Franjo Tudjman
Franjo Tuđman or Tudjman (May 14, 1922 - December 10, 1999) was the first president of Croatia in the 1990s.
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Tuđman's political party HDZ ("Hrvatska Demokratska Zajednica", Croatian Democratic Union) won the first post-communist multi-party elections in 1990 and he became the president of the country. A year later he proclaimed the Croatian declaration of independence. He was reelected twice and remained in power until his death in late 1999.
He was born in Veliko Trgovišće, a village in Hrvatsko Zagorje, region in northern Croatia.
During WWII Tudjman fought on the side of Tito's partisans, where he also met his future wife, Ankica. He became one of the youngest generals in the Yugoslav people's army in the 60s which some observers linked to the fact that he sprung from Zagorje, a region which gave few Communist partisans. On the other hand, others have observed that Tudjman was probably the most educated Tito's general (as regards military history, strategy and the interplay of politics and warfare) - the claim supported by the fact that generations of future Yugoslav generals based their general exam theses on his voluminous book on guerilla warfare throughout history: "Rat protiv rata" (War against war), 1957, which covers as diverse topics as Hannibal's drive across the Alps, Spanish war against Napoleon and Yugoslav partisan warfare. Tudjman left active army service in 1961 to found the Institute for the history of the workers' movement, and remained its director until 1967. Apart from the book on guerilla warfare, he wrote a series of articles which attacked the Yugoslav Communist establishment, and was subsequently expelled from the Party. His most important book from that period was "Velike ideje i mali narodi" (Great ideas and small peoples), which collided with central dogmas of Yugoslav Communist elite with regard to the interconnectedness of the national and social elements in Yugoslav revolutionary war.
In 1971 he was sentenced to two years of prison for alleged subversive activities during "Croatian Spring", the reformist movement actually set in motion by Tito and Croatian party chief Bakarić in the climate of growing liberalism in late 60ies. But, since from its initially tepid and ideologically controlled party liberalism "Croatian Spring" soon grew into mass manifestation of dissatisfaction with the position of Croatian people in Yugoslavia, it began to threaten the party's political monopoly. The result was brutal suppression by Tito, who used the military and the police to crush what he saw as the threat to his undivided power - Bakarić quickly distanced from Croatian Communist leadership he himself helped to gain power earlier and sided with Yugoslav ruler. During turbulent 1971, Tudjman's role was that of the dissident who questioned the central myth of modern Serbian nationalism, the number of concentration camp Jasenovac's victims, as well as the role of centralism in Yugoslavia and continuation of unitary ideology of "Yugoslavism"- originally the Croatian romantic pan-Slavic idea from the 19th century that has mutated in harsh realities in both Yugoslav states in the front for pan-Serbian drive for domination over non-Serb peoples, from economy and army to culture and language. On other topics like Communism and one-party monopoly, Tudjman remained mostly within the framework of Communist ideology. His sentence was commuted and Tudjman had been released after nine months. Tudjman was tried again in 1981 for the "crime" of giving the interview to the Swedish TV on the position of Croats in Yugoslavia and got three years of prison, but again he only served a portion, this time eleven months.
In 1989 Tudjman published his most celebrated work, "The Horrors of War" ('Bespuća povijesne zbiljnosti') in which he questioned the number of victims during WW2 in Yugoslavia. "The Horros of War" is a strange book, a compilation of meditations on the role of violence in the world history interspersed with personal reminiscences on his squabbles with Yugoslav apparatchiks and slowly spiralling towards the true center of the work: the attack on hyperinflation of Serbian casualties in the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) -the main pillar of the modern Serbian mythic martyrology; the self-image of a people victimized by Croats who are depicted as diabolical Serbocidal fanatics-which in turn led to the state of mind battening on fear, hostility and thirst for revenge. Serbian "historians" and their copycats "estimated" the number of Serbs killed in Jasenovac from 500,000 to 1,000,000. These pathological fixations, oppressing the Serbian collective psyche, were intentionally nourished, cleverly manipulated and intensified in the concentrated effort of vast majority of Serbian intelligentsia in their efforts to create and solidify Greater Serbia domination on the ruins of destroyed post-Titoist Yugoslavia. Tudjman had, relying on earlier investigations, concluded that the number of all victims in the Jasenovac camp (Serbs, Croats, Jews, Gypsies and others) was somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000. Current investigations have bracketed the figure between 49,000 and 85,000- therefore, confirming Tudjman's estimates. Other contorversy surrounding "The Horrors of War" was Tudjman's alleged anti-Semitism, supposedly expressed in this book. On closer examination, Tudjman can be blamed only for the lack of sensitivity: he quoted various Jewish sources that show how the number of victims is hard to estimate- Jewish and Israeli historians placed the number of Jews killed in the Nazi genocide between 4 and 6 million. The relativity of these figures ("margin of error" fluctuating around 2 million people dead or alive) prompted Tudjman to lump these estimates with evidently overinflated Serbian ones. Just- in the case of Jewish victimology, figures vary ca. 30 %, which is completely unlike Serbian situation with no less than 1200 % "uncertainty"- a grotesque example of manipulation. Also, Tudjman's style was anything but nuanced: the characteristic amply misused by Serbian propagandists who quoted Tudjman's frequently superficial generalizations taken out of context, in order to depict him as virulent anti-Semite. This ensued in tension between a part of Jewish communities (especially in the USA and Israel) and befuddled Tudjman- a tension that was soon dispelled by prominent Jewish figures like writers and publicists Finkielkraut and Cohen or Tommy Baer of Jewish World Congress. Aside from that furore, "The Horrors of War", the most famous (but not the best) Tudjman's book, remained closer to the leftist and socialist worldview, not questioning the Marxist ideology as such.
