Croatia: an OSCE success story in the making

“Success,” the old saying goes, “has many fathers.” That being so, many individuals and  organizations will cheerfully claim paternity for Croatia’s achievements: NATO membership, successful EU candidacy, a stable society and working democratic system, significant progress in resettling Serb and other refugees, improved relations with once hostile neighbours and a growing economy at a time of economic crisis. A few important issues remain to be addressed, to be sure, including the handling of remaining war crimes trials and investigations. How it is addressed will determine the speed with which Croatia brings its process of reform and recovery to a successful conclusion.

The OSCE has been instrumental in supporting Croatia, its people and its institutions on the journey that has brought it to where it is today. As Deputy Head of the OSCE Mission to Croatia from 2000 to 2007, I was one of many who participated in that process during a particularly significant period of change. I would also be one of the first to say that what we achieved was not our work alone. Numerous interrelated factors have been at work over the years, but the progress that has been made is substantially the result of the extensive collaboration, co-operation and communication that exists along all conceivable axes, among all domestic and international organizations and individuals, at every level of society and government.

Overcoming mistrust

It was not always that way. When I first took up my duties in Zagreb, I found that Croatian authorities and Mission members viewed each other with considerable skepticism, even open antagonism. The Croatian side saw the Mission as a blemish to its honour and reputation, an albatross around its neck, as it were, while in the Mission, a critical, somewhat one-sided view of the nature and causes of the problems in Croatia was widespread. There was an impatience with the government as it struggled to make an entirely new nation state out of a regional republic and handle the complex and largely new tasks required to establish an open, transparent, rule of law-based, multiparty, multi-ethnic and multi-religious society — and this in the aftermath of five years of bloody, physically and emotionally destructive war.

In the past 11 years, this unease between the Mission and its host country has evolved into collaboration and cooperation. How was this possible?

First, the Mission was able to build a reputation as a solid partner through its extensive field presence. When I arrived, the Mission had 16 field offices staffed by close to 250 international officers from 25 participating States, and over 700 national staff members. This network of observers, reporters and actors allowed us to develop an in-depth analysis of conditions in the widely different and varied parts of the country. Our reporting was the envy of bilateral embassies, the EU and the UN, which frequently looked to us for objective information on refugees, human rights or the rule of law. Even the Deputy Prime Minister, Željka Antunović, once approached me at a reception to thank the Mission for its reporting, which, she said, provided the government with crucial information about conditions some distance from Zagreb, which it could acquire from no other source.

Second, continuity and length of service contributed significantly to the Mission’s effectiveness. Building trust takes time, patience and not a little trial and error. The OSCE’s policy of allowing up to seven years of service in one position gave it a significant advantage over other diplomatic and aid programmes, which often turned over staff every two to three years.

As in a great many countries, personal relations in Croatia matter a great deal. In my own case, I was able to establish and maintain long-term relationships with key Croatian interlocutors, beginning with the Prime Minister’s OSCE liaison officer, Tomislav Vidošević, to whom I give credit for much of the progress the Mission and Croatia made together over the years. In addition, I established close relationships with many regional, city, NGO, ethnic and religious community leaders throughout the country, from Dalmatia to Eastern Slavonia. Having the time to let our communication develop allowed us to constructively engage on  issues despite our differing points of view and ultimately contributed to mutual respect. Often a relationship of trust with one key official, even in situations where there were strong differences, led to ultimate understanding. That in turn contributed to our ability to successfully address some of the most difficult and contentious issues objectively and with a common purpose, including interethnic disputes and Serb refugee returns. Over time we could find effective solutions which helped Croatia meet its OSCE commitments in the areas of human rights, minority issues and rule of law.

The Mission regularly informed the Permanent Council of its progress, or lack thereof, through the Head of Mission’s reports, initially three times a year — a managerial nightmare! — and subsequently every six months. These reports did not make anyone’s life comfortable, but they demanded careful and accurate assessments by the Mission and challenged reformers and resisters alike on the Croatian side: were the criticisms justified? what was the appropriate response on the part of Croatia in order to change and meet its OSCE commitments?

I was fortunate to work with three Heads of Mission, Bernard Poncet, Peter Semneby and Jorge Fuentes, and a large (but constantly decreasing) international team, who approached our work with the philosophy that the OSCE has a mandate from many countries, not a bilateral agenda. Our role was to support and empower Croatia, its institutions, organizations, groups and individuals to create the conditions in which agreed OSCE goals and principles, to which it had committed itself, could be best achieved in its particular cultural and historic context.

In the beginning, this often meant we had to confront serious resistance. That was the case when the representative of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Croatian OSCE liaison officer Vidošević and I struggled for over a year against stubborn internal Croatian parliamentary and administrative opposition to establish an independent Human Rights Institute in Zagreb. Establishing positive conditions for the return of Serb refugees to the former war zones in Eastern Slavonia, Knin and the region behind the coastal city of Zadar also required constant effort. Repeatedly, success hinged on our having four or five international staff members who could provide continuity to the Mission’s policies and actions and build key trust relationships with influential Croatian authorities over a period of years. Progress was often mind-numbingly slow, millimeter by millimeter, with starts and long stops; but we understood the necessity of keeping the process alive. In the end, that approach paid off.

Getting on the same side

An important breakthrough in the OSCE-Croatian relationship came — if one can identify one event — in January 2004, when the then Head of Mission Peter Semneby and I held a strategic planning meeting with the newly elected Prime Minister, Ivo Sanader, and the Deputy Prime Minister, Jadranka Kosor, who later succeeded him. The Prime Minister, with whom the Mission had established open lines of communication prior to his election, proposed  that all mandate issues be put on the table for frank discussion between his government and the Mission, and that policy solutions be developed by his administration with support from Mission and OSCE experts. With that straightforward agreement, a fruitful process was begun.

This working relationship was later expanded by Head of Mission Jorge Fuentes, who established with the Foreign Ministry a formal series of regularly scheduled and carefully structured roundtable meetings, systematically attacking “tough nut” issues, including rule of law, refugee return and war crimes.

This new systematic and business-like way of working also served Croatia’s efforts to achieve NATO and EU membership. Here one must come back to a point mentioned earlier: the OSCE’s success in Croatia has been consistently linked to its good and close relationships with other international organizations — the UN and its bodies, the EU, NATO and the Council of Europe — whose goals dovetail with its own. Working with each of them in a mutually supportive and not in a bureaucratically competitive fashion has smoothed Croatia’s pathway to success.

I look back on the years of transformation from mistrust between the OSCE and Croatia to co-operation and success as a process in which we were able to move from confronting each other across the table, with the central issues languishing forgotten between us, to sitting on the same side of the table and tackling the problems together.

Written by Todd Becker

Todd Becker is currently Special Advisor on the Balkans in the OSCE Chairmanship Task Force of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Lithuania. A former United States diplomat with 34 years of service, he was Deputy Head of the OSCE Mission to Croatia from 2000 to 2007. In 2007, he was awarded the Croatian Helsinki Committee Human Rights Award and Special Recognition by the Croatian Minorities Office for his promotion of minority rights in Croatia.

This article was originally published in the OSCE Magazine, 4/2011.