Recently held congress of the HDZ /Croat/ party in Bosnia is discussed by Drazena Peranic in the May 24, 1998 issue of the Srajevo weekly Svijet.

The election of Ante Jelavic as the new president of the BiH HDZ, despite the orders from Zagreb that, after Perinovic, Kljujic, Brkic, Boban, Kordic and Rajic - federal health minister Bozo Ljubic be chosen, seems like the first misdemeanor of the West Herzegovinians. The virus of resistance to the main office, showing itself through an attempt to conduct a more independent policy, has, after the Serbin SDS, infected the leading Croat party in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

But, to see the new BiH HDZ leader as a representative of a possible liberal option which will, along with opposing Tudjman, turn itself towards cooperation, Dayton and joint BiH state, as opposed to defeated Ljubic, is too a simplistic thesis which could only satisfy the imagination of politically illiterate. This even more so, because the stories about fractional conflicts within BiH HDZ, reflecting themselves, supposedly, through gh a pro Bosnian and extreme Herzegovinian stream, are mostly constructed in Sarajevo cabinets so that the eight year long coalition of the leading Bosniak party with those Herzegovinians dividing Bosnia could be justified. This due to the fact, that in all eight years of existence of the BiH HDZ no political autonomy of this party has been noted, concerning the nation, religion, state, which were the declared postulates of the formation of this national political movement.

So, marking of Jelavic as a democrat who will, as he states himself, reconstruct the HDZ into a true pro Western party is too unrealistic. But, that he will be in the midst of some kind of cleansing of ranks of the BiH HDZ and first attempts at more independent decision making in relation to Zagreb - that should not be doubted.

Official ZAgreb has been facing similar problems which Milosevic encountered at the time of the first slap in the face from Pale and the attempts of taking things into our own hands. The pressure and constant threat of the international community because of the HDZ uncooperativeness in BiH are not waning; the return of Croatian Serbs brings into question the already achieved ethnically pure state; the method of governing the state and the effects of the illegal privatization have strengthened the dissatisfaction of citizens up to the measure that as much as a glimmer of fair elections could have a devastating effect for the HDZ in Croatia. If you add to this the recent death of the true Croat patron of Western Herzegovina, Gojko Susak, as well as ill health of President Tudjman himself, the worries and fears of the BiH HDZ of Zagreb giving up on them and leaving them to their own fate so that Zgagreb could save its own skin - is completely justified.

Former misunderstandings Pale-Belgrade show that such a turn of events inevitably leads to political differentiation within the ranks of the party, which could have as an effect a final creation of space for the birth of an alternative to totalitarian politics of the national center.



Source: Sarajevo weekly Svijet, May 24, 1998