In the latter part of the 1980s, when Yugoslavia was creeping towards inevitable demise, torn by conflicting national aspirations (among them the most "visible" Albanian "troubles" in Serbian province Kosovo and pan-Serbian national populist movement, moulded by Serbian intellectual elite and led by former banker and Communist official Slobodan Milosevic), Tudjman formulated Croatian national program that can be summarized in the following way:
- the primary goal is establishment of the Croatian nation-state; therefore all ideological disputes from the past should be thrown into nation's dumpster. In practice, this meant strong support from anti-Communist Croatian diaspora, especially financial.
- since the grudges and impediments from western European countries could be expected, along the lines:" We are undergoing a process of integration, and you (Croats) want to disintegrate a successful multiethnic county, Yugoslavia", the answer was found in an equally simplistic expression: "Your pet Yugoslavia is not a multiethnic paradise, but a Serbian Communist tyranny. Do you support "integration" based on oppression ?". Or, in a more nuanced vocabulary: "Nations are simultaneously going through processes of national individualization and international integration."
- but, although Tudjman's final goal was the independent Croatia, he was well aware of the realities of internal and foreign policy. So, his chief initial proposal was not fully independent Croatia, but confederal Yugoslavia with growing decentralization and democratization. He knew that this process would eventually corrode all Greater-Serbia projects, only if it could be implemented in peace.
- Tudjman envisaged Croatia's role as a welfare capitalist state that will inevitably move towards central Europe and away from the Balkans.
- with regard to the burning issuses of national conflicts, his vision was the following (at least at the beginning): he knew that Serbian nationalism, which effectively controlled JNA (Yugoslav People's Army: Serbs, who constituted less than 40% of Yugoslavia's population, made ca. 80% of commissioned officers corps) could wreak havoc on Croatian and Bosnian soil. The JNA, according to some estimates the 4th European military force re firepower, was being rapidly Serbianized, both ideologically and ethnically, in less than 4 years. Tudjman's proposal was that Serbs in Croatia, who made up 11 % of Croatia's population, should gain cultural with elements of territorial autonomy. But-this did not satisfy Serbian appetites that operated on many levels: the lower one was the condition that they should have the right of the contitutive people ( ie., the right to secede) in any form of Croatian state-effectively, that Croatia should be defined as a bi-national, Croato-Serbian country (notwithstanding the fact that Croats constituted 78 %, and Serbs 11 % of the populace in 1991.) Apart from being a stew cooked in the ideological kitchen of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (the mother of all Serbian expansionist machinations in 1980s), this claim had a sort of legitimacy in a purposely ambiguous formulation of Croatia's constitution from 1974. But, it could hardly stand a dispassionate legal analysis. Everyone knew that it was only a pretext for impending Serbian aggression. As far as Bosnia and Herzegovina is concerned, Tudjman was more ambivalent: initially, he thought (as many Croats from northwestern Croatia) that Bosnian Muslims or Bosniaks are, essentially, Croats of Muslim faith and will, freed from Communist censorship, declare themselves ethnically as Croats, therefore making Bosnia a predominantly Croatian country (with 44% Bosnian Muslims, 17% Croats and 33 % Serbs). But, these illusions were soon dispelled.
Tuđman led the fledgling country through very rough times, in war with Serbia on several fronts. The armed conflict in Croatia died down by 1992 but over a fifth of the country wasn't under government control, the areas which were overwhelmingly Serb were organized into the so-called Republic of the Serb Krajina, supported by Slobodan Milošević's Serbian government.
New elections were organized in Croatia and Tuđman again won with over 60% majority. In the coming years, his government supported Bosnian Croats in the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was widely speculated that he and Milošević were actually in cahoots to carve up Bosnia amongst themselves, ever since their secret meeting in Karađorđevo in 1991. Tuđman also supported Bosnian Croats because of a powerful lobby of Croats from Herzegovina whose funding de facto brought him into power.
In 1995, some time after the Operation Storm, Tuđman signed the Dayton peace agreement, which ended the Bosnian conflict. New elections were held in 1997 and he was reelected.
Tuđman's style of government was considered to be too authoritarian and corruption was also pretty much unrestrained during his years in power.
He didn't however finish his third mandate, incapacitated by cancer in late 1999. The Constitutional Court declared him too ill to rule on November 26th, and on December 10th, 1999 he died at the age of 77.
He had two sons Miroslav and Stjepan, and one daughter Nevenka.
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