Franjo Tuđman

Franjo Tuđman.

Franjo Tuđman (May 14, 1922 - December 10, 1999) was the first president of Croatia from 1990 until 1999. He was reelected twice and remained in power until his death in 1999. He is known as the "Father of Croatia." English reference works, news media, and diplomatic usage very often spell his name as "Franjo Tudjman." As Yugoslavia broke into independent republics, Croatia and its neighbors re-asserted their national identities, which had been officially suppressed during the Yugoslavia era. Each re-claimed their cultural legacies. Tuđman emphasized Croatia's Catholic identity and its role as Western Europe's bulwark between "Orthodox Christian and Muslim Balkans." For him, this made Croatia an ideal candidate for membership of the European Union more so than other Balkan states, which he represented as too Oriental, or pro-Russian.

He did much to resurrect pride in Croatia's past, especially in the period from the establishment of the medieval kingdom (925) to the Ottoman conquest of 1526 at the Battle of Mohács. Part of Croatia remained in union with Hungary, where distinctive cultural institutions were preserved. His speeches espoused hatred of Muslims and Jews while his writing praised the World War II Ustashe regime, which had rid Croatia on behalf of its Nazi masters of its Jewish population, declaring it Jew-free (Judenrein). Claiming that all areas of the Balkans with substantial Croatian populations, in particular Bosnia, where some 17 percent of the population were "Croatian" should be within Croatia, Tuđman supported Croatian insurgency in Bosnia, the Croatian Defense Forces. He is alleged to have colluded with Slobodan Milošević as early as 1991 to divide Bosnia between Serbia and Croatia. While he is credited with providing the strong leadership that Croatia needed to win independence, his autocratic style put the development of democracy on hold. He is viewed differently inside and outside of Croatia.

Early Years

Franjo Tuđman was born in Veliko Trgovišće, a village in the Hrvatsko Zagorje region of northern Croatia, then a part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. During WWII Tuđman, together with his brother Stjepan, fought on the side of Tito's partisans. During the fighting his brother was killed in 1943, but Franjo had better luck, meeting his future wife Ankica. Shortly after the end of the war his father Stjepan, who was an important member of the Croatian Peasant Party, killed his wife and then himself, according to the police finding. At that time Tuđman declared that his parents had been killed by the Ustaša, but after the breakup of Yugoslavia he blamed communists for the killing. This version of events has become the official version in modern Croatia. After the war's end Tuđman worked in the Ministry of Defense in Belgrade, attending military academy in 1957. In this period of his life he became the president of FK Partizan which in the time of his presidency created many jokes.

He became one of the youngest generals in the Yugoslav People's Army in the 1960s—a fact which some observers linked to the fact that he came from Zagorje, a region that gave few Communist partisans, except for Tito himself. Others have observed that Tuđman was probably the most educated of Tito's generals (as regards military history, strategy and the interplay of politics and warfare)—this claim is supported by the fact that generations of future Yugoslav generals based their general exam theses on his voluminous book on guerrilla warfare throughout history: Rat protiv rata ("War against war"), 1957, which covers topics as diverse as Hannibal's drive across the Alps, the Spanish war against Napoleon and Yugoslav partisan warfare.

Tuđman left active army service in 1961 to found the Institut za historiju radničkoga pokreta Hrvatske ("Institute for the History of Croatia's Workers' Movement"), and remained its director until 1967.

Dissident Politics

Apart from his book on guerrilla warfare, Tuđman wrote a series of articles criticizing the Yugoslav Socialist 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 nations"), a monograph on political history that collided with central dogmas of Yugoslav Communist elite with regard to the interconnectedness of the national and social elements in the Yugoslav revolutionary war (during WWII).

