19

‘Freedom Train’

The big heart of Franjo Tudjman has stopped beating.

Vlatko Pavleti, 11 December 1999

On 26 August 1995 Tudjman boarded the first train to travel from Zagreb to Split since that hot August night five years before, when the balvan revolutionaries had blocked the line. The train was called the Vlak Slobode – ‘Freedom Train’ – and its most distinguished passenger was in an expansive mood as he talked to the accompanying group of journalists. ‘They disappeared ignominiously, as if they had never populated this land,’ he said of the recently departed Serbs. ‘We urged them to stay but they did not listen to us. Well then, bon voyage.’

At Karlovac and Gospi, the Freedom Train stopped on its journey to Dalmatia, and Tudjman got off to acknowledge the cheers of the crowds on the station platforms, the salutes of the soldiers and the addresses of the civic dignitaries.

At Knin, the atmosphere was somewhat different, as there were few people left in the town. Here the Freedom Train was a strange spectacle, winding along the tracks and sounding its horn mournfully as it passed silent and empty blocks of flats before gliding into the station, where the sign reading ‘Knin’ in Cyrillic letters had been taken down and replaced by one in Latin letters. From there it was on to Split, more delighted crowds and another victorious speech under the palm fronds of the city’s elegant corniche.

In the speeches he delivered along the route of the Freedom Train. Tudjman harked back to the theme of the brief addresses he made on kissing the red and white flag fluttering from the battlements of Knin castle, the day after the Croatian army retook the town; the work of creating an independent Croatian state had now been completed and foundations laid that would endure for centuries to come.

The scale of his achievement could not be denied. In 1990 he had won the first genuinely free multi-party election in Croatia since the Second World War. That had been a victory, not only over the Communists who had ruled Yugoslavia for half a century, but over far better known Croat dissidents, such as Savka Dabevi-Kuar. And this was a man whose political career only took off when he was almost sixty years old, the age at which most people contemplate retirement.

But the triumph of 1990, sweet as it was, was a paltry thing compared to that of 1995. In 1990 the election results had scarcely been counted before the first threatening storm clouds had rumbled over Knin. Tudjman had then been a president of a portion of Yugoslavia, and a president in name only, as his humiliating treatment at the hands of the Knin rebels and the Yugoslav army was so soon to demonstrate.

In 1995 Tudjman’s victory had an air of permanence and finality. Historic questions had been settled: whether Croatia’s fortunes would be decided in Belgrade, or in Zagreb alone; whether Croatia was a region of a larger state, or a country in its own right; whether Croatia was a land belonging to two nations – Serbs and Croats – or Croats alone. The proof was the sight of those empty tower blocks in Knin, and it is hard to believe Tudjman did not feel an enormous sense of relief when he saw those ghostly buildings for himself from the windows of the Freedom Train.

After a year of hoarse arguments, political deadlock and dreadful uncertainty in 1990, half a year of warfare in 1991, an unworkable ceasefire in 1992 and then more fighting in 1995, Croatia was a state with all the proper accoutrements, both big and small, from an army to stamps, airlines and embassies. The red and white flag, the so-called Ustashe flag that the Serbs had tried to trample into the dust, now flapped outside the headquarters of the United Nations. Zagreb at last had confirmation of that truly metropolitan status for which it had hankered for so long. And there was money, in some people’s pockets at least. Although much of Croatia had been laid waste by the war, the capital appeared far less tatty, ground down and embittered than Belgrade. There were plenty of limousines belonging to the newly rich in the streets. A splendid new Sheraton hotel had been built to cope with the growing number of foreign businessmen and diplomats. The shelves of the bookshops were lined with lavish, showy volumes celebrating Croatia’s past and present, no longer written in a kind of code, as before, to avoid the charge of nationalism. Just north of the city, in the foothills of Zagorje, the old fortress at Medvedgrad had been restored and refurbished as an ‘Altar of the Homeland’ – a fitting setting for those heavy, theatrical ceremonies Tudjman delighted in conducting.

