Ivica Kostelic continues tothe top

Defending World Cup champion Ivica Kostelic ofCroatia passes a pole on his way to fourth place in the World Cup slalom race inKitzbuehel on January 26, 2003. REUTERS/Calle Toernstroem

Anthony Seric, of Croatia

Parma's Hidetoshi Nakata, foreground, of Japan,is pursued by Brescia defender Anthony Seric, of Croatia, during their Italianfirst division soccer match at the Mario Rigamonti stadium in Brescia, Italy,Sunday, Jan. 26, 2003. (AP Photo/Felice Calabro')

France loses to Croatia at world championships 

Sat Jan 25, 2:44 PM ET

LISBON, Portugal - Croatia upset defending champion France 23-22 on Saturday while reigning European champion Sweden beat Algeria 32-28 at the men's handball World Championships. 
France, which won its first three matches, still leads Group C, followed by Croatia. Both teams are 3-1-0 and are likely to move to the next round. 
Also, European runner-up Germany continued its unbeaten run in Group B by downing host Portugal 37-29. 
In other games, Spain crushed Asian champion Kuwait 45-18; Iceland beat Qatar 42-22; and Hungary topped Argentina 35-23. 

Ten European Years

Jan, 15 2003 
PRAVDA

Ten European Years
by 
Dr. Tomislav Sunic

Great expectations that Europe, ten years after the signature of the historic Maastricht treaty, will become a flawless union, are boundless illusions. It is not yet clear to the European political class whether the new European order will have the label of federal units or the hallmark of sovereign states. In view of the unavoidableglobalization, the concept of the European Union becomes superfluous. To what good should one keep uniting Europeans, if in the global market most European enterprises have already branches scattered all over Eastern Europe, or tap on cheap resources and labor in Third World countries? The grandstanding project of uniting Europe is based on mercantile and consumerist principles and little on cultural and historical identities of European peoples. The Union was conceived at Maastricht, in 1992, as a pool of rootless merchants not as a trove of patriots. If the sacred economy slides into recession, each member country is bound to pay a heavy price. 

The idea of the unified Europe is not just meant for somebody or for something, but also against something and against somebody. Early European emperor, Charlemagne, in the ninth century, also thought about uniting Europe, but primarily as a shield to fend off the looming Arab threat coming from the Mediterranean basin, and as a common rampart against incursions of Asian hordes into the Panonian plains of central Europe. His dream about linking the Burgundy with the Black Sea through elaborate water channels via the Rhine and Danube rivers, was finally put to practice in 1993. Charlemagne's late successor, the Flemish-born German-Spanish emperor, Charles Quint, in the sixteenth century, also toyed with the idea to unite Christian Europe, albeit not only as a spear for throwing out infidel Turks from the Danube delta in the Balkans, but also as a sword to push back the rapacious French southwest off the Rhine river. Foreign powers have traditionally tapped on numerous European traitors and collaborators in order to weaken Europe. What is more, Europeans have a strange habit of constantly waging tribal wars among themselves. The French royal houses and their mundane Catholic clergy, nourished for centuries good diplomatic ties with Islamic Sublime Port in Turkey, which the peoples in central Europe and the Balkan peninsula paid very dearly. The French obsession was to weaken the European center and its prime spiritual and geopolitical locomotive, the Holy German Empire. 

It is not per chance that the biggest stumbling block among European Union bureaucrats today is not the clash between the left with the right, but the clash of the French "souverenistes" vs. German "f?d?ralistes." Must one follow the old principle of decentralized Germany and its current state policy of federalism, or rather lean toward the French aggressive agenda to preserve sovereign nation-states? Yet even the concept of sovereignty and state-building differs widely in both countries today, creating a great deal of confusion about the future of the Union. The early French state was created by lawyers. By contrast, the early German statehood was designed by itinerant poets and philosophers. It is not an accident that the French revolution, prior to severing of intelligent heads, first began with severing of all regional dialects. The French idea of the united Europe, which is embedded in the concept of centralized "empire," has nothing in common with the German idea of "Reich". The idea of the Reich presupposes the spatial infinity defying transient state borders. Many of the "reich" legal proviso are still strong in contemporary German Republic. The most elaborate form of the embryonic European union was practiced by the lasting Austro-Hungarian Empire, which housed for centuries a myriad of diverse European peoples living in relative solidarity. 