In 1971 he was sentenced to two years of prison for alleged subversive activities during the Croatian Spring. This was a national movement that was actually set in motion by Tito and Croatian party chief Bakarić in the climate of growing liberalism in the late 1960s. It was initially a tepid and ideologically controlled party liberalism, but it soon grew into mass nationalist-based manifestation of dissatisfaction with the position of Croatia within Yugoslavia, and threatened the party's political monopoly. As a result, the movement was suppressed by Tito, who used the military and the police to crush what he saw as separatism and a threat to the party's influence. Bakarić quickly distanced himself from the Croatian Communist leadership that he himself helped gain power earlier, and sided with the Yugoslav president. However, Tito took the protesters' demands into consideration, and in 1974 the new Yugoslav constitution granted the majority of the demands sought by the Croatian Spring.

Tuđman's role in 1971 was that of a dissident who questioned what he saw as the cornerstones of modern Serbian nationalism—the number of victims of the Jasenovac concentration camp, as well as the role of centralism in Yugoslavia and the ideology of unitary "Yugoslavism." Tuđman felt that what was originally a Croatian Romantic pan-Slavic idea from the nineteenth century had mutated into the front for what he claimed was a pan-Serbian drive for domination over non-Serb peoples.

On other topics like Communism and one-party monopoly, Tuđman remained mostly within the framework of Communist ideology. His sentence was commuted by Tito's government and Tuđman was released after nine months.

Tuđman was tried again in 1981 for having spread "enemy propaganda," while giving an interview to the Swedish TV on the position of Croats in Yugoslavia and was sentenced to three years of prison, but again he only served a portion (this time 11 months).

Formation of the National Program

In the latter part of the 1980s, when Yugoslavia was creeping towards its demise, torn by conflicting national aspirations, Tuđman formulated a Croatian national program. His primary goal was the establishment of the Croatian nation-state; therefore all ideological disputes from the past should be thrown away. In practice, this meant strong support from anti-Communist Croatian Diaspora, especially financial.

Even though Tuđman's final goal was an independent Croatia, he was well aware of the realities of internal and foreign policy. So, his chief initial proposal was not a fully independent Croatia, but a confederal Yugoslavia with growing decentralization and democratization. Tuđman envisaged Croatia's future as a welfare capitalist state that will inevitably move towards central Europe and away from the Balkans.

He also asserted that Serbian nationalism controlled the JNA (Yugoslav People's Army—Serbs, who constituted less than 40 percent of Yugoslavia's population, made up ca. 80 percent of commissioned officers corps and could wreak havoc on Croatian and Bosnian soil. The JNA was being rapidly Serbianized, both ideologically and ethnically, in less than four years. Tuđman's proposal was that Serbs in Croatia, who made up 11 percent of Croatia's population, should gain cultural autonomy, with some elements of territorial autonomy as well.

As far as Bosnia and Herzegovina was concerned, Tuđman was more ambivalent. He thought that Bosniaks were essentially Croats of Muslim faith and would, freed from Communist censorship, declare themselves ethnically as Croats, therefore making Bosnia a predominantly Croatian country.

The President of Croatia

Tuđman's connections with Croatian Diaspora (he had traveled a few times to Canada and the US after 1987) proved to be crucial when he founded the Croatian Democratic Union ("Hrvatska demokratska zajednica" or HDZ) in 1989—a party that was to stay in power until 2000. Much of the party's funding came from the Croatian Diaspora.

Essentially this was a nationalist Croatian movement that affirmed Croatian values based on Catholicism, blended with historical and cultural traditions generally suppressed in Communist Yugoslavia. Tuđman also espoused "green" policies as part of his bid to gain external support. The aim was to gain national independence and to establish a Croatian nation-state. His party won around 60 percent of the seats in the Croatian Parliament. Afterwards the HDZ's constitutional changes, which included his refusal to accept Serbs as a constituent nation, inflamed Serb opinion in Croatia. This resulted in many Serbs being purged from their jobs in the police, security forces, the media and factories.

Tuđman's party 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. Stressing Croatia's Catholic identity and European cultural heritage attracted strong German support for independence, depicted Croatia as "an integral part of a civilized Catholic, central European culture while denigrating its Serbian neighbor as representative of the barbaric, despotic Orient."

Tuđman was elected to the position of President of Croatia. The break with Yugoslavia was precipitated when Milošević blocked the appointment of the Croatian nominee to the revolving Presidency and manipulated his own appointment.