It was extraordinary to think that only a few years previously, the very notion of an independent Croatia had been the dream of a few befuddled right-wing émigrés, who spent their lives peering over their shoulders in case their activities should attract the attention of the Yugoslav secret police. Now it was a reality, the true believers had carried the day, and it was the turn of a fast-diminishing band of Yugoslav sympathisers, dubbed ‘Yugo-nostalgics’, to experience the uncomfortable sensation of being members of a small, minority sect.

But the price of the thousand-year-old dream had been enormous. Apart from Bosnia, no state in Eastern Europe had suffered such material destruction and loss of life to win its independence. From Karlovac in the north to Split in the south, the interior of Croatia was a charred wasteland – mile upon mile of burned-out houses and ruined churches. What had not been burned down by the Serbs in 1991 because it was Croatian had been burned down in 1995 because it was Serbian. Some of the larger towns had escaped this pointless destruction of property, but few of the villages had, for it was in villages rather than in towns that neighbour came back to punish neighbour, repeating the cycle of vengeance that had continued after the Second World War. From time to time on the road to Split one passed a house that had been left intact. Many had the words ‘Hrvatska kua – ne diraj’ (Croatian house – don’t touch) daubed in large letters on the wall. But in hundreds of villages there were scarcely any usable houses. From the windows of the bus tearing through the hills of Lika from Zagreb to Split one could catch glimpses now and then of old women dressed in widow’s black, standing like sentinels in this dark and brooding landscape – Serbs who had been too old to join the frantic exodus of August 1995 and who had been abandoned by their relatives.

South of Zagreb, in the fertile orchards of Banija, the air of desolation was much the same. In the border town of Kostajnica, on the banks of the River Una that divides Croatia from Bosnia, a handful of people hurried through the streets past the ruined façades of what had once been one of the most attractive old country towns in Croatia. There the damage was the work of the Serbs, partly carried out in 1991, the rest shortly before the exodus of August 1995. Of the baroque parish church and the eighteenth-century Franciscan monastery almost nothing remained. Even the late medieval apothecary had been torched in a destructive act of spite. Of Kostajnica’s considerable artistic heritage there remained only the medieval castle on the Bosnian side of the river, built by the Frankopans as a fortress against the Turks. Down by the river bank a small group of Croat police stared at their Serb counterparts on the other side of the Una through binoculars. Sometimes these Serbs and Croats would shout at each other across the water. The bridge between the two sides had been blown up. The few Croats who had returned to Kostajnica evinced an air of defiance and gloom. ‘We’ve destroyed the myth of the invincible Serbian army,’ one old man remarked. He said he had returned to the town after four years as a refugee ‘on the second day after Kostajnica’s liberation,’ in August 1995. ‘My home was all right but as for the others … they come each day in buses and try and clear up the mess, but without money and jobs, they won’t be able to come back and live here for a long time.’

It was much the same situation in a dozen other towns of the fallen Republic of Serbian Krajina. Those lying nearest the big cities, which had had a sizeable Croatian population before the war of 1991, had the best chance of reviving, such as Petrinja, which is near Zagreb, or Benkovac, which is just outside Zadar. But the future looked uncertain for Dvor, Vojni, Vrginmost, Korenica and other Serb-majority towns which lay far from the big population centres.

The euphoria generated by Operation Oluja encouraged Tudjman to go to the country in October, in the hope that the prestige he undoubtedly enjoyed would induce the voters to give his far less popular HDZ party the absolute majority it sought in the Sabor. The electorate, however, proved able to distinguish between the president and the increasingly unpopular clique that surrounded him and in spite of a blatant attempt to massage the poll by including Bosnian Croats on the electoral roll, the HDZ failed to win convincingly. There was further evidence of resistance to the growing cult of the president in Zagreb, where voters in the local elections reacted against the corruption in the ranks of the ruling HDZ by rebuffing Tudjman and giving a loose coalition of opposition parties a narrow majority in the council chamber. Tudjman’s retort to this unexpected show of insolence was characteristic. Instead of examining which of his party’s actions might have alienated the voters, he used his prerogative to block the nomination of an opposition mayor in the capital.

