Why Tudjman cannot loose elections in Croatia

- and how the U.S. help him

In 1950.-s in the height of the cold war, while the U.S. was preaching to the world the values of democracy and the one-person-one-vote rule, a large number of Americans was denied the right to vote just because their skin was of the "wrong" color. A mirrored Stalinist purge was also under way lead by senator McCarthy.

Today the bar is raised, but the same ironies persist - American foreign policy, basically a marketing venture, is, as it is quite often a rule in the U.S., better than the product which it is purported to sell. Like, Madeleine Albright took a stand in front of a Serbian house burned and ruined in Croatia, in an effort to, rightfully, criticize Croatia's behavior towards its minorities; while at the same time one can find innumerable burned, ruined, abandoned, dilapidated buildings in the black and Hispanic minority neighborhoods across the U.S., and nobody is taking stand there.

American government officials would argue that while the burning of that house in Croatia was motivated by reasons of ethnic chauvinism and political persecution (much like the burning of 40+ black churches in the South of the U.S. in the past few years - for which case Clinton did take a firm stand), the burning, deterioration and ultimate abandonment of housing in minority neighborhoods in the U.S. is merely result of the free market mechanisms. Along the same lines the U.S. immigration service makes the distinction between political and economical grounds - political are allowable for an asylum request, economical are not.

However, we do not eat the Constitution. We merely read it. And we do have to eat, too. As one can be a victim of political persecution, another may be a victim of persecution by the free market mechanisms. Economy may be used as means of political persecution: during the McCarthy era, victims were often not imprisoned but left out of job and virtually unemployable, the practice used quite often in late Yugoslavia, too.

In a more sophisticated way, just letting the free market mechanisms work unchecked may be a way of political and racial persecution: imagine if Serbs did not leave Krajina and if Croats, instead of killing them and burning their property, let them stay there after they surrendered their weapons; imagine if Croatia then let free market mechanisms take over, building highways and high speed rails flying over the Serb neighborhoods in Krajina, with just a few heavily guarded exits labeled like let's say Draza Mihajlovic Boulevard in Cyrillic (so to underline the Croatia's high level of tolerance), letting those neighborhoods to rot slowly, letting the inhabitants kill each other fighting for whatever scraps from Zagreb's tables may come their way. I wonder if Mme. Albright would go to Krajina then. Or would the sight look to familiar for her to bother.

The sanctimonious gap that exists between the values America markets abroad and the values America manages to implement at home is too obvious to ignore and it creates a huge damage to American foreign policy, particularly in the Balkans. Politicians there simply don't take America's human rights musings seriously. They are all quick to point out that their countries neither administer nor condone administering the death penalty, and what about the mass graves? They were perhaps digged by "the Ogre from the tunnel" (quote from the brilliant Serbian film "Pretty Villages Burn Pretty").

Although they fear America's immense military power and even more its gigantic market influence, they also quickly learn that America's military power is a paper tiger, banning its soldiers to engage for fear that they may die, and that with American markets any smart dictator may do a lot of very lucrative business. The end result is that the electorate there would vote in office those people perceived to be the best able to get more out of Americans: more McDonalds and more Coca-Cola at a lesser price.

As long the Coca-Cola keeps flooding the country, they'd be kept in office. Inevitably this gives the U.S. the control of those countries by the means of economic pulleys and levers. However, it may be a costly venture, heh. People in the Balkans are used to a good life under Tito, and they would quickly proceed to demand more out of America than just McDonalds and Coca-Cola. And America, predictably, would continue to pay them off while it deems that profitable - as it did in the case of former Yugoslavia. Then, suddenly, the pipe would shut down, and the New York Times would come up with yet another fantastic story of thousands years of war and ethnic hatred in the historically damned Balkans region.

Expectedly then, Croats voted for Tudjman again. In a three-way race Tudjman won more votes than the two other candidates combined (Gotovac 18.1%, Tomac 22.8%, Tudjman 60.1%), as he self-predicted. The voter turnout was the lowest in the short history of Croatian democracy - 57% - just a tad higher than the recent voter turnouts at the U.S. presidential elections. Wow, Croats got bored with it pretty quickly, huh? Not unlike the subtly distinct American presidential candidates, one a Republican and another a Democrat, the Croatian candidates came from the same ideological fold: all three of them were at one time or another high-ranking members of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia.

They actually represent three different eras of Yugoslav communism: Tudjman is a communist of 50-s and 60-s (what would in the U.S. be called a "matures" candidate), Gotovac is a communist of 70-s (a "boomer") and Tomac is a communist of 80-s (Yugo "Gen-X"). They are all veteran parts of the political "process", passing in and out through the revolving doors (even more elaborate in Yugoslavia than in the U.S.; there we called it "rotacija") of the system many times before the present. Tudjman's repeated winning signifies that in Croatia the past holds firm supremacy over the present and over the future. Heh, I guess with all those recent disturbances of orderly life in the past decade, a lot of established and well situated Croat citizens would much rather live in the past. They probably vote for Tudjman because he most closely resembles Tito to them. Well, a democracy guarantees a right to choose, it does not guarantee that the choice will be the best one.