Civil War in Serbia and the War in Bosnia

Croatia declared independence on June 25, 1991. On November 18, 1991 some Croats declared the ‘Croat Community of Herzeg-Bosnia’, creating a third quasi-political entity alongside Bosnia and the Serbian Republika Srpska. The Croat entity organized a militia, known as the Croatian Defense Council. In Croatia, Serbs declared their own state, resulting in a civil war that continued until 1995 with United Nations peace keeping forces being first deployed in January, 1992. Croatia was not officially involved in the war in Bosnia, where Serbs and Croats tried to carve up the country between themselves ridding it of its Muslim population. However, until March 14, 1994, when Bosnian Muslims and Croats sign an accord, Croatia gave unofficial support to the Croatian militia.

Assessment

From 1990 to 1995, Tuđman proved to be a master strategist. According to the testimonies of both friends and enemies, he outmaneuvered Croatia's adversaries on many levels. While his opponent Milošević was a brilliant tactician who, by many accounts, lacked strategic vision, Tuđman was the exact opposite—frequently clumsy and erratic in behavior, he possessed the strong sense of mission and the vision of Croatia's independence, and the statesman's wisdom of how to realize it.

This was seen at crucial junctures of modern Croatia's history, including the war against the combined forces of the Serbian nationalist rebels (assisted at first by the JNA), the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Operation Storm, and the Dayton peace agreement. For instance, Tuđman's strategy of stalling the Yugoslav Army in 1991 by signing frequent cease fires mediated by foreign diplomats was efficient—when the first cease fire was signed, the emerging Croatian Army had seven brigades; by the final cease fire (the twentieth), the Croats had 64 brigades. In March 1991, he was believed to have signed the Karađorđevo agreement a military pact signed by Milošević in the town of Karađorđevo. The treaty was meant to limit conflicts between the Bosnian Serb and Croat forces by allowing both parties to concentrate on taking Bosnian territory.

Controversies

The most common accusation is that of autocratic behavior and despotism. However, many argue that, faced with a superior military aggressor, the Croats, who had not yet built functioning national institutions, had to rely on a strong personal leadership Tuđman embodied. Although such kind of leadership necessarily involved unpleasant side-effects like traits of autocratic behavior, it might have been beneficial in crucial matters, as the Croats under Tuđman won the war and founded the nation-state, at least partly thanks to this characteristic.

In 1997, the HDZ government undertook several programs to refurbish Tuđman's tarnished image, especially for Western consumption. One of these projects included an "official" biography of the President, written by an American science-fiction author, Joe Tripician. The resulting biography, however, was critical of Tuđman, and was never published.

Tuđman, who had been thrice elected as President of Croatia, fell ill with cancer in 1993. He recovered, but the general state of health declined in 1999 and Tuđman died from an internal hemorrhage on December 10, 1999.

Alleged War Crimes

Had Tuđman lived longer, he may have been brought up on war crimes charges by the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague. The Tribunal's indictment of Croatian general Ante Gotovina lists Tuđman as a key participant in a "joint criminal enterprise" aimed at the "permanent removal of the Serb population from the Krajina region by force, fear or threat of force, persecution, forced displacement, transfer and deportation, appropriation and destruction of property and other means."

Privatization controversy

President Tuđman initiated the process of privatization and de-nationalization in Croatia. However, this was far from transparent and fully legal. The fact that the new government's legal system was inefficient and slow, as well as the wider context of the Yugoslav wars caused numerous incidents known collectively in Croatia as the "privatization robbery." Nepotism was endemic and during this period many influential individuals with the backing of the authorities acquired state-owned property and companies at extremely low prices, afterwards selling them off piecemeal to the highest bidder for much larger sums. This proved very lucrative for the new owners, but in the vast majority of cases this (along with the separation from the previously secured Yugoslav markets) also caused the bankruptcy of the (previously successful) firm, causing the unemployment of thousands of citizens, a problem Croatia still struggles with to this day.