Operation Oluja marked the apotheosis of Tudjman’s presidency. It was as if all his energy and concentration had been fixed on the goal of securing Croatia’s independence over all the territory it had been accorded by the post-Second World War arrangement in Yugoslavia. Once that was achieved, decline set in. Tudjman himself was ill. The year after Oluja, commentators began noting the infrequency of his public appearances, his sudden loss of hair and haggard face. Shielding him from the public gaze, his spokesmen and women insisted there was nothing wrong, but rumours of inoperable cancer continued to spread. They were true, though it would be years before he succumbed.

Tudjman’s illness changed the character of his administration. He retreated into his inner sanctum, rarely saw his ministers and let power slip into the hands of his immediate entourage, including his chief adviser, Ivic Pasali, and to a lesser extent, to members of his family. The needs of post-war Croatia demanded imaginative and dynamic leadership to cope with the challenges posed by a ruined economy, continuing international isolation and the complex question of future relationships with Slovenia, Bosnia, Montenegro and Serbia. Instead, there was a disastrous programme of privatisation and a continuation of the old policy of meddling in the affairs of Bosnia.

That the state economy needed an injection of private and foreign capital was incontrovertible. But the way privatisation was handled in Croatia mirrored Russia’s dismal experience more than that of the successful ‘transition’ economies of Poland and the Czech Republic. Enterprises were parcelled out to cliques of political supporters, many of them Bosnian Croats, creating a network of a few hundred wealthy families.

This strategy of politically driven privatisation need not have spelled disaster if the favoured cronies had possessed economic know-how and the determination to make their assets work. There were some cases of state firms in Zagreb privatised in this way, which continued to function and even grow. But most were handed over to men who simply enriched themselves by stripping the assets, storing the money abroad, and then closing the enterprises down. Miroslav Kutle, Bosnian Croat owner of the Globus media group centred on the Tisak newspaper distribution company, was the most notorious of the new breed of ‘tycoons’, as they were known. Using his close contacts with the Herzegovinian clique surrounding Tudjman, Kutle got hold of at least 150 state enterprises in this way. ‘He would buy a company, take out its cash to buy another company and repeat the process. Tisak was a hugely profitable company when he got control. But he was never able to invest in his acquisitions or put in new management,’ Andrew Krapotkin, head of the Zagreb office of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, recalled.

The knock-on effects of this development were two-fold. Firstly, unemployment increased as companies were closed, sometimes completely unnecessarily, swelling the ranks of demobilised soldiers who flooded onto the jobs market in autumn 1995. Secondly foreign investors shied away from Croatia, as they did from Russia, out of a well-founded suspicion that it was not a functioning legal state in which investors could operate without encountering mafia-style pressure from politically connected tycoons such as Kutle.1 Croneyism was an established part of the HDZ political culture, inherited from the old Communist regime. But it took on an increasingly uncontrolled and malevolent aspect after Operation Oluja and Tudjman’s sickness.

The abuse of the economy to create a ring of powerful families linked by naked self-interest to the regime’s survival worsened an economic downturn fuelled by the government’s diplomatic isolation. After the conclusion of the Dayton agreement. Tudjman’s American patrons dropped him. Washington had no need of Zagreb’s co-operation once the Croatian army had done its job of rolling back the Serb army in Bosnia and forcing Miloševi to the negotiating table. The Serb regime remained the number one pariah of the Balkans in US eyes, but Croatia was seen in only a marginally more favourable light. As for the Europeans, they continued to hold Tudjman at arm’s length. As usual, Croatia and the Europeans looked at the same situation from entirely different perspectives. Croats of almost all political persuasions saw Oluja as an entirely legitimate operation to recover the national territory, which required no apology. The Western powers were more legalistic, factoring in the point that Croatia had overrun UN Protected Areas – the famous UNPAS – which had been set up by a Security Council resolution. No one for a minute seriously thought the Croats might be persuaded to disgorge any of their gains but the manner with which the Croat army had reoccupied the Krajina still rankled, especially the burning down of several thousand houses. The alienation extended even to Croatia’s traditional supporters. In the early 1990s Germany and Austria had championed Croatia against the more pro-Serbian foreign offices of the British and the French, not to mention the Russians. After 1995 those voices fell silent, and the replacement of the Christian Democrat-led government in Germany in September 1998 by a Social Democrat-Green coalition under Gerhard Schröeder ended the era when Zagreb could expect any special treatment from Berlin.

