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The paper investigates war veterans as organisers of contentious politics in post-war Croatia, by looking into two significant protests. Already amid the 1990s War in Croatia, the first veteran associations were tied to the army or governing Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ). After the HDZ government ignored their demands in 1996, the main association gathering disabled veterans announced a protest, shocking the regime. After defusing the situation by meeting most of veteran demands, the protest against the Government was transformed into a support rally for officials who helped the protesters’ cause. In 2014, veteran associations initiated a protest over, at first, officials’ speculations about PTSD cases among the local Serb population, framed among the veterans as “aggressors”. As Prime Minister Zoran Milanović refused to dismiss the Minister of Veterans and his associates, the veteran protest outlasted the Government, including violent episodes in the government building’s vicinity and ending in April 2016. The article proceeds to analyse the disruptiveness of the protest, the repertoire and violence used, as well as frames of meaning with which protesters justified their collective actions and wished to appeal to wider constituencies. The article attempts to analyse the motives behind the protest and links of protesters with different political actors – mostly HDZ – trying to show if veterans acted as independent political actors or only as an extended arm of politicians. By using veteran associations’ documents, archival documents, media reports and literature, the paper wishes to place the two case studies into the body of literature that describes the decades-long patron-client relationship between veterans, HDZ and the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the developments of the contemporary Croatian citizenship regime, with particular focus on the ones that took place after Croatian accession to the EU. The first two stages of development of Croatian citizenship regime, from the 1990s until the Croatian membership to the EU, are focused on the consolidation of the status and rights dimensions of citizenship. The aftermath of the EU accession (re)introduced identity in the focus of the Croatian citizenship debates, particularly when it comes to issues of the status and rights of two categories of citizens: Serb minority and veterans of the Homeland War. This paper will argue that the dynamics of these developments is impossible to understand without: a) comprehending the specific legal tradition and political context that shaped the circumstances of the foundation of the Croatian state; b) understanding the role of the Homeland War as the symbolic foundation of the Croatian statehood; c) the development of the new statuses and categories of citizens that emerged from the constellation of this context and symbolic foundations of the state; and, finally, d) how the institutionalization of these statuses shape the context and agenda for Croatiancitizenshiprelated debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the party archives, newspaper archives and literature recovery, the author presents the political programs and activities of the Croatian Party of Rights (HSP) from 1990 to 1992. This work analyzes the political aims of the party, the most important personalities associated with it during this period, the significance of its electioneering as well as of its results in the election of 1992. Once the multiparty system was established, HSP was rebuilt by Dobroslav Paraga and Ante Paradžik. The main party's program was the establishment of an independent Croatian state. Political action of HSP resulted in political killings, political trials of leading party officials and the Party's schism. The fundamental obstacle to renewal and further development of HSP was the Croatian Democratic Union and its attitude towards HSP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses commemorations and commemorative practices relating to certain events from the 1991-1995 conflict in Croatia (Domovinski rat, or Homeland War) and their relation to the official narratives of the past. It begins with a theoretical framework about war commemorations introduced by Ashplant, Dawson and Roper (2000) and continues with an overview and analysis of the dominant, official narrative of the Homeland War, which organizes war memory and forms the framework of official commemorative practices. The hypothesis of the paper is that the official, state narrative on the 1990s war is being deconstructed and contested by oppositional, sectional narratives, which can be discerned from unofficial, counter-commemorations and celebrations of war events. The article, thus, looks at what role these 'counter' (oppositional) commemorative events, which do not follow the dominant pattern, play in the (de)construction of the official narrative about the Homeland War. Moreover, the paper is interested in the ways in which the official commemorative practices are interwoven with Croatian-Serbian bilateral relations and relations with the ICTY, and argues that these practices do not contribute to, but rather obstruct, reconciliation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]