A Protest, Coup d’État, or Internal Party Power Struggle: What Motivated Croatian War Veterans to Hit the Streets?
A Protest, Coup d’État, or Internal Party Power Struggle: What Motivated Croatian War Veterans to Hit the Streets?

Summary/Abstract: 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.

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