The growing perception of Croatia as an international irritant was boosted by Tudjman’s incurable taste for meddling in Bosnian Croat affairs, which reflected the strength of the Bosnian Croat caucus in his immediate circle. The Bosnian state that had emerged from the Dayton agreement in 1995 was, admittedly, a sickly child and the Western powers hovered nervously round the cradle, throwing accusing glances at Zagreb every time they detected a downturn in the child’s health. The fact was that while war had impoverished Croatia, it had destroyed Bosnia. The economy of Bosnia, even more than that of Croatia, was geared to supplying the needs of the 23 million inhabitants in former Yugoslavia. Now it served a tiny landlocked state of about 4 million, which had been cut into two. Ruled effectively as a protectorate by Western powers – an unfortunate development which infantilised the political culture – Bosnia failed to revive economically and educated professionals streamed out of the country. In the Muslim Croat federation that covered just over half the republic, the Croats formed a restive and dissatisfied element, envious of the Serbs for gaining a self-governing entity and resentful of the dominant role assumed by the Muslim majority in their own half. The ferment posed a political challenge to any government in Zagreb, which called for great delicacy. Instead, the ailing Tudjman kept Croatia on collision course with Sarajevo and its external sponsors by openly supporting the calls of hard-line Bosnian Croats in western Hercegovina for a revision of Dayton, which neither the US nor the Europeans were willing to even contemplate. In Croatia itself, Tudjman did the Bosnian Croats no favours in the long term. He ensured the politicisation of their cause, which became linked in the public mind with the fortunes of a single political party – his own. After his death and the HDZ’s loss of power, the Bosnian Croats suffered an almost total loss of influence.

The year 1998 brought Tudjman one last hurrah: the restoration of full control over Serb-held land in East Slavonia and Baranja, the last remnant of that brief meteor on the European political stage, the Republic of Serbian Krajina. The return of Vukovar had been foreseen at Dayton. After the fall of Knin, Belgrade resigned its interest in Eastern Slavonia, leaving the local Serb authorities no option but to sign a UN-mediated ‘Basic Agreement’ with Croatia in the border village of Erdut in December 1995. The agreement envisaged a slow transition to Zagreb rule through the auspices of a new UN mission known as UNTAES, the United Nations Transitional Administration for East Slavonia. By mid-1996, UNTAES was in place and had reported the demilitarisation of the region, and over the next 18 months the nervous local population was acclimatised to the inevitable resumption of Croatian rule, which recommenced on 15 January 1998.

After the propaganda debacle in the West that followed Operation Oluja, Tudjman was determined that the re-absorption of Vukovar and its surroundings would not be accompanied by reports of revenge killings and house burning. He gave the job of overseeing the transition to Vesna Škare-Ožbolt, a rising star in the HDZ who spoke several foreign languages, came from Slavonia and belonged to the moderate fraction within the party that orbited foreign minister Granic. ‘I need a success,’ he told Ožbolt,2 who managed a remarkably peaceful and painless change of authority in a town that more than any other in Croatia had come to symbolise the horror and brutality of war.

Only a minority of the town’s Croatian population returned to Vukovar over the next two years, much to the disappointment of the authorities. For many of them, the business of rebuilding homes from rubble was financially insupportable and the prospect of living side by side with their former Serbian neighbours was unattractive. There were no jobs to go back to, in any case. The huge Borovo rubber complex, which once employed thousands of workers, was a rusting ruin that had next to no chance of being rebuilt. Of all the returnees, the farmers were best off. The cultivators of the famous vineyards of the charming village of Ilok were soon back tending their vines. But after the initial euphoria over the recovery of Vukovar had dissipated, it dawned on people that the industrial town was destined to become nothing more than an outsized, rustic village. The promises that Tudjman extracted from the various local authorities to undertake rebuilding projects in Vukovar were soon forgotten. The towns and cities of Croatia had been obliged to rebuild 29 pieces of infrastructure, but by 2001 only seven were complete, such as the imposing, baroque Franciscan monastery in Vukovar itself and a sports centre in nearby Borovo, the latter a gift of the people of Cakovec on the Hungarian border. But the heart of Vukovar was still a ghoulish ruin where only cafes did good business, helping unemployed men to while away their time. The sole reason why so many people remained in Vukovar was because many Serbs wanting to sell up could not find buyers, in spite of the fact that house prices were a tenth of the value of similar structures in Zagreb.