The imperial French tradition, carries along a merciless grinding wheel of cultural and ethnic assimilation. Not even in his wildest dreams does a French right-winger or a left-wing extremist think about granting complete autonomy to Brittany, Alsace or Corsica. In its centralistic and globalistic appetites the ancient royal France sold not only gaping mortars to the Ottoman empire in Istanbul. Its ruler Louis XIV also introduced the state -sponsored terrorist cannon diplomacy. By the end of the 17th century his troops lobbed with heavy howitzers the city of Brussels - a town which was then inhabited by the majority of Germanic speaking populace. 

The European Union and its apparatus in Brussels and Strasbourg, cost very much money and employ over 40 thousandapparatchiks. Side by side with state bureaucracy, an anonymous supra-state bureaucracy keeps growing and growing, which only hampers smooth and unanimous decision making. The salaries of EU bureaucrats are amazingly high - even for West European standards - and everybody pretends to ignore that all expenses are being indirectly fueled to Brussels by German tax payers. Long time ago, in multiethnic Holy German Empire, official languages were Latin and German, and no career could be dreamt of without solid knowledge of these two languages. In the European Union headquarters today, in theory all 7 European languages are equally represented. Yet in order to avoid linguistic effort regarding the plight of Portuguese wine makers or Greek fishermen, official statements are made in broken English - which seems to be the trademark of the bearded and stuttering NATO spokesman Javier Solana. Foreign policy of the EU is non-existent. Given that the heads of the EU are unwilling to trot in the mine fields of independent decision making, each foreign overture must have a prior stamp of the Washington benediction. Such political paralysis resulted recently in additional thousands of dead in the Balkan killing fields. Today, the paranoid fear of any foreign wrong-doing, which in the minds of EU officials may be wrongly interpreted as anti-Israeli, makes EU diplomacy a mockery in the burning Middle East. In addition, since even among equals there must be those who are more equal, the German nation, unlike other EU member states, never had a chance to vote in plebiscite for the introduction of the euro currency. Indeed, even the uttering of a word plebiscite ("Volksbegehren") triggers amidst the German political class, immediate historical neuroses and may result in loss of a well paid career. To offset this complex of historiographic inferiority, the Germans must therefore counter their back-seat role in the EU by endlessly jumpstarting their charitable and culinary diplomacy - to the great joy and big laughter of other member states. In its architectural design the EU buildings in Strasbourg and Brussels project the late, albeit air-conditioned carbon copy of the Soviet monumentalism, and its last palace standard bearer the late Romanian communist Dracula, Nicolae Ceausescu. And should one consider this as an accident that exactly 2 years ago a postage stamp was introduced by the Belgian authorities with facial traits and goat beard of the late communist leader Vladimir Ilich Lenin? 

The dream of the united Europe is as old as Europeans themselves. In reality though it turns into regular nightmare. About the united Europe millions of European romanticists hallucinated: from papist to atheists, from Guelfs to Ghibelins, from anarchists to Trotskysts. Their wishful thinking as a rule ended up in chain catastrophes. Hence the fact that even today the concept of the European union remains fluid, lending itself to thousands of work hypotheses. By the end of 1943, the national-socialist authorities decided to start printing in the German village of Vlotho, first European passports destined for a million or more European Waffen SS volunteers coming from Germany, Chechnya, Croatia, Flanders, Albania, France, Spain, a handful of Irishmen etc. These lost souls also had their vision of united Europe. On May 3, 1945 in the late evening hours, accompanied by gusty winds, around 300 hundred French Waffen SS soldiers side by side with a handful of Latvian and Hungarian SS troopers defended Berlin along the left bank of the Spree river on fire, against the incoming Soviet tanks. These were the remnants of the French Waffen SS division Charlemagne. 

