Croatia’s Far Right Weaponizes the Past

The European Union’s newest member, Croatia, has an unabashed and strong-willed fascistin its new cabinet — one who makes the right-wingers in power in Hungary and Poland look like wimps. The contested figure is Zlatko Hasanbegovic, a 42-year-old historian who became culture minister in late January after the country’s latest election produced a new right-wing ruling coalition.

Hasanbegovic had been a prominent figure in a small ultra-rightist partythat openly extols the fascist World War II-era Ustashe movement (He left the party and is now unaffiliated, though he has never renounced it). As a historian, his work focuses on downplaying the crimes of the Ustashe and cautiously rehabilitating its ideas. Unlike the right-wingers in Poland and Hungary who are eviscerating their states’ democratic structures, the Croatian nationalists are waging their war within the realm of political culture — for now. Their goal is to lay the groundwork for an eventual assault on the country’s liberal democracy. 

Hasanbegovic’s appointment in the new government — a gesture to the country’s powerful far-right forces — provoked protests and sharp criticism, not least from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a prominent Jewish human-rights organization. But since taking office, Hasanbegovic has done nothing to blunt his radicalism, cutting funds for progressive groups and independent media and endorsing a revisionist documentary film that denies the scale of the crimes committed by Croatia during its alliance with Nazi Germany in the 1940s.

Source http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/05/06/croatias-far-right-weaponizes-the-past-ustase-hasanbegovic/