Tudjman’s illness worsened. The president’s first examination in the Walter Reed US military hospital in Washington on 26 November 1996 had left him despondent. After the doctors told him his advanced stomach cancer was inoperable and might leave him only weeks to live, he hurried back for a miserable New Year in Zagreb. Hope returned the following spring after a visit by a surgeon from the Gustave-Roussy cancer institute in Paris. The French ditched surgery in favour of less invasive forms of chemotherapy, and at first their course of treatment appeared to achieve remarkable results, immediately halting the erosion of the president’s stomach.

The return of all the symptoms in February 1998 came as a terrible blow, particularly as tumours had spread to the brain. Although the French doctors tried treating his brain with radiation. Tudjman no longer entertained serious hopes of long-term survival. ‘The last two years were impossible,’ Ožbolt recalled. With the president sick and withdrawn – his ministers scarcely saw him at all in the last year – the infighting between Pasali. Šeks and the moderates around Grani became increasingly frantic in an atmosphere of virtual political paralysis and a continually worsening economic crisis. According to the newspaper Nacional, Tudjman lost his ability to concentrate and was only interested in chatting about football.3

Symptomatic of the rising concern about the economy was the collapse of much of the banking system, led by the country’s fifth largest bank, Dubrovaka Banka, which experienced a disastrous run on its savings in February 1998. The panic at the Dubrovnik bank triggered the collapse of several small and medium sized banks, wiping out about 20 per cent of the savings of Croat investors and presenting a huge compensation bill for the government in the 1999 budget. As the country’s foreign debt lurched steadily higher towards the $l0bn mark, all hopes were concentrated on a dramatic revival of tourism in Dalmatia. But once again, as so often in its history, Croatia was the victim of events over which it had no control.

This time the proverbial Balkan powder keg was Kosovo. The overwhelmingly Albanian province in southern Serbia slid into a state of growing lawlessness in 1998, as the Serbian police attempted vainly to counter the threat of insurgency from a shadowy new force called the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) by burning down the villages of alleged ‘terrorists’ often with the members of their families inside. The first of these bloody reprisals, at Prekaz, left about 50 dead and only ignited a cycle of violence that rapidly spiralled out of control. If Miloševi calculated that it might be smart to let the KLA uprising gather strength precisely in order to crush it more thoroughly, the strategy backfired horribly. A series of atrocities perpetuated against Albanian villagers sparked the exodus of about 800,000 terrified Albanians into neighbouring Macedonia and Albania, placing an enormous strain on both those rickety states and posing an immediate dilemma for the Western powers. Determined not to play the role of the helpless spectator, as it had in Bosnia in 1992, Nato brushed aside Russian opposition and began rocketing the Yugoslav army from the skies. The air war that raged over Yugoslav skies in the summer of 1999 culminated in the Serbs’ withdrawal from Kosovo. It did not affect Croatia in the slightest, beyond the fact that Zagreb obligingly lent Nato the use of its air space. But as far as potential holidaymakers in Western Europe and America were concerned, Croatia was part of the Balkans and the Balkans, as usual, was in the middle of some horrible war. As a result, a tentative recovery in tourist results in the summer of 1998 was followed by another disastrous dip in visitor numbers.