It is also beyond doubt that not few shadowy figures who moved close to Tuđman, the centre of power in Croatian society, profited from this enormously, having amassed wealth with suspicious celerity. Although this phenomenon is common to chaotic reforms in most post-communist societies (the best example being Russia with her "oligarchs"), the majority of Croats are of the opinion that Tuđman could and should have prevented at least a part of these malfeasances because nothing similar has happened to Slovenia with who Croatia has been inside Yugoslavia. The most common allegations sprouting from this state that he probably personally profited from this.

The charge of nepotism and favoritism (elitism), frequently leveled at Tuđman himself, has been resolved in 2007 when his daughter, Nevenka Tuđman, was found guilty of corruption, but set free because too many years has passed from time of the crime. There are also other instances of apparent family nepotism. His son Miroslav Tuđman occupied the position of Chief of the HIS, the Croatian secret service, during the time of his father's presidency. Franjo Tuđman is often accused of having acquired his personal property by dishonest means.

Controversy surrounding The Horrors of War

In 1989 Tuđman published his most famous work, The Horrors of War or Wastelands of Historical Reality (Bespuća povijesne zbiljnosti) in which he questioned the number of victims during World War II in Yugoslavia during the rule of the Nazi puppet regime. It is considered by many to be a strange book—a compilation of meditations on the role of violence in world history interspersed with personal reminiscences on his squabbles with Yugoslav apparatchiks. It then slowly spirals towards the true center of his work: the attack on what he claimed was a hyperinflation of Serbian casualties in the Independent State of Croatia (NDH).

Serbian historians have claimed that the number of Serbs killed in the Jasenovac concentration camp was between 500,000 and 800,000. Many researchers such as the Israeli Yad Vashem of the Center for Holocaust studies estimate that altogether, about 600,000 people were murdered at Jasenovac, including Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, and Croats who opposed the Ustaša government. Of that number, some 25,000 of the victims were Jews, most of whom had been brought to Jasenovac before August 1942 (at which point the Germans began deporting the Jews of Croatia to Auschwitz). Tuđman had estimated, relying on some earlier investigations, that the total number of victims in the Jasenovac camp (Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, Croats, and others) was somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000, thus in a scale similar to the one that is currently prevalent in Croatia. These figures are, however, considerably lower than the generally accepted numbers, which caused ample controversy.

Another controversy surrounding The Horrors of War was Tuđman's alleged anti-Semitism, expressed in this book and elsewhere. Tuđman is said to have estimated that a total of only 900,000 (as opposed to six million) Jews perished in the Holocaust of the Second World War. However, this was reportedly a misinformation that caused some Croats to accuse The New York Times of anti-Croat bias and calumny. Another frequently mentioned quotation is the claim that "the establishment of Hitler's new European order could be justified by the need to remove the Jews," which supposedly actually describes the hidden agenda of the Hitlerite propaganda machine rather than Tuđman's own opinions. Aside from the war statistics issue, Tuđman's book contained views on Jewish role in history that many readers found simplistic and profoundly biased. Tuđman based his views on the Jewish condition (in terms of pages, a small portion of the "Horrors of war") on the memoirs of Croatian Communist Ante Ciliga, one of the top officials, and later a renegade, of the pre-war Komintern, who described his experiences in the Jasenovac concentration camp during a year and a half of his incarceration. Ciliga's experiences, recorded in his book "Sam kroz Europu u ratu (1939-1945)"/Through the war-time Europe alone (1939-1945), paint an unfavorable picture of his Jewish inmate's behavior, emphasizing their alleged clannishness, enthocentrism and apartness. Ciliga claimed that Jews had held a privileged position in Jasenovac and actually, as Tuđman concludes, "held in their hands the inmates management of the camp up to 1944," something that was made possible by the idea that "in its origins Pavelic's party was philo-Semitic." Furthermore, Ciliga theorized that the behavior of the Jews had been determined by the more than 2000-year old tradition of extreme ethnic egoism and unscrupulousness that he claims is expressed in the Old Testament. Tuđman picked all this as a dispassionate analysis of Jewish behavioral traits- which it, according to many, is not. He summarized, among other things, that "The Jews provoke envy and hatred but actually they are 'the unhappiest nation in the world', always victims of 'their own and others' ambitions', and whoever tries to show that they are themselves their own source of tragedy is ranked among the anti-Semites and the object of hatred by the Jews." However, in another part of the book, Tuđman himself did express the belief that these traits weren't unique to the Jews; while criticizing what he alleges to be aggression and atrocities in the Middle East on the part of Israel, he claimed that they arose "from historical unreasonableness and narrowness in which Jewry certainly is no exception."

