KOKI the parrot is a shrewd old bird. He used to belong to Marshal Josip Tito, Yugoslavia’s longtime communist leader, who died in 1980. Koki lives on the Croatian island of Brioni, where Tito spent six months of the year, and where the villas are still reserved for Croatia’s leaders. If visitors are lucky, Koki will swear at them, or squawk “Tito! Tito! Tito!” If Koki had a bigger vocabulary, he would doubtless enjoy revealing Croatia’s darkest state secrets, which he has surely overheard. On August 16th Croatia lurched into a new election season, and it is a measure of the country’s frozen politics that some of the key campaign issues hinge on conversations Koki might have eavesdropped on decades ago.
Take the murder of Stejpan Djurekovic, who was shot and hacked to death with a meat cleaver in Germany in 1983. Mr Djurekovic was an émigré active in Croatian nationalist circles. On August 3rd a German court sentenced Josip Perkovic and Zdravko Mustac, two former Yugoslav secret-service agents, to life imprisonment for organising his death.
Croatia’s main parties, the Social Democrats and the Croatian...Continue reading
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