While Nato warplanes rocketed Serbia and Miloševi skulked in his Belgrade bunker, Tudjman’s constitution began to surrender to the ferocious impact on his body of prolonged chemotherapy. The first sign that the end was near came in February 1999, when his immune system collapsed on a visit to Turkey. He struggled through the summer before the final crisis came in October, when he was forced to cut short a trip to Rome and was rushed to hospital in Zagreb on 1 November. He never emerged. Slowly poisoned by sepsis caused by the disintegration of the intestine, he fell into a coma on 22 November. On 26 November, the president’s advisers gave up the pretence that he was suffering from a minor illness and authorised parliament to suspend his powers and vest them in the president of the Sabor, Vlatko Pavletic. He died just before midnight on 10 December 1999. His minister of science, Milena Žic-Fuchs, recalled being woken just before the announcement on air by a woman who simply said the president had gone.4 At 3am, Pavleti addressed the nation on television. ‘The big heart of Franjo Tudjman has stopped beating,’ he said.⁵ The ministers gathered for a cabinet meeting the following day in a mood of despondency. They had all been prepared for his death but it still came as a shock. In spite of his illness and prolonged absence in the last months, he had remained the ultimate arbitrator between the quarrelling factions of the HDZ, which had ruled Croatia since the historic election of 1990. The decade of Tudjman’s rule had been one of tumultuous events. Croatia had declared independence, risked total military defeat at the hands of the Yugoslav army and had snatched victory at the last minute. Tudjman’s era had been marked by an increasing trend towards authoritarianism, xenophobia and economic and diplomatic incompetence, but to many people he remained a revered father figure. His funeral, held on 13 December in the bitter cold at Mirogoj, was virtually boycotted by the international community. Only Turkey despatched its head of state, Suleyman Demirel. The Bosnians, Slovenes and Macedonians contented themselves with prime ministers, while the Western states sent only ambassadors. But the people turned up in their tens of thousands to line the funeral route.

No sooner was Tudjman laid to rest in a vast, unlovely, black marble tomb in Mirogoj, not far from the resting place of his close ally Gojko Šušak who died from cancer in May 1998, than his political legacy began to unravel. The Croats paid their respects at his funeral, but almost immediately signalled their desire for a complete change of style in the presidential and parliamentary elections that followed on 3 January and 24 January.

The first sign of a new era was the opposition victory in the first of those polls. For years, Tudjman – like Miloševi – had confronted a myriad of unstable opposition coalitions that failed to impress the voters with any sense of permanence or resolution. But now it was the HDZ that looked divided and confused, while the two biggest parties of the left and centre, the SDP under Ivica Raan and the HNLS under Dražen Budiša, formed a solid coalition. Moreover, these two large parties had drawn four other smaller parties under their umbrella, the Istrian Democratic Congress, the Peasants Party, the Liberals and the Croatian People’s Party. The verdict of the electorate was decisive. The SDP and HNLS together won 71 of the 151 seats in the Sabor, while the additional support of their smaller allies gained them a two-thirds majority. The HDZ was humiliated with only 46 seats.

In one sense, the parliamentary result was not much of a shock, given the obvious unpopularity of the HDZ in the last years of Tudjman’s life. The election that followed to the presidency was a bigger upset. ‘The Croats want their leader to be someone they are afraid of, or someone they can have a drink with,’ Croatian journalist Mirjan Buljan recalled. ‘Tudjman was the former and Mesi was the latter.’

The last president of the old Yugoslav federation did not at first appear a very likely victor. The party he had led after leaving the HDZ, the Croatian People’s Party, had mouldered away on the fringes of the republic’s public life, attracting little attention. The other parties supporting his presidential bid, the Istrian Democrats and the Liberals, were also small fry. One confined its activities entirely to a small region in the far west. The other had little support outside the far east and was little more than a platform for Zlatko Kramari, the boyish-looking mayor of Osijek. As late as November 1999 public opinion polls suggested Grani was by far the most popular politician in the country.

Many observers at first predictably put their bets on Grani as a safe pair of hands who could be relied upon to preside over Croatia’s transition to a more accountable style of government. But it soon became clear that the public revulsion against the HDZ, so clearly expressed in the parliamentary elections at the beginning of the month, was about to be reinforced in the second poll. Grani’s campaign was not helped by what Ožbolt called a deliberate campaign of sabotage waged from within the party by the hard-line nationalists around Pasali and Vladimir Šeks, who seemed to prefer no HDZ candidate to win if the only choice was a man of Grani’s convictions. A quiet, rather modest man with the demeanour of a Catholic bishop, Grani proved no match for the effervescent Mesi, who was clearly relishing his return to the centre of the stage after the years of obscurity. An HDZ win, even by Grani, also threatened to lead to confrontation between the presidency and the new constellation of forces running parliament.

