Croatia is struggling, like many former dictatorships, with its past and in Eastern Europe the past is the future.
Croatia lauds itself on being one of the most Westernized and modern of the former Yugoslav republics, certainly more economically viable and advanced than most (except Slovenia). But Croatia's record during WW II (Ustase, Pavelic) has been obscured and not dealt with well, and to add to that are the insinuated war crimes of the 1990s Tudjman era. As the Polish former prime minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki put it when he investigated alleged war crimes in Slavonia (modern eastern Croatia, bordering Serbia) in the late 1990s, did we get so caught up in stopping the creation of a Greater Serbia in the Balkans that we failed to notice the creation of a Greater Croatia?
The communists throughout the region in the 1940s and 50s declared ethnic and national problems solved, though what they really did was sort of chryogenically (sp?) freeze them, for future generations to revive. Because of this Croatia (among other states) never fully confronted its past in WW II as the West Germans were forced to. The Ustase under Pavelic committed its own small-scale genocide as Croatia attempted to eradicate all ethnic Serbs living within its borders. Estimates range from 200,000 to 500,000 Serbs being murdered and executed by the Ustase before war's end. Tudjman soft-pedaled these numbers and tried to portray Pavelic as a Croat national hero, somewhat harsh but more "misunderstood". Croatia has also dragged its feet on turning over known and suspected war criminals from the 1990s wars, and has a spotty record on allowing Serbs forced out in the 1990s to return.
West Germans were forced to deal with Hitler's crimes at home and abroad in full force, and left with no doubt about the immorality of his actions and while a small extremist minority today still praises Hitler most Germans reject his ideas and his methods. Croats have never had that full confrontation with their past, and a popular concept of "communist = Serb = distorted history; nationalist = homegrown = TRUE history" paradigm has evolved. The EU and NATO have pressured Croatia to begin the process but the nationalists heavily watered down Croat war crimes or denied them altogether as foreign propaganda. There was some hope in the West when Racan was elected but the reality is that Croats were fed up with the lack of economic progress under the nationalists and were simply reaching for someone - anyone - else. Racan has been doing what needs to be done through the "painful" reforms but that's just the problem, they're painful and in the short-term no one sees the benefits.
HDZ leader Ivo Sanader is banking on voter discontent with the pain of economic reforms pursued over the past four years in the name of joining the wealthy European Union. At the same time, he stresses Croatia has no alternative to that goal.
The campaign was high on promises but short on specifics and just how Sanader proposed to steer his country to EU membership with less pain than Racan was unclear.
But he prepared the ground for a comeback by cleansing the party leadership of ultra-nationalists whose confrontational tone in the past darkened Croatia's EU prospects.
Now Croats are reaching for someone to make the pain go away, and they like the HDZ's subliminal anti-Western message; how dare those uppity Westerners try to tell Croatia how to run itself!
This in itself is not a tragedy but it is a dangerous moment for Croatia; it - like so many other states in the region - must decide if it wants the modern, connected and prosperous Croatia (the 'Juan Carlos' approach) or the isolated, nationalist and economically backward (the 'Franco' approach) Croatia.
