Local elections (2)

Croats cast their vote in local elections yesterday. A summary of the results, ordered by the size of towns.
In Zagreb incumbent mayor and swanky social democrat Milan Bandić goes to the next round, in which he will have to fight independent candidate Josip Kregar, dean of Zagreb's Law faculty. Bandić received 48 percent of the votes, a bit short for a win in the first round.
Entrepeneur Željko Kerum got 40 percent of the votes in Split. His main contender Ranko Ostojić (social democrat) follows with 35 percent. Both men (Croatian politics is to a large degree, unfortunately, men's business) will have a face-off in the second round.
No second round in Rijeka, Croatia's largest port. Social democrat Vojko Obersnel won a safe majority of the votes.
Osijek will have a second round in two weeks. The contenders are incumbent right-wing mayor Anto Đapić and Krešimir Bubalo, member of Branimir Glavaš HDSSB party. Glavaš was sentenced to ten years last week after he was found guilty of war crimes against Serbian civilians in Osijek.
All other towns have much less than 100.000 inhabitants. Only in these smaller towns some HDZ mayors managed to secure their seats (HDZ is the ruling party in national politics). HDZ president Jadranka Kosor said that her party won the vast majority of the counties, for what it's worth. Croatia has 21 counties (županije), an administrative unit that does not hold a lot of power.
High-ranking HDZ-member Andrija Hebrang, former minister of Defense and Health, was not surprised that his party did not win in the bigger towns. "In the centre of the city live either the voters or descendants of people who were privileged during communism." The electorate Hebrang likes better gathered last week in Bleiburg for a commemoration. In 1945 Tito's partisans killed there a great number of fascists, ustaše, četniks and also some innocent people. Hebrang gave a speech in Bleiburg, a bunch of clergymen said that if "Bleiburg is no genocide, then what is genocide?", and several people were arrested for wearing fascist symbols.

Free tram rides in Zagreb (2)

I don't dare to say there is a causal relationship, but after my previous post about riding the tram for free in Zagreb, ZET decided to extend the "free tram zone" to Kvatrić.
Kvatrić is of no interest to tourists, unless you are interested in urban planning failures and want to wonder how Zagreb's mayor Milan Bandić could ever brag that Kvatrić would turn into "Zagreb's most beautiful square". In fact it turned into a no man's land with inadequate public transportation. Someone should tell him that a square is more than just an empty space surrounded by buildings.
I don't know who lives around Kvatrić, but they seem to love watching television.I ask myself if someone will bother to remove this antenna jungle when Croatia switches to digital broadcasting in 2011.
Kvatrić, by the way, is short for Kvaternikov trg, named after Eugen Kvaternik (1825-1871), a politician and co-founder of the Croatian Party of Rights. Kvaternik led a unsuccessful rebellion against Austrian rule in Croatia in 1871. Some of his offspring would hold important positions in the fascist Independent State of Croatia, a Nazi puppet state.

Tito's friends and foes

Former mayor of Karlovac, Josip Boljkovac, has taken the initiative to establish the Josip Broz Tito Society of Karlovac. "If there had not been unity of the Serbian and Croatian peoples and the Communist Party, Croatia as we have it today would not exist", he explained.
Most people agree with that, although many would add that Croatia today could have been a better country had it not been ruled by a brutal communist dictator. Around 2000 people who hold that opinion gathered last Saturday on Zagreb's Trg maršala Tita (Marshall Tito Square). Their protest was aimed at the very name of the square, as it honours the man they call a "war criminal". Instead, they want to change the name of the square around the Croatian National Theatre into Kazališni trg (Theatre Square). Theatre Square sounds logical, but it was only during the fascist Independent State of Croatia that the square went by that name. Before World War Two it honoured Petar Karađorđević and, before 1918, Franz Joseph, the Austrian emperor.
A counter-demonstration of antifascists drew a few hundred people. Their message was that Tito had defeated fascism in Croatia and given Yugoslavia a respectable position in world politics. The Alliance of Antifascist Fighters and Antifascists (communists love lengthy names) said that it is time to "stop expressing hatred and spreading lies about the antifascist struggle and Marshall Tito".
There is, of course, nothing wrong with antifascism. That is why Croatian communists present themselves as antifascists, because everything else that has to do with communism has been discredited. I don't have much faith in Croatian anticommunists either. There is, again, nothing wrong with anticommunism. But the anticommunist community here is too often made up of an unholy alliance of the catholic church and people with an excess of love for the homeland.
That is, in short, the trouble with Croatian history and society. This country has no history of civil liberalism that said "no" to any kind of totalitarianism.
The Alliance of Antifascist Fighters and Antifascists boasted that seventeen cities around the world named a square or street after Tito, among them London, New Delhi and Washington. If you have a picture of a Tito Square or Street, wherever you live, please send it me so I can make a Tito gallery on this blog.

World War Two - episode 101

In World War Two Croatia was torn apart by warring factions, of which partisans, fascists (ustaše) and četniks were the most prominent. After the war, the četniks disappeared from the scene, only to reappear in the 1990s in Vukovar, Knin and other places that Serbian rebells considered theirs. The partisans and ustaše, however, never left the stage of Croatia's post war history. In a way the Second World War never ended here. Of course, in Tito's Yugoslavia ustaše were obviously the bad guys. Not without a reason: even the German Nazi's and Italian fascists who de facto ruled Croatia during WWII abhorred the cruelty of the ustaše terror against Serbs, Jews and anti-fascist Croats.
With Croatia's independence, the partisan movement was knocked off its pedestal. So far so good, one could say. However, the downfall of socialism went hand in hand with the rehabilitation of the fascist ustaše movement. Ustaše symbols can be seen on the streets and the Croatian equivalent of "Sieg heil" (Za dom spremni - Ready for the homeland) reverberates through the stadium when Croatia's national football team plays.
In the latest episode of the ongoing war between partisans and ustaše the main role is played by an new organisation with the lengthy name Croatian Ceremonial Association of World War Two and Croatian War of Independence Warriors of the Zadar District, conveniently abbreviated to HODB. So far the HODB seems to do little more than arguing over the question whether portraits of Ante Pavelić (the Croatian Hitler) should be classified as fascist or not. A strange question, considering the fact that on 28 December the HOBD will hold a Mass in Zadar to commemorate the day of Pavelić's death. Partisans, by the way, are excluded from HODB-membership.