Generals on their way to The Hague

Nothing dramatic will happen in Croatia: the wanted generals will travel, voluntarily or under compulsion, to The Hague, Ivica Račan will replace the ministers who are already controversial in the light of the future reconstruction of the Government (Minister of Science Hrvoje Kraljević), and HSLS - considering the already difficult coalition with the ideologically distant SDP - it can also be in the opposition.

In short, the hills shook - a mouse was born!

In short, this is what happened: last week's visit of Carla del Ponte to Zagreb finally brought to the public two secret indictments that the Croatian government has had in its hands for more than two months. There was nowhere to go, that fact had to be acknowledged. After the meeting of the SDP coalition HSLS, Dražen Budiša, a man who likes to cover his political defeats with "moral victory", stated that his party does not agree to the extradition of Croatian citizens to The Hague "under command responsibility". This was immediately followed by the resignations of the HDZ ministers, the aforementioned Kraljević, the Minister of Defense Jozo Radoš and the Deputy Prime Minister Goran Granić (the fourth minister, transport, Alojz Tušek did not resign). And there, however, there was no unity. Namely, Goran Granić did resign, but he voted "for" extradition, and there is every chance that Prime Minister Ivica Racan will not accept his resignation.

VOTING O TRUST: Next - but only on July 15 - is the session of the Parliament where the vote of confidence in Račan's government will be taken. Regardless of Račan's statement that the survival of this government is less important than the far-reaching decision on cooperation with The Hague for the fate of the country, Račan can sleep relatively peacefully next week. Namely, the ruling coalition will survive, unless the prime minister decides otherwise. The counting of representative votes showed that the Government, even without the support of all 23 representatives of HSLS in the Parliament, can count on more than 80 hands, with the support of Istrians, minority representatives and parties of the former "four". And she needs 76!

Opponents of extradition are, apart from the HSLS, the right-wing parties (HSP and the Croatian Pure Party of Rights, and the "Christian Democrats"), led by the HDZ and the Democratic Center, a renegade wing of the HDZ, which was defeated in the elections. It was they, then, who, while "daddy" was alive, at his wish and request, enacted the Constitutional Law on Croatia's Cooperation with the International Criminal Court (April 26, 1996). It's not that Racan himself didn't try to cover things up, so after receiving the indictments, his office requested that the Prosecutor's Office withdraw some accusations and qualifications about the "homeland war", but the inexorable Carla del Ponte stated coldly: "The indictments cannot be changed because legal documents, which were confirmed and signed by the judge of the Tribunal, and at the trials it will be determined whether those accusations are justified".

It should be known that Račan's action was completely unfounded: according to the Constitutional Law, namely, the Government is not authorized to enter into the merits of the indictment, but only to ensure that it initiates and brings to an end the proceedings against those sought by The Hague.

MERGE INCOMPATIBLE: When it comes to HSLS, it was best described by Đurđa Adlešić, the "head" of the Parliamentary Committee for National Security. Leaving the meeting of the party's brains, she declared: "We simply couldn't fight ourselves!" That party, which is trying to combine the incompatible - social and liberal - after the elections in January 2000 - took right-wing positions where the HDZ had been unassailable until then, in which is occasionally joined by SDP's flagship Zdravko Tomac, and even Račan himself with his own "excursions" into national rhetoric. Disagreement with many of the Government's moves is not recent, it has been going on since the beginnings of the coalition, so some analysts in Croatia assess that all that is happening is Budiša's attempt to relatively painlessly, for national reasons, get out of that "unprincipled embrace" with Račan's party . The question is how Budiša and his colleagues will position themselves in the end and whether they will recant and find a compromise, because the fact that the last, recent local elections showed that the party has lost much of its former appeal to voters.

The most important thing is that it is not yet publicly known who the generals are wanted in this "shipment" from The Hague. They are talking about two people, Anta Gotovina and Rahim Ademi. Ademi has already signed the Hague power of attorney to the well-known Zagreb lawyer Čedi Prodanović and announced that, in the event that he is indeed the subject of a sealed indictment, he will go to The Hague without any resistance. Another general, Ante Gotovina, a former legionnaire who arrived in Croatia with "Suško's stable" in the early nineties, disappeared without a trace. Journalists visit his house in Pakoštane, from which the general's brother and wife, colonel Dunja Zloić, drive them away, and the mayor of Pakoštane, a certain Milivoj Kurtov, predicts catastrophically that the arrest of Gotovina could lead to "closed roads, protests or, God forbid, the worst." !". Kurtov spoke with Gotovina on the phone on Sunday, so he told the public that "the general is safe".

OPET BLOCKADES: Other "headquarters for the protection of the dignity" of the war and the participants in the war are on that trail. As in previous cases, they threaten with logs, roadblocks and "mining" of the tourist season. Among the "dignitaries" is, of course, Tuđman junior, Miroslav Tuđman, who probably still hopes to sit on the ruling throne in order to continue where "dad" left off.

Racan, however, has to take his hat off for something: he showed that he can still be decisive in the crucial hour. It's the critical hour! All the time he was at the table in Banski dvori, he indulged the right too much, his party, together with others, proclaimed the "sanctity of war", his Zdravko Tomac still says that "there is no comparison of Serbian and alleged Croatian crimes"... The question is whether his decisive " yes" to the extradition of the two generals, the Tribunal did not even hear that Slobodan Milošević had not traveled there recently. After Detainee number 39, namely, the last argument of Croatian politics that it is unfair to try "Croatian criminals" while Balkan Executioner still at large. Lucky it is His apprentice died on time!