Posted on 02/08/2009 12:26:55 PM PST by Ravnagora
From Iceland to Latvia, the growing financial crisis is triggering popular revolts. Several European governments are on the verge of being toppled. Yet, it is in the Balkans where the rising tide of discontent may have the most significant impact.
The bloody breakup of Yugoslavia left in its wake successor states - all of whom, with the exception of Slovenia, are mired in economic stagnation. The region's biggest disappointment, however, has been Croatia. It is now badly lagging behind its northern Slovene neighbor due to massive political corruption. Croatian Prime Minister Ivo Sanader vows to lead his country into the European Union by 2011. Instead, he has transformed Croatia into a mafia state. The government's incompetence threatens to push the country toward economic collapse. It's no wonder thousands of protesters took to the streets in December demanding early elections.
Since coming to power in 2003, Mr. Sanader and his ruling Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) have presided over a creeping authoritarian kleptocracy. Bribery, kickbacks and cronyism are ubiquitous. Most senior politicians possess unexplained wealth. Mr. Sanader has amassed a personal fortune, including a Zagreb mansion worth about 10 million euros and a luxurious watch collection valued at 150,000 euros. This kind of wretched excess would cause even former disgraced Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich to blush.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
Pasalic was President Tudjman's main advisor during the post-war phase and was loathed by Croatia's liberals and those working for George Soros.
I don't have hard evidence, but it's not difficult to conclude that Mr. Kuhner is on Pasalic's payroll. Pasalic has tried several times to get back into the political game but the Sanader machine has been an effective one, both wiping out the hard right and sidelining Croatia's liberals and socialists time and time again.
As for Croatia being a mafia state, corruption is still typically high (but normal on a Balkan level) as four decades of communism have imprinted such poor business standards and politics on the country.
Seems to me that if the criticism is basically limited to reminders of the terrible atrocities committed all over the Balkans over 60 years ago, plus statements that Croatia is more crooked than the President of the US, that is praising with faint damns.
pretty much :)
Welcome back, Diocletian! Are you back from your visit to the former Yugo? How did that go, if you indeed went on your lecture tour already, or is that still in the future?
Now, I bite. Why is Dragan Rakic an idiot?
And have you taken a look at the thread about Croatia returning to the traditional naming of their children?
DIVO-MAXIMO-DIOCLETIANO
Diocletian turned crimson with fury, and after glaring for a moment like a wild beast, screamed `Idiot!’.
`Nonsense!’ said Alice.
“I would have said, speaking mostly from ignorance, that Croatia did well to get out from under the Muslims, the Communists, the Nazis...”
The Muslims didn’t run Croatia. In WW II they and Albanians marched in Himmler’s SS together with the Croats, who called the Bosnian Muslims “the flower of Croatia.” Muslim SS units guarded the rail lines carting Jews to Auschwitz.
“If things were really bad, we’d be hearing more about it.”
As you say - uninformed. “As for economic troubles, what country isn’t having economic trouble these days?” —
Dubrovnik is now totally gangster-ridden. Croatia became an economic basket case and mafia “state” as soon as Yugoslavia was broken up by CRO, SLO and MU secession, backed by Germany, the US and the Vatican. (16 years of my education was in RC schools.)
Out from under the Nazis?” That IS uninformed. Croatia IS a Nazi statelet today. There was no de-Nazification by Tito; he let the Yugo-Nazis swap their SS badges for the Red Star. Chameleon is the “national bird” of those tribes. In Croatia today the Hitler salute is in fashion. People get beaten up if their accent isn’t considered Croatian. Serbs returning to their property in Croat-seized Serb lands or to get birth certificates in the new Croatia are arrested on trumped up charges. Death threats and murder are the pay-off for Croatian reporters who publish about murder of Serb civilians.
http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=15898
What do we hear about the murder of Christians in Iraq (Assyrians, Chaldaean, Syriac, as they’re variously known). Precious little. Just Sunnis, Shia, Kurds. What have you heard about the Turkmen or Mandaeans being slaughtered in Iraq? You heard nothing about the impaling, burning, beheading of Serbs by Muslims in the villages around Srebrenica 1992-95, the kidnap and shipment of Serb kids from Sarajevo in the early 1990s to the sex bazaars of the Middle East. The media didn’t report the mujahedin show-and-tell with the salted heads of Serb women brought back as trophies to Saudi.
“If things were really bad, we’d be hearing more about it.”
Sorry, I don’t buy it. Some of the Balkan statelets and groups marched with Hitler. Some marched with Stalin. Some managed to march with both. Decent people caught in the middle were lucky to get out from under both these oppressive totalitarian systems, which are commonly said to be opposites, but were, in fact, much the same.
Re WWII: In most of Europe and even the Balkans, much of what you said is true.
However, WWII Croatia WAS a unique case. The only WWII deathcamps in Europe not run by Nazi Germany were in Croatia. Look up Jasenovac or Croatian Ustashe just as overviews. Croatia was a particularly brutal and sadistic state during WWII, with behavior that even appalled Germans.
Cicero: beware of Serbian propagandists and their claims. The Jasenovac Research Institute for example engaged in a gross lie in which they published the names of 700,000 purported victims of the Ustashi in Jasenovac. It turned out that over 90% of the names were names of those who perished elsewhere, hundreds of thousands of which were on the Axis side during the war!
