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 ...
The following is a response sent in to the Washington Times regarding the Kuhner commentary. The author is Dragan Rakic from France. He quotes Kuhner, then responds.
Regarding Jeffery Kuhner’s statements that “Hundreds of thousands of Croatians were systematically butchered by Tito’s Partisans; priests, nuns and peasants were massacred; their lands were confiscated; and slave labor camps were established. My grandfather’s brother - a priest - was murdered in his own church, hung with piano wire through the back of his head. My grandfather and his wife and family were rounded up into a concentration camp for three agonizing years - he and my grandmother survived, most of my other ancestors didn’t. Upon leaving the death camp, my grandfather’s small farm was seized, his family persecuted and eventually driven into exile. Despite all their suffering, my grandparents managed to rebuild a life for themselves and their children”.
If Mr. Jeffrey Kuhner did not forget his glorious grandfather, he did forget, or never learned the history of Balkans, particularly the period from 1940 to 1945. In his above sentence he refers to the event when Croat Nazis tried with the help of Vatican’s priest Draganovic,( see the documentary: The Rat Lines), to cross the border and reach Italy and Austria.
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. 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. 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.
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. 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.
Sincerely
Dragan Rakic
Strasbourg
France
EU
__________________________
Ping!
Ping!
Who knows? During the war, there were more than atrocities to go around committed on both sides, by Nazis and Communists.
As for the current state of Croatia, who knows? I’d prefer to hear from someone who doesn’t have a dog in this fight, as this writer evidently does.
Not a whisper of Croatia’s islamification. I wonder why?
I take it that was a rhetorical question.
There is something that the writer said, which doesn't quite makes sense to me. He said that Sanader controls the news source Javno. But Javno had the following report: Croatia Ruled by Mafia and Crime
If Sanader was Mafia and controlled Javno, you'd think that he wouldn't let them publish a headline like that.
Maybe because Croatia is almost entirely Christian and less than 2% muslim? Serbia has almost twice as many muslim citizens as Croatia.
Correction: Serbia has over 4 times as many muslim citizens as Croatia.
I confess I have not really followed events in Croatia since the breakup, so I speak from ignorance. As far as I know, there may be some corruption—as there certain is, for instance, in Chicago or Washington—but things have been stable. That’s just a distant impression. But if things were really bad, we’d be hearing more about it.
As for economic troubles, what country isn’t having economic trouble these days?
I would have said, speaking mostly from ignorance, that Croatia did well to get out from under the Muslims, the Communists, the Nazis, and all the other malign forces that have been overrunning the region for the past century and more.
And that this reporter obviously is prejudiced.
They did well to get out from under the Serbs also.
I do as well. I really haven't followed the events in Croatia that much. My cousin, a Croat who was living in the US, passed away five years ago so I lost my connection to what was happening there -- other than I did notice some stories on high profile murders of reporters in Croatia, showing up on B92.
Joe, go find a place in this forum where your ignorance isn’t so fully on display. Your postings on the Balkans threads are sub-moronic.
Wow!
FormerLib, troll-feeding is strongly discouraged.
Good point, but sometimes you just have to mock ignorance when it is so strongly displayed.
Dragan Rakic is an idiot.
Croatia isn’t being Islamified.
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