The presidential candidates did not only differ over Bosnia, Europe, Serb refugees and indicted war criminals. Mesi’s campaign platform involved concrete pledges to oversee the drastic reduction of the presidential prerogatives Tudjman had piled up, and the return of almost all executive decision to the parliament and the prime minister.

The public warmed to the fact that Mesi was as different from his old mentor as could be imagined. Where Tudjman had been stiff, patriarchal and reluctant to display his dry sense of humour, Mesi was an avuncular club man, never happier than when he was holding court with his friends in the Café Charlie, just off Zagreb’s Jelai square. In fact it was his humour that increasingly grabbed the public’s attention as he campaigned for the nation’s votes.

In spite of the obvious decline of the HDZ since Tudjman’s death, the results on 24 January still came as a surprise. Mesi won convincingly, taking 41 per cent of the votes, compared to 28 per cent for Budiša and only 22 for Grani. The HDZ had been buried and Grani was so disappointed with his party, as well as the result, that within a few weeks he left the HDZ with Škare-Ožbolt to set up a new forum for the centre-right called the Democratic Centre. Budiša and Mesi went on to a second round on 7 February, but there were no further upsets. Mesi won as was expected, and assumed Tudjman’s vacant seat.

The West greeted Mesi’s victory with almost indecent enthusiasm. While only one foreign head of state had attended Tudjman’s funeral, 12 showed up in Zagreb for Mesi’s inauguration, alongside the US secretary of state, Madeleine Albright. It was not his folksy charm that drew them to Zagreb, but two specific foreign policy pledges. One was to terminate Zagreb’s involvement in Bosnia’s convoluted domestic arrangements by cutting financial and military aid to the Bosnian Croats. The other was to co-operate fully with the International War Crimes Tribunal, not only over Bosnian Croat suspects, but over the much more sensitive subject of regular Croatian army figures suspected of war crimes in Operation Oluja. Both marked a radical break with HDZ policy which was to support the Bosnian Croats, however covertly, and to deny the Hague Tribunal any authority to investigate the ‘Homeland War’.

These promises were not popular, and drew furious opposition from war veteran organisations and more muted criticism from the Catholic Church, not a negligible force in a country where about 30 per cent of the population regularly attended mass. Yet Mesi and Raan were able to deliver to their new Western allies on both counts without encountering a serious threat to public order. A few dangerous moments followed the announcement in early February 2001 of a judicial investigation into Mirko Norac, a former general, over a pogrom of several dozen Serbian civilians in Gospi in mid-October 1991. A youthful 33, Norac was a hero to nationalists far beyond the ranks of the HDZ and the court’s announcement sent about 100,000 protesters onto the streets of Split the following weekend, as well as sparking smaller protests in other cities. The size of the Split rally, which included a number of clergy, rattled the authorities but they did not back down, and after the Hague Tribunal helpfully declared it was not intending to seek Norac’s extradition, the suspect handed himself in at the end of the month and was charged in March with crimes against humanity. The demonstrations continued but the fact that Norac was going to be tried in Croatia and not the Netherlands defused the issue. The Norac case caused a lot of noise but showed no sign of igniting a campaign of civil disobedience. More importantly, it did not revive the HDZ even though it had positioned itself as the war veterans’ champion.

It was the same with the Bosnian Croats. Heavy sentences passed down by the Hague judges in March 2000 and February 2001 on two key figures in the Croat–Muslim conflict in central Bosnia in 1993 aroused a lot of anger in Croatia,6 but there was no widespread opposition to the government’s policy of distancing itself from the Bosnian Croats. Politically, Mesi owed them nothing and it was differences over Bosnia policy that had led to Mesi’s resignation from the HDZ in 1994 in the first place. Many of Tudjman’s closest advisers came from western Herzegovina. None of Mesi’s did. Only weeks after his inauguration on 18 February, Mesi paid a symbolically loaded visit to Sarajevo at the end of March, where the mainly Muslim Bosniak population gave him a warm welcome, and he repeated his message that the Bosnian Croats must turn to Sarajevo for the solution to their problems and abandon hopes of political union with Croatia.

