Former prime minister of Croatia dies
Ivica Racan, who led Croatia's first pro-Western government between 2000 and 2003, died on April 29. Local and international media reported that the 63-year-old died of a cancer that had spread over the past three months from his kidney to his brain. Racan, a onetime communist leader, founded the center-left Social Democrats and led it -- with a brief interruption -- between 1990 until April 11 this year. He played a pivotal role in redirecting Croatian politics away from the authoritarianism and nationalism of the late President Tudjman. However, while Racan set Croatia on the road to the EU by signing a premembership agreement, his six-party coalition government hesitated to hand over war crimes suspects to The Hague, a vacillation that may have set Croatia's 
European ambitions back by years. Racan was born in a German concentration camp in 1944, a period when Nazi sympathizers governed Croatia, and became Croatia's Communist Party leader in 1989. Under his leadership, the Communist Party in Croatia introduced a multiparty system, leading to elections in 1990 that it duly lost. Racan's death deprives the Social Democrats of one of Croatia's most popular politicians half a year before parliamentary elections in November. // Copyright (c) 2005. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036. RFE/RL
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