Under the Concentration Camp

January 5: Croatia Presidential Elections
Zoran Milanovic , Social Democratic Party of Croatia: 52.7%
Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic, Croatian Democratic Union: 47.34%

In the short history of Croatian presidential campaigns, this one might have been the most watched. The debates between the conservative incumbent Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović and former prime minister Zoran Milanović, a social-democrat, felt more like family bickerings than well-organized political discussions. There was talk about reversing the Croatian population decline (in 2019 Croatia’s population was 4.07 million—the lowest it has been since 1957), and foreign policy (especially the country’s relationship with the rest of the Balkans). We also heard much about the musical, book and film tastes of the two candidates. The incumbent president loves Independence Day, because “it shows the Earth united against the aliens.” The former prime minister is a fan of the 1980s gangster movie Once Upon a Time in America. On January 5, Milanović won with 52.7% of the votes.

The two leading candidates ran with similar policies. Both advocated for lower taxes, the need to create more jobs and to boost the economy, in more than vague terms. During Milanović’s time as prime minister, he had implemented—or tried to implement—conservative economic policies, such as a reform of labor and pension law diminishing workers’ rights, moving the legal age of retirement to 67 or privatization of public companies. But the role of the president in Croatia is largely ceremonial—it is the prime minister who holds the real power. Economic policymaking falls beyond the presidential remit.

More lasting is what the candidates said about the past. The campaign was dominated by historical revisionism on the part of multiple candidates aimed at attracting right-wing voters. The debate centered on Croatia’s fascist rulers during World War II, the country’s relationship with former Yugoslavia and the 90s war for the country’s independence.

Over the course of her tenure, Grabar-Kitarović had talked about how she was “born on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain,” dreaming of places “where people were able to speak freely.” She talked about how she “yearned for democracy” as a child, as well as an opportunity to choose between different brands of yogurt in the store. 

Many Croatians rushed to make memes of Grabar-Kitarović and yogurt. Media commentators noted that there were indeed different brands of yogurt in Yugoslavia. Historians recalled that after the Tito-Stalin split in 1948, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia distanced itself from the USSR. But these references to the past had a more symbolic purpose. Focusing on the crimes committed under the Yugoslavian regime and downplaying those of the Ustasha regime that came before has become a tactic to attract right-wing voters. 

When the Axis powers invaded and partitioned the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in April 1941, the Independent State of Croatia was formed. It consisted of the territory that included some parts of today’s Croatia, but also some of Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was an ally of Nazi Germany. The military branch of the Croatian Nationalist Revolutionary Movement, the Ustasha, committed mass extermination of its Serb, Jewish, and Roma inhabitants. The Ustasha and their allies remained in control of a large part of the Croatian territory until the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945.

Although the crimes of the Ustasha are well-documented, many right-wing voters in Croatia speak of the movement as one solely concerned with the independence of Croatia, and gloss over its Nazi ties. They argue that until Croatia broke away from Yugoslavia in 1991, the Independent State of Croatia was the only period of independence in Croatia's modern history. The state of Yugoslavia was in their eyes dominated by Serbia, a country in which one could not express nationalist sentiments. 

Mentions of the Independent State of Croatia, then, often function as “dog whistles” to hard-right voters. In 2016, Grabar-Kitarović posed with a group of Croatian diaspora members in Canada holding a flag bearing the Ustasha symbol. In 2018, during her visit to Argentina, the president said that, “After World War II, many Croats found a space of freedom in Argentina where they could testify to their patriotism and express their justified demands for the freedom of the Croatian people and their homeland.” Many of those who fled to South America after the war were close to the Ustasha regime.

In the second round of elections earlier this year, hoping to appeal to voters attracted to parties further right, Grabar-Kitarović enlisted the support of Julienne Bušić, the American widow of a late Croatian nationalist, Zvonko Bušić. In 1976, the Bušićs and three others hijacked a plane as it left New York’s La Guardia Airport for Chicago and demanded that a declaration of Croatian independence be published in major newspapers. They also planted a bomb in a locker at New York’s Grand Central Terminal, which went off as police attempted to defuse it, killing one officer and wounding several others. Julienne Bušić and her husband were sentenced to life in prison in the U.S.  She was released after serving 13 years in 1989, and later moved to Croatia, where she has been received as a right-wing icon. (Zvonko Bušić killed himself in 2013.) 