Tomislav Sunic 

The author is a writer and a former Croat diplomat. He writes from Europe. 

Copyright (c)1999 by "Pravda.RU". When reproducing our materials in whole or in part, reference to Pravda.RU should be made. The opinions and views of the authors do not always coincide with the point of view of PRAVDA.Ru's editors. 

http://english.pravda.ru/columnists/2003/01/15/42070.html  

CROATIA - USA

Natural allies 

January 24, 2003 

Amb. Prosper And the Wanted Men

By VITOMIR MILES RAGUZ

Washington's envoy for war crime issues, Pierre Richard Prosper, is ending his visit to the Balkans today, after a trip meant to reinforce the U.S. commitment to the International Criminal Tribunal at The Hague. Mr. Prosper also pressed Belgrade, Podogorica, Sarajevo and Banja Luka to fulfill their key obligations quickly so that the international community can focus on winding down the Tribunal with some semblance of success. The Tribunal is to close its investigations by the end of next year, and complete its trials by 2008. Surprisingly, the envoy bypassed Zagreb at the last moment.

In Belgrade, Mr. Prosper praised the surrender of Milan Milutinovic, a top Milosevic era diplomat, but cautioned his hosts that the Bush administration is under a congressional obligation to end assistance to Serbia after March 31, unless the Djindjic government moves forward on handing over other big-fish indictees, such as Gen. Ratko Mladic and the remaining two of the Vukovar Three: Maj. Veselin Sljivancanin and Col. Miroslav Radic. After that, Mr. Prosper said, Serbia can try the majority of other cases in its own courts.

In Sarajevo, the American envoy was received by the new government of Prime Minister Adnan Terzic, still viewed with suspicion in the West. He stressed the importance of establishing a national ad hoc court that would take over for the Tribunal as it phases out its caseload. The onus falls on the new-old Serb entity leaders, though.

High representative Paddy Ashdown has called for unspecified "smart" sanctions against the Serb entity due to its history of complete non-cooperation. This may involve travel bans and financial sanctions against Radovan Karadzic cronies in politics and commerce. Given the complexity of the situation, however, aid carrots also are on the table if the entity can deliver on Karadzic, seemingly the least most-wanted man in the world. He has been hiding in an area the size of Luxembourg, yet it appears no one is really willing to nab him.

As for Zagreb, it was dreading Mr. Prosper's scheduled visit. Only a month before Croatia submits its EU membership application, it was expecting to hear hard words about its slight EU and NATO prospects unless it delivers on generals Janko Bobetko and Ante Gotovina. Media reports say the Prosper visit was postponed for technical reasons; awaiting the outcome of the medical exam performed on Gen. Bobetko last week by Tribunal doctors.

Yet it's possible Mr. Prosper also wanted to segregate Zagreb from the previous group because Croatia has been largely cooperative with the Tribunal -- and so help the beleaguered Prime Minister Ivica Racan. He is faced with dipping poll numbers due to now-unpopular cooperation with the Tribunal; and a threat of widespread labor strikes against his much needed social and economic reforms. Yet neither the threat of strikes nor Gen. Bobetko is Mr. Racan's chief worry. Strike plans seem to be fizzling out and Bobetko's health has worsened to the point where Tribunal's doctors may let Mr. Racan off the hook on this one.

Gen. Gotovina is another issue. The prime minister is faced with serious societal division there, and many speculate about civil upheaval if he is arrested. A delicate situation for Mr. Racan, especially in an election year.

