Dying Out Or Not

In his famous address to the nation last year, Franjo Tudjman said in a dramatic tone: "The gravest and most lethal consequence of the rule over the Croatian people by the unnatural communist regime and anti-Croat Yugoslav state is the highly concerning demographic state of Croatia. The Croatian people would be threatened with extinction if we didn't take certain steps."

He explained: the population growth in Croatia has been dropping for 45 years and is smaller today than the number of deaths. There were 95.5 babies for every 100 deaths in 1993. He proved this was caused mainly by political and economic reasons with the fact that today almost all European countries except Italy and Austria have positive population growth rates and only Croatia has a negative rate. The Croatian president said there were almost three million Croatians living abroad. There are about 250,000 whose ancestors emigrated around the time of the first world war. around two million emigrated between the world wars and another 1.5 million after the second war. Some 94,000 emigrated because of the 1991 war (71,200 to Europe and 22,800 overseas).

The figures are certainly higher and today it is impossible to determine Croatia's real population. The second reason is that no one knows how many refugees there are from Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia and how many people live in the UNPA zones. It's hard to talk about the makeup of the nation because there are different figures on the number of Serbs who left the free part of Croatia and how many Muslims came in. The war threw people around everywhere and if Tudjman can make his state seem bigger than it really is and lower the occupied territories to under 14.7% he will find it harder to stop the drop in the population growth unless he uses pressure from Bosnia, especially Herzegovina.

Tudjman said a well thought out demographic policy was needed. How hard that job is can be judged from the fact the it will take 20-30 years just to remedy the current state of affairs.

If every adult woman had three children today the drop in the population growth would stop in the year 2020. To do just that the Croatian president proposed a number of measures: stimulation for births, less abortions (the annual rate now is 45,000), and a special ministry for immigration like the ones in Canada and Israel.

All those measures won't give any results because this year's budget does not include higher child support or money for women who will only be mothers and Croatia is not Israel. Tudjman's figures dating from 1990 show that some 3,500 people have returned to Croatia and the claims by émigré organizations that at least another 300,000 will return soon seem ridiculous.

Today Croatia is an independent state, a UN member and its citizens are leaving the country en masse because they see no future here. Some justification will be found by politicians, primarily in aggression and war, which should be accepted, but it would be interesting to ask why young experts are leaving why they don't want to lay down their lives for their fatherland?

Perhaps the Croatian leadership could find the answer at home because the system of early liberal capitalism that is being built here has created a caste of rich and a huge mass of poor who are barely surviving. Maybe Tudjman should review what he says: "A mother with four (or more) children should be given the average salary of her class so she can devote herself to raising the children."

In France, they started a revolution against the classes and the ideas of professional mothers who will give this country Aryans has been buried long ago.

Demographic problems will have to be solved differently, not by amateurs.