Milanović’s relationship to the World War II period has been more ambiguous. Four years ago, Milanović brought up that his grandfather “was an Ustasha soldier” in an attempt to gain sympathy with right-wing voters. He alienated the voters on the left and ended up losing the election to the right-wing party anyway.

This time, he tried to represent himself as a candidate who wanted to look toward the future by putting up a poster in the eastern town of Vukovar—ravaged by the 1991-95 conflict between Croatia and Serbia—with the slogan, “The wars are over.” Referring to Yugoslavia, he said he was “indifferent to that time” and “what happened happened.”

For Croatian historian Tvrtko Jakovina, a professor at the University of Zagreb, debates over the Independent State of Croatia and the legacy of Yugoslavia are part of a broader revisionist tendency in the country. “In the Croatian political jargon, equating all the totalitarian regimes is just a polite way to avoid saying that the Independent State of Croatia [a Nazi-allied state] ‘wasn’t so bad after all.’ That means representing it better than it was,” Jakovina says. 

When the Holocaust Remembrance Project published its 2019 Holocaust Revisionist Report, an annual study examining how European Union member states deal with the legacy of World War II crimes, Croatia was listed as one of the worst countries in Europe when it comes to historical revisionism. The report points out that, for example, the use of the wartime Croatian fascist Ustasha movement salute “For Homeland Ready” (generally understood to be the equivalent of the Nazi salute ‘Sieg Heil’) is still widespread. The report also notes that in 2017, Grabar-Kitarović said, “It is the old Croatian salute, but unfortunately it was compromised during the Ustasha days.” (She backtracked in 2019.)

Moreover, the report notes that the number of Serb, Roma and Jewish victims in World War II has been often downplayed. This is especially true when it comes to the number of those murdered at the Jasenovac concentration camp, a camp near the current Croatian/Bosnian border run by the Ustasha. More than 80,000 people are estimated to have died there. The leadership of the Jewish community in Croatia, along with representatives of the country’s Serb and Roma minority, have boycotted the last three government-sponsored Holocaust commemorations at Jasenovac, saying they wouldn’t condone historical revisionism. They have held an alternative commemoration a few days earlier.

Miroslav Škoro, a folk singer turned nationalist candidate who came in third during the first round of the presidential race with nearly 25% of the vote, promised to “dig up" Jasenovac to determine the real number of victims buried there during his campaign. He also pledged to pardon the convicted war criminal Tomislav Merčep, who was jailed for failing to prevent his police unit from detaining, torturing and killing several dozen civilians—mainly Serbs—back in 1991. (This past week, Škoro launched a new party, the "Miroslav Škoro Homeland Movement.”)

Milanović reacted to Škoro’s promise to dig up Jasenovac by suggesting it was an unrealistic campaign pledge, a “promise that one could not fulfill even if they wanted.”  “Such lack of responsibility, charlatanism and political cowardice that I have listened to over and over again during the campaign is apparently something that can’t be eradicated,” he said. He did not discuss historical revisionism. 

Milanović’s words and his posturing with respect to the past will have a crucial role in Croatian society, Jakovina believes. “He will need to have a firm position about the historical events, visit memorial sites and not succumb to bad, revisionist populism. He should not dismiss talks about history as stupid or unimportant or not position himself clearly on this topics...something he sometimes did while he was Croatia’s prime minister,” Jakovina says. 

In his inauguration speech on February 18, Milanović again vowed that “the wars are over” and that it was the nation’s responsibility not to make anyone in Croatia feel excluded because they are different. 

But election season is ongoing: This fall, Croats will return to the polls to vote in parliamentary elections. Their representatives will have plenty of time to paint their own version of history.