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The fifteen Foreign Ministers of the EU, meeting in Brussels on 16 March, have decided to postpone negotiations with Croatia, which ought to have begun on 17 March. No other date for the opening of talks has yet been fixed. The decision to put the talks on hold was taken in the light of Zagreb’s inadequate collaboration with the International Tribunal in The Hague. The Croatian authorities are accused of not having done enough to apprehend General Ante Gotovina, accused by the Tribunal of having committed a massacre of at least 150 ethnic Serbs during the war of 1991-1995. But it is also on the internal front that Croatia must do some soul-searching. She must try to throw light on the crimes committed by the Communist regime. Let us forget the past and look to the future! That’s the slogan with which many people in contemporary Croatian society express their own “credo” of life and suggest how the country’s problems should be solved. But that is not so: one of the crucial problems of Croatian society is precisely its relation with the past. This problem can be solved neither by simply turning our eyes to the future, nor by playing a double game, i.e. forgetting just a part of the past! Today Croatian public opinion can be said to be mature in recognizing the guilt of the past and the atrocities committed during the Second World War, and in demanding that those responsible for the crimes committed during the war for Croatian independence in the 1990s be brought to justice. Nonetheless, at the same time, everything that happened during the Communist regime is in some way erased from memory. In Croatia many do not dare to say that the totalitarian regime was guilty of atrocities, and that after the Second World War the Communists killed over 100,000 people and were responsible for what we now call “ethnic cleansing”. Paradoxically, when people speak of the country’s ills today, these are explained as the consequence of the errors committed after the fall of the Communist regime, but never of those of the previous period. The media present it as a period in which people lived better. They speak more willingly of “socialism with a human face”. They try to keep alive the “positive” side of that period. No one in Croatia has ever been accused of crimes committed during the Communist regime. Croatian society has never seriously come to terms with this part of its history. Many of those who then played roles in public life, then open only to members of the Communist Party and non-believers, are still present today as interpreters of history. They promote what is tantamount to cultural amnesia about this period. They do so in a unilateral manner, exploiting current difficulties and the subjective memories of those who lived the greater part of their life during that period. And so we hear being repeated phrases like ‘we lived in an almost democratic and fair society’, or ‘today it has no sense to re-open those wounds or penalise the people who collaborated with the secret services, and formed part of the judicial, educational, cultural and media system”. All this is skated over as if it were just a temporary glitch. Undoubtedly many of these people have since been ‘recycled’, but not converted to democracy. Europe ought to help Croatia to build democracy by means of people who believe in it with all their heart and not for opportunistic reasons. The European institutions ought to understand that those who hide their past within the Communist regime cannot be partners for the construction of the European family.
