He died at the age of 105 Josip Manolić – intelligence officer, politician, president of the Government and Parliament, one of the founders of the HDZ. He belonged to a generation of politicians who played important roles in shaping recent Croatian history in a long, turbulent period.
“For almost 75 years, I have participated in the political life of Croatia, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the Independent State of Croatia, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and, of course, the democratic Republic of Croatia. Four states, four different political regimes – I destroyed two, built and destroyed one, and created one” , Manolić once said.
But we asked historians what exact mark in history was left by a high-ranking member of the Udba, and in the early 1990s, one of Tuđman’s closest collaborators. What will we remember him for the most?
Klasić: ‘People will remember him as a nice figure’
“He will be remembered mostly for his longevity, he is one of the few people who for most of his life were active participants in the world in which he lived. He had a turbulent life in turbulent times, but he always managed to emerge victorious,” the historian told us. Hrvoje Klasic.
“As a young man, before the Second World War, he joined the Communist Party, which at that time was very dangerous for his life, and even more dangerous in 1941, when he joined the partisan movement, which was very risky then, in the 1941s nobody bet on them, even though we know now that it was a victorious movement. It didn’t work that way. He experienced the climax and anticlimax in communism, but the most important part of his life came at the end of ’80. and in the early ’90s, when he founded the strongest political party with Tuđman and founded the government with it,” continues Klasić and concludes: “People will remember him as a nice figure who did, not always beautiful, but interesting things.”
Jurčević: ‘Participated in Stepinč’s death’
University professor, historian Josip Jurcevictold us that Josip Manolić left one of the bloodiest traces in the history of the Croatian nation, especially at the end of the Second World War.
“There is no doubt that after the war he was in charge of the liquidation of Croats. He was one of the main liquidators of the OZNA, not only in the Lug forest but also in other areas of the Bjelovar region. And because of those crimes that were committed then, today we are also paying for demographic extinction .Because mostly younger men were killed. But that is only one dimension. The other is that he was part of the former communist structure and took part in the deaths, that is, in all the operations of imprisonment and poisoning. Alojzija Stepinac“, Jurčević told us.
The Croatian paradox, he adds, is that he became the prime minister in the new Croatian state.
“In the first year of his mandate, from the summer of 1990 to 1991, when he was the head of the government, the communist structure moved to the HDZ. Then 98 thousand party members joined the HDZ and occupied the system with the Yugoslav paradigm. They did all that of the repressive services of the former state, and he was the one who was the Prime Minister at the time. He appointed all the former personnel, he did it all. Allegedly, new people and a new system,” Jurčević pointed out, adding that he was sorry that Manolić did not managed to publish his third book.
WATCH THE VIDEO We remembered how Manolić drove our reporter in his Golf at the age of 97
