Far Right in Croatia - Post-war Political Scene

Post-war Political Scene

In recent times, mainstream Croatian politicians, such as Stjepan Mesić, brought more focus to anti-fascist stances and veterans groups. Remembrance ceremonies at the site of Jasenovac concentration camp resumed, with support from the highest levels of government, including the right-wing HDZ under Ivo Sanader.

The World War II war crimes committed by Croats had been processed in Yugoslavia, but some cases had protracted long enough to become the responsibility of the modern-day Croatian authorities. In 1999, Croatia extradited Dinko Šakić from Argentina, one of the commanders of the Jasenovac concentration camp, and he was subsequently tried and sentenced to 20 years in prison, at the time the highest penalty under Croatian law.

The conservative parties such as the Croatian Party of Rights (HSP) and the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) permeated in their support for extreme forms of nationalism and far-right ideas. This has been particularly apparent in the latter, which has a large membership and voter base and appeals to a broad spectrum of right-wing voters.

The two-time prime minister Ivo Sanader of HDZ came to power after promoting himself as an avid advocate of Croatian general Mirko Norac in 2001. The far-right position with regard to war crimes committed in the Croatian war of independence has been one of a general denial - the Croatian side is seen as inherently not responsible for any crimes because its role in the war is one of a victim. This view is the extreme form of the position taken by the Supreme Court of Croatia, which allows "pursuit of a legitimate goal of defending one's country against an armed aggression" to be considered a mitigating circumstance in war crimes trials. In general, with respect to processing war crimes, the Croatian Government (mostly under HDZ) has had a rather spotty record for processing those committed by Croats. Pressure from the European Union helped rectify this. After Sanader and HDZ were elected in 2003, Norac was prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Croatia has also been cooperating with the ICTY in the legal prosecution of all war criminals, which has included Croatian officers, notably Ante Gotovina.

Parties like the Croatian Party of Rights which are most commonly associated with Ustašism generally aren't able to attract support from more than a few percent of the population (HSP coalition won 6.4% of the national popular vote in the 2003 election and 3.5% in the 2007 election). In recent times, the HSP's image of "pro-Ustaša" was repetitively shunned by its leaders in an attempt to sway more votes.

On July 11, 2003, the Ivica Račan coalition government passed amendments to the penal code which outlawed hate speech, in a new section titled Praising fascist, Nazi and other totalitarian states and ideologies or promotion of racism and xenophobia. The law is not perfectly applied, evidenced by the examples of regular public display of Ustasha memorabilia by the group "Hrvatski domobran" from Zadar that only recently started to get sanctioned by the police.

On June 20, 2006 Croatian prime minister Ivo Sanader issued a message ahead of the Anti-Fascist Struggle Day (an official holiday in Croatia), in which he rejected extremism and radicalism, and said that "antifascism was a commitment weaved into the foundations of independent, democratic Croatia".

Croatia has no laws against historical revisionism or Holocaust denial. This can be attributed to the change of political system, and the change in the entire system of values as the country became independent. Revisionism was not frowned upon because priority was placed on the re-evaluation of history as recorded during the Communist era, which was therefore deemed almost implicitly tainted, because it systematically omitted or misrepresented issues related to what was perceived to be Croatian nationalism. On the other hand, the revision of history books often went too far in making them increasingly focused on Croatian national issues, even with far-right interpretations of various World War II events. The re-examination of the number of victims of the Independent State of Croatia, particularly the Jasenovac concentration camp, was fairly common, as well as fairly controversial. The topic as such was reasonably relevant, and statistical research such as that by Vladimir Žerjavić indicated serious flaws with Yugoslav data, whose sources had been kept secret until 1989, but in an atmosphere of war, this was an incendiary issue associated with the far right.