Stjepan Mesic

Stjepan Mesić (2012)

Stjepan "Stipe" Mesić (born December 24, 1934 in Orahovica , Kingdom of Yugoslavia ) is a Croatian politician . From February 18, 2000 to February 18, 2010 he was President of Croatia . He was also the last President of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) from July 1, 1991 to October 3, 1991 .

Life

During the Second World War , Mesić's family took an active part in the fight of the partisans against the fascist occupying powers, in which eleven family members were killed. Mesić graduated from the University of Zagreb as a lawyer in 1961 and was a member of the parliament of the Socialist Republic of Croatia , one of the Yugoslav republics , from 1966 . In 1971, during the Croatian Spring , he was arrested and sentenced along with other representatives of the Croatian Communists for “counterrevolutionary activities” and spent a year in political prison in Stara Gradiška prison . The trained lawyer then worked as a lawyer for state-owned companies.

In June 1989 he was a co-founder of the national-conservative Croatian Democratic Community (HDZ) led by Franjo Tuđman , which won an absolute majority in the parliamentary elections in Croatia in 1990 .

From May 30 to August 24, 1990, he was Prime Minister of Croatia, appointed by Tuđman. He was the elected Croatian representative in the Yugoslav Federal Presidency , in which he first served as Vice President and from 1991 as the last President.

In 1991, when the end of Yugoslavia was in sight, he said in his inaugural address to his presidency of the SFRY: “I will be the last President of Yugoslavia . After the end of my reign, this country will no longer exist in this form. "

In May 1994 he resigned from the HDZ after internal party disagreements, according to his own account because of the Croatian Bosnia policy, and founded the Croatian Independent Democrats (HND) together with Josip Manolić . The Presidium of Parliament, which he had held since 1991, he lost in a row. In 1997 he left the HND and joined the Croatian People's Party .

In 1997 and 1998, Mesić testified before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague as a witness in the trial of the Croatian general Tihomir Blaškić . It is believed that this was an act of political reckoning with Franjo Tuđman , with whom he led the movement for Croatia's independence in the early 1990s.

On February 18, 2000, Mesić succeeded the late Franjo Tuđman after winning the runoff election against Dražen Budiša as President of Croatia.

Mesić's political orientation is left-liberal to social democratic . He campaigned for a consistent democratization and Euro-Atlantic integration of his country, the social balance and a rapprochement of his country to the European Union .

In the presidential election on January 2, 2005 , Mesić ran again. He won 48.9 percent of the vote in the first ballot and was well ahead of the HDZ candidate Jadranka Kosor , who received around 20.3 percent of the vote. In the second ballot on January 16, 2005, he prevailed with 65.9 percent of the vote, with a turnout of 51.0 percent.

criticism

During his political career, Mesić made very different statements about the Ustaše and the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), which it controlled and existed from 1941 to 1945. While he was still defending the NDH's politics in the early 1990s, he later professed democracy and freedom and in 2001 apologized in a speech to the Knesset for the crimes of the NDH state against the Jews.

In December 2006, Croatian state television HRT broadcast a video recording of a speech that Mesić had given to representatives of the Croatian diaspora in Australia in 1992, during which he glorified the establishment of the Independent State of Croatia in 1941 and denied the importance of remembering the Jasenovac concentration camp . As a result, the three reporters who were responsible for broadcasting the recording were temporarily suspended from duty - officially because of "unprofessional" work. The suspension was only withdrawn after violent protests by Croatian human rights organizations and journalists' associations.

Fonts

• Kako smo srušili Jugoslaviju: Politički memoari [How we destroyed Yugoslavia: Political memories] . Globe, 1992.

Web links

Commons : Stjepan Mesić  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Stjepan Mesić in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ President Stjepan Mesic of Croatia, a faraway grave and the debt of honor from 60 years ago. In: The Times, October 20, 2007.
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Danijela Barišić: Stjepan Mesić - biography. (No longer available online.) Ured Predsjednika Republike Hrvatske 2003. (Presidium of the Republic of Croatia), formerly in the original ; accessed on July 1, 2009 .  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.    
3. ↑ Text of the speech on Stjepan Mesić's website ( memento of the original from June 11, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
4. ↑ Article in the online magazine Telepolis