A Protest, Coup d’État, or Internal Party Power Struggle

Abstract

The paper investigates war veterans as organisers of contentious politics in ‎post-war Croatia, by looking into two significant protests. Already amid the‎1990s 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.‎