At last count, I've found 110 relatives on the list and I can assure you that not one of them was a victim of Ustashi terror. For instance, two of my greatgrandparents were killed in an Allied air raid in October 1944, but both their names appear on the list of "victims of Ustashi terror" on the Jasenovac Research Institute site.
Always, always take Serbian claims with a two handfuls of salt.
Why should the Nazi try to escape the justice? Because they were Croats or because they committed crimes, maybe worse than German Nazis did in Yugoslavia.
Croatians weren't Nazis. They were either Ustashi, Domobrans, or Partisans. The attempt to form a Nazi party in Croatia was halted by the NDH regime and the party banned from ever assembling.
Those “good” Croat Nazis murdered a cousin of mine just because her name was Sarah, burned my grand uncle and all the members of his parish in the concentration camp of Jasenovac, executed and committed genocide against Serbs, Jews, and Roma.
Your personal anecdotes are worthless Mr. Rakic.
As for those in Bleiburg, the majority were not Ustashi but were Domobrans who were quite different from the Ustashi....and many of those were recently mobilized teenagers. Apart from that, you had women and children who were escaping the communist regime.
Alongside them, you had Montenegrin Chetniks who didn't want any part of life under communism just like those Croatian people.
And while the Serbian royalist leader Draza Mihajlovic was executed, the Croat Nazi Ustasha leader, Pavelic died in the age of nearly 90 years in Argentina, his right hand Andrija Artukovic hada Mickey Mouse judgment in Zagreb and died in age of 85, and many other war criminals still live and write odious articles to ignorant American readers.
Ante Pavelic died not at 90, but at 70 and not in Argentina, but in Madrid, Spain, from complications stemming from an assassination attempt.
Andrija Artukovic was like Draza Mihailovic, subjected to a communist show trial in which Artukovic wasn't allowed to present evidence in his defense nor call witnesses to his defense.
Mr. Kuhner should know better who started and when the last civil war in the former Yugoslavia. It was not in 1990 but in 1989, when irregulars started attacking the federal army., and expulse Serbs from Croatia.
Utter crap. The first fight in Croatia occurred at Plitvice in 1990 between Croatian police forces and Serbian irregulars. There was no fighting in 1989. The first fighting between the JNA and Croatian forces didn't take place until the spring of 1991 when the JNA took the Serb side and attempted to steal Croatian land.
Before the war there were 12% of Serbs in Croatia, and if you go to CIA site and take a look at the recent data about Croatia, you will find out that there is only 3% of Serbs left there. So who committed crimes or ethnic cleansing, it is up to normal people to judge according to facts and figures and not fairy tales and stories.
Tell us how many Croatians remained within the borders of the "RSK" and "RS" and you'll see that the answer to the question is that the Serbs did by far the most ethnic cleansing during those wars.
But lap up with a spoon whatever Croatian revisionism you hand out that is completely unsupported by any evidence out there, even Jewish and American sources?
Cicero is a grownup and will believe what he wishes -- he doesn't need to be told what to do by you.
And BTW, Professor Maher is Irish.
Are you denying the fact that the Yugoslav regime inflated the numbers of war dead even after Milovan Djilas admitted that they did so?
Maher wrongly calls Ustashi "Yugo-Nazis". As for his claim, he is totally wrong since Tito's Partisans never extended amnesty to Ustashi but Serbian Chetniks were granted amnesty if they crossed over until late 1944.
Maher is either misinformed or purposely lying.
The great irony on this thread is seeing the Serb contingent cheer on Tudjman supporter Jeffrey T. Kuhner in his criticism of the Sanader regime. Funny stuff.
Show me where I either "asserted" or "denied" either of those things here, Dio. You are the one bringing it up.
The great irony on this thread is seeing the Serb contingent cheer on Tudjman supporter Jeffrey T. Kuhner in his criticism of the Sanader regime. Funny stuff.
Show me where I "cheered on Tudjman supporter Jeffrey T. Kuhner in his criticism of the Sanader regime". If you bother to read my posts, I said I didn't know anything about it and that something Kuhner said didn't make sense.
Now you are the one Dio, who is so insistent on slamming statements -- some of which weren't even made -- as "Serb propaganda" that you are whizzing around left field. Get a grip, Dio!
Post #34 was not in reference to you. As for the rest, it puts to rest your incorrect suggestions that my position is somehow unfounded. That’s why I mentioned the JRI and Djilas. So either you agree with me or you don’t on those points.
Please don't start that crap again because as a Catholic you should not be playing games with moral relativism by whitewashing Croat crimes with technicalities. I have dead relatives as a result of Jasenovac that would disagree with you so put a sock in it.
Jasenovac was a concentration camp complex in which there were prison camps, labour camps, and in which executions of people innocent of crimes and guilty of crimes did take place.
Labelling it a "death camp" makes it seem that the purpose of the camp was wholly one of executions when the facts simply show that it wasn't the case.
It's akin to how Brezovo Polje was mislabeled as a "rape camp" simply because some rapes by Serbs of Muslim women took place there when it fact the camp was simply a prison camp with some random internees.
You guys don't like it when media exaggerates about Serbs, so therefore you should understand why I don't like it when it happens to my people.
The Ustashi claimed to have killed 1 million Serbs. Were they just bragging?
So to sit there with a straight face trying to gloss over a systematic attempt at killing thousands of human beings on the grounds of technicalities in nomenclature in order to help you Croats feel good about yourselves is simply pathetic.
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