When a bomb exploded yesterday at the British embassy in Croatia's capital, Zagreb, causing minor injuries to a security guard, Prime Minister Ivo Sanader suggested it might be linked to Croatia's application to join the European Union. Britain is the current president of the EU, and one of several member states that has opposed Croatia's membership until it arrests its main war crimes fugitive, Gen. Ante Gotovina. (Reuters [2], Sept. 19) Croatian President Stipe Mesic condemned the incident as a "terrorist attack." But when an embassy employee, Damir Rovisan, was arrested today for smuggling in the device, Interior Minister Ivica Kirin said: "This indicates that this is not a terrorist act against the British embassy, but an act of an individual coming from criminal circles." Yet he admitted that no motive had been established for the bombing. (BBC [3], Sept. 20)
Since no motive has been established, why has terrorism been ruled out? It seems to us the Croatian leadership is playing a cynical propaganda game: they want to join the EU, but also want to protect their right flank which is intransigent over war crimes committed in 1990's and openly nostalgic for the Ustahse—the fascist party that ruled Nazi-allied Croatia in World War II. Terrorism was a favorite tactic of the Ustashe in its struggle for Croatian independence from the "first Yugoslavia" (1919-41): a Ustashe militant assassinated Yugoslavia's King Alexander in 1934. Since Croatian independence in 1991, the Ustashe has been rehabilitated, as Chris Hedges of the New York Times noted in a terrifying April 12, 1997 article, "Fascists Reborn as Croatia's Founding Fathers [4]."
See our last posts on the simmering Balkan crisis [5] and European neo-fascism [6].