The new team were most successful in their foreign policy objectives. They wanted to dispel international disapproval of Croatia, banish its image as something of a rogue state and start the process of integration into the European Union and other Western financial and defence structures. Mostly they succeeded. The endless international carping and grumbling about Croatia stopped dead. EU delegations came and went and murmured pleasant things. Within a year of taking office, the Croatian government had signed up to Nato’s Partnership for Peace programme, joined the World Trade Organisation and had started negotiations on a Stability Pact with the EU, the first step to joining the organisation. The new leaders talked vaguely of being in a position to join by 2005.

The coalition enjoyed other political successes. The inclusion of the main Istrian party partly defused a potentially tricky confrontation with separatism in a geo-politically sensitive region that remained a focus of irredentist agitation for the Italian extreme right.⁷ The government lifted the heavy-handed control of the state television and radio, and reporters relaxed in the new, less pressurised, atmosphere. There was an end to the constant, dispiriting xenophobia that marked the Tudjman era and the endless preoccupation with convoluted Western ‘plots’ against Croatia’s independence. The new president lived up to his pledge to preside over the reduction of his own powers, saving his right to command the armed forces. A byproduct of the new atmosphere was the decline of the far right. Only a few years previously, the ultra-nationalist far right appeared a disturbing phenomenon that threatened to destabilise the country’s infant democracy and deepen its isolation from the Western mainstream. By 2001, the neo-fascists had evaporated as a serious force and their main exponents, the Party of Rights, had toned down its language and largely dumped the cult of the Ustashe.

Croatia was developing into a normal democracy. And yet the country still did not quite feel liberated. Partly, this was because the relaxation in the political atmosphere was not accompanied by an obvious improvement in the economy. Journalists and human rights activists praised the new freedom in Mesi’s Croatia.8 Consumers and wage earners felt less happy. The government’s excuse was that it inherited a poor situation, including a balance of payments crisis, a foreign debt of $l0bn, zero economic growth, a slight fall in industrial production and an unemployment rate of 23 per cent. In fact, the unemployment statistics obscured a more serious situation. Other EU states, including Spain, lived with high unemployment rates. Croatia’s problem was that those nominally in work included many who were rarely or never paid and an even larger number who were paid but could not live on their wages. The average monthly wage of about 3,000 kune, less than $400, was far lower than the Western European average, yet the price of many foodstuffs was almost the same and the cost of rented accommodation was high.

The pattern of unemployment was also geographically uneven, creating pockets of extreme poverty. In some Dalmatian cities, such as Šibenik, it was 50 per cent. The picture was even worse in the old Krajina. Bosnian Croat refugees from central Bosnia had been siphoned into Knin by the Tudjman government to change the area’s ethnic composition. But no jobs followed these refugees, few of whom brought any capital with them. Pre-war Knin had lived off the railways, a subsidised nuts and bolts factory and army pensions. The new townspeople were not old army officers, the factory was closed and Knin’s days as a Balkan railway junction were over. By 2001 some of the inhabitants were on the edge of starvation.

Like Serbs and Bosnians, Croats were skilled at surviving on small salaries and supplementing their wages through the unofficial ‘grey’ economy. For all that, life was visibly a disappointment to a great many people. The waving of once-forbidden flags and the singing of once-forbidden songs no longer lifted people’s spirits. The Croats had long cherished the notion that it was Belgrade and Serbia that had stopped them from becoming as rich as the Austrians or even the Swiss. They thought that once they were out of ‘the Balkans’ and into the dreamland of Central Europe, they would start to enjoy the ‘Dolce Vita’. Ten years into independence, Croatia was a more sober, sadder society. The Freedom Train had ground, if not to a halt, to a snail’s pace. The Croatian nationalists under Franjo Tudjman had failed to deliver the Promised Land, and so too, to a great extent, had the coalition that had replaced the HDZ. The future appeared to offer young people infinitely more political freedom than their parents had known, more choice in terms of lifestyle and career, and that most elusive of commodities, peace. But there was also a feeling that the nation had been stripped of its comforting illusions, and of the dreams that had kept so many hopes alive.