
refuses to aggressively confront
Croatia's culture of corruption. In
fact, he is part of the problem. A 2006
European Union progress report
criticized the government for having "no
overall strategic framework" for reform.
The report went on to state that Zagreb
lacks "clear and transparent rules and
procedures with regard to elections and
the forming of governments at the local
level." It is "still some way from
enjoying an independent, impartial,
transparent and efficient judicial
system." And, "[m]any allegations of
corruption remain uninvestigated and
corrupt practices usually go
unpunished."
Instead of
doing the hard, tedious work of
dismantling Croatia's old communist
structures and entrenched vested
interests, Sanader resorted to his usual
practice: he lied. The prime minister
told the Croatian public the EU had
"praised" his government for "progress .
. . when it comes to reforms." This
prompted The Wall Street Journal to
denounce him for "playing spin doctor."
Sanader is a
fantasist. Vain, self-absorbed and
shallow, he believes, as he once told
me, that politics is the art of
"marketing." It is not. Politics is the
art of delivering concrete results to
one's constituents-results that advance
the nation's economic and strategic
interests. The Heritage Foundation and
The Wall Street Journal's 2007 Index of
Economic Freedom rates Croatia 109th out
of 157 countries worldwide-a dismal 37th
out of 41 nations in Europe. In matters
of property rights, the rule of law,
corruption and freedom from government,
the index called Croatia "repressed."
On most indicators, Croatia scored
considerably lower than neighbors
Slovenia and Hungary.
No amount of spin can obscure
Zagreb's weak economic record.
Sanader's mendacity extends to
foreign policy as well. Having promised
to use all "legal and political means"
to protect the dignity of Croatia's war
for independence from the assaults of
the ICTY, Sanader capitulated-but not
before telling the Croatian public that
he "had no choice" since cooperation
with The Hague-based war crimes tribunal
is a precondition for EU membership. The
problem, however, is that Sanader never
had any intention of standing up to the
ICTY, especially to its rabid and
amateurish chief prosecutor Carla Del
Ponte. Prior to his election in 2003,
the HDZ leader vowed to defend Croatian
war hero, Gen. Ante Gotovina, from the
ICTY's judicial witch hunt. State
Department sources at the time, however,
confirmed to me that Sanader (and Zuzul)
had already given their assurances that,
if elected, they would hand him over to
The Hague. This is precisely what
happened. The fix was in.
As a result of Sanader's power-lust,
an innocent man was sold down the river.
Ante Gotovina was forsaken in order to
satisfy the ICTY's liberal globalist
agenda. The tribunal is determined to
equalize guilt on all sides of the
Yugoslav wars of succession-rather than
pin the blame squarely where it belongs:
Slobodan Milosevic's genocidal project
of a "Great Serbia" and his attempt to
forge an ethnically pure state from the
Danube to the Adriatic.
More importantly, the Gotovina case
has never been about simply the
innocence or guilt of one man; it is
about preserving the international legal
legitimacy of the Croatian state in its
current borders. The Gotovina indictment
calls into question the very basis of
Croatia's successful efforts to
militarily retake lands seized by Serb
rebels. Already, Serbia's leading
opposition party, the ultra- nationalist
Radicals, are claiming that the Gotovina
case will give Belgrade the legal and
moral justification to re-annex large
swaths of Croatian territory.
By not defending Gen. Gotovina,
Zagreb engaged in a Faustian bargain.
It betrayed not only its finest
general but the country's very national
honor-and all for the empty promise of
joining the EU at some distant date and
under conditions that will most likely
harm Croatia's economic, fishing and
agricultural interests. Rather than
following the Rwanda model-whose
government succeeded in having Del Ponte
removed from the Rwandan U.N. war crimes
tribunal for her prosecutorial
negligence-and wage a bruising
diplomatic campaign on behalf of the
general (as he had promised), Sanader
took the easy
road: He caved and then presented it
as a "great victory" in Croatia's march
toward EU membership.
When Boro
Gotovina personally protested to Sanader
about the shameful betrayal of his
brother, the prime minister responded:
"In politics, one says one thing, does a
second and thinks a third." It is this
kind of moral depravity that has led
Sanader to the brink of defeat. Polls
now show the HDZ is trailing the SDP,
and that a liberal-left ruling coalition
is likely. The SDP and its allies will
continue to follow Sanader's policies of
phony reform and EU entry at all
costs-and Croatians will continue to pay
the price.
Clearly, there
is a vacuum in Croatia's political
landscape for a center-right populist
coalition that champions real
market-based reforms, Catholic social
conservatism and a Croatia-first foreign
policy. The HDZ could have spearheaded
that coalition; instead, under Sanader's
Machiavellian leadership, this
once-great party has been drained of all
conservative and patriotic content. It
has become nothing more than a vast
patronage machine, dispensing jobs and
doling out government contracts in the
service of its smug, lazy and venal
ruling elite.
In the end,
Sanader will have no one to blame for
his loss but himself. He betrayed his
supporters, his party and ultimately,
his country. It is time Croatia's voters
do to him what he has done to
others: dump him swiftly,
immediately and without remorse.
Jeffrey T. Kuhner is the editor of
Insight (