Ambassador Prosper can help both Mr. Racan and The Hague if Washington is truly committed to its stated goal that the Tribunal is to be one of truth, justice and reconciliation. Gen. Gotovina is innocent. Ambassador Prosper may not know it personally, but Washington certainly does. Further, Washington has ample evidence to submit to the Tribunal to reverse the present indictment.

Gen. Gotovina is charged with planning and carrying out a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing of some 100,000 Serbs from Croatia via Operation Storm in August 1995. Yes, Serbs did suffer as a result of that operation, but not because of Gen. Gotovina nor for that matter of Zagreb. They were victims of their own leaders' folly, Milosevic's promises to make them part of a larger Serbia, and Belgrade's later orders to evacuate its forces, as testified recently in the Milosevic trial by Milan Babic, his former confidant-turned-prosecution witness, among others.

Operation Storm was motivated by completely different reasons, unrelated to ethnic cleansing. Its first objective was to de-blockade the U.N. safe area of Bihac in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), after it became threatened in July 1995 by Gen. Ratko Mladic, days after he overran Srebrenica. Visions of another Srebrenica-like massacre, with an even higher number of fatalities, were on everyone's mind, including Washington's.

When Zagreb special envoy Miomir Zuzul came to Washington with the Operation Storm plan in mid-July, the Clinton administration hesitated only for a moment. The green light on Bihac as well as the occupied Krajina territories in Croatia came from Undersecretary of State Peter Tarnoff, Assistant Secretary Richard Holbrooke and the late senior Balkan negotiator Robert Frasure.

After Washington saw that Zagreb was serious about carrying out the operation, and the West helpless, it moved to make sure the Croats would succeed. Washington jumped in and provided crucial intelligence-gathering facilities. It set up a 40-person Predator drone base in Sepurina, near Zadar, with two real time feeds: one to the Pentagon, and one to Gen. Gotovina's headquarters. Further, on the day the Storm started, the U.S. sent two specialized Prowler planes to the region to disable the rebel Serb communication systems.

After the Storm ended, Washington used Gen. Gotovina's ground troops to supplement NATO air bombings in western Bosnia. The joint operations altered the territorial control close to the 51-49 two-entity split envisioned for the eventual Dayton peace deal.

Despite using Croatia as its proxy in 1995 to achieve its objectives in BiH, Washington has in the past leaned to accept fallacious charges regarding the goals of Storm because Zagreb failed to protect the remaining Serbs and their property in the occupied territories after the operation ended. More importantly, the charges were seen as a necessary fiction to pressure Franjo Tudjman in respect of possible Serb returnees and the fragile BiH, and later as a vehicle to remove him for power.

But there is a new leadership in Zagreb, one that has been cooperative on issues that Tudjman once balked at, and there seems to be no reason for the Bush administration to play Clinton to Tribunal chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte anymore.

Moreover, it would behoove the administration -- one that is notably skeptical about international tribunals in general because they are prone to political adventurism -- to grasp the opportunity to imprint its persuasions, and provide exculpatory evidence where it clearly exists. (Then, there is something to be said about Gen. Gotovina in effect acting as a U.S. agent, where Washington would be obligated to at least morally assist his case.) The practical side for Washington is that providing evidence on the real goals of the Storm will stem this and similar cases in the future, and substantially limit the expenditures of an already very costly operation at the Hague.

Unless the Bush administration has withdrawn from serious policy discussions on the Balkans and decided to operate on the autopilot set by the Clinton administration, Ambassador Prosper has the clout in Washington to pursue changes on such issues. This would make his work much more productive. It would allow him to concentrate his energies on the real war criminals in the Balkans -- Karadzic and Mladic. Knocking on doors in Zagreb is unnecessary now or later. Croatia already is pursuing potential war criminals in its own courts.

Mr. Raguz was ambassador of BiH to the EU and NATO in 1998-2000. This article is adapted from his essay in the forthcoming 50th anniversary issue of the Journal of Croatian Studies.

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