Speech by the President of the Republic and Commander in Chief of the Croatian Armed Forces to military studies students at the Dr. Franjo Tuđman Croatian Defence Academy

For those of you who have completed your studies and received your diploma, and are continuing or starting your military career more seriously, I want you to continue working on yourselves, and never take things for granted. While the service lasts, and while the vocation and profession last, one should always think in a way that one can do better, that one can learn more and, ultimately, do more for oneself and one’s career. And in the case of an unwanted and never unexpected and never invoked situation, your country can be better helped in war and in danger. Today and always in history, but especially today, the one who has more and knows more prevails. It has always been so, today more than ever in history.

We are a small country, most of the students here are Croatian people, Croatian citizens. And it is worth repeating once again things that we should never take for granted because they are not given by themselves, they are hard to acquire and easy to lose. The Croatian Army, first and foremost, serves and has a constitutional and every other mission to defend the Croatian state, to defend Croatian territory, territorial integrity, because with the entry into Schengen it does not stop and does not disappear. Croatian borders are there, as well as Slovenian, Kosovo, Serbian. For the Croatian borders, your predecessors, Croatian soldiers – in the conditions of international isolation and arms embargo – defended Croatia and liberated it. Those borders for us are as for every country, but for us maybe even more – special.

The second is the Croatian people – the inhabitants who make up this state, which makes no sense without them. These are all the people who live in our state. And the third component is a democratically, I emphasize, democratically elected state government. Everything that represents state power and democracy as a system that is the most demanding, delicate, hard to acquire, yet lost in the blink of an eye, disappears without you being aware that it has disappeared. After that come our and your obligations for partnership and membership in defense alliances, primarily NATO, but in a way the European Union as well. Anyone who reads the Treaty of Lisbon and other acts will see that there is one legal and moral situation, that is, an obligation to help a partner and a friend in need.

We live in such a system, we have chosen it and we cannot say tomorrow that we did not know it. It is in second place – loyal, fair, with no hocus-pocus – but above all the Croatian borders and the Croatian homeland. It is the pledge and vow of our predecessors, your predecessors, the people who in ’91 defended Croatia, when chances were slim, without weapons that had to be illegally supplied to the country or confiscated, no one ever. Regardless of the fact that our enemy was not Russia but small Serbia, then, no one has ever had such a difficult job and ungrateful task as the guys and girls who defended Croatia in ’91 and liberated it in ’95. This is a lesson that no one in Europe has learned, except Croatia, the Croatian people, the Croatian political people, all its citizens who were ready, determined and brave enough to defend it in every way, especially with weapons that did not exist. No other European political nation has gone through something like this.

Some of you who graduated from war school may still remember that time, perhaps as participants, though less and less. New generations are coming, our children, daughters, sons, grandchildren and they need to be taught about it. Do not indoctrinate them, do not immerse them in dogma! Raise them to think, to reflect, to ask questions, but in the end to be loyal to their homeland, even more than loyal – to be faithful to the homeland. And that is why that greeting was not chosen by chance – faithful to the Homeland!