The accusations of anti-Semitism were sometimes disputed due to Tuđman's contacts with representatives of the Jewish World Congress (Tommy Baer) and various Jewish intellectuals (Alain Finkielkraut, Philip Cohen). Still, it was invoked by Tuđman's opponents.

On Muslims

According to Mahmutćehajić, Tuđman contributed to anti-Muslim sentiment in Croatia and among Croatians in Bosnia. Describing Bosnian Muslims as "Turks," he claimed that they planned to establish a fundamentalist Muslim state which would represent a threat to Europe's security. Mahmutćehajić represents this as part of a strategy to destroy Bosnia. Certainly, during Tuđman's presidency, Croatians as well as Serbs "subscribed to the view of novelist Ivo Andrić" who popularized the notion that only the cowardly and greedy had converted to Islam. Tudjman and Miloševic both downplayed any history of hostility between Orthodoxy and Catholicism. Thus, Croats and Serbs declared that they were "brothers in Christ" while "Muslims are nothing to us." Some clergy did condemn the violence but others fully identified with what has been called "Christo-slavism," the claim that in order to be a Slav you must be Christian. Since the claim that Bosnians were a threat to Croatian and European stability, that Croatians and Bosniaks could not live in peace was compromised by evidence of a history of inter-religious harmony, a concerted effort was made during the war in Bosnia to destroy this legacy. Thus, "It is not enough to cleanse Mostar of the Muslims ... the relics must also be destroyed." It was Croatian militia who destroyed the famous bridge at Mostar November 9, 1993, which Sells describes as "a symbol of Bosnia’s role in bridging cultures." While the post-Yugoslavian nation states of Serbia and Croatia claimed continuity with medieval, in this view the Muslims have no right to claim the legacy of the "medieval Bosnian kingdom," since they forfeited this right by their conversion.

Published works

If Tuđman’s stature as a historian and publicist is to be evaluated, it should take into consideration the following facts:

• his voluminous, more than 2,000 pages long, Hrvatska u monarhističkoj Jugoslaviji has come to be assigned as reading material concerning this period of Croatian history at many Croatian universities;

• his shorter treatises on national question, Nacionalno pitanje u suvremenoj Europi and Usudbene povijestice are still valuable essays on unresolved national and ethnic disputes, self-determination and creation of nation-states in the European milieu

• his most celebrated work Bespuća povijesne zbiljnosti, allegedly distorted and misused by anti-Croat propagandists of various affiliations, has become regarded, by the majority of Croatian analysts and historians, as a book of historical importance only. This is a patchwork of personal reminiscences, musings on possible determinants in history and a catalog of anti-Croat biases. For many Croatian nationalists, its value lies mostly in the dismantling of what they view as the central modern myth of Serbian nationalism—the hyperinflation of number of Serbian victims in the Jasenovac concentration camp.

Generally, Tuđman’s historical works are considered, especially in Croatia, to have gained the status of indispensable synthetic surveys of Croatian twentieth-century history, while his shorter political-cultural analysis and geopolitical essays belong to the treasury of classical Croatian political thought, along with writings of Ivo Pilar and Milan Šufflay. However, Tuđman’s overly Marxist treatises and polemical squabbles are period pieces that have already become obsolete and do not provoke historians' or general reader's interest any more. Outside of Croatia, he is accused of distorting history.

Legacy

Tuđman's grave at the Mirogoj graveyard (in the background)

Despite the controversy, Tuđman is credited with creating the basis for an independent Croatia. He was, however, too autocratic to do much to nurture democracy, and "it is only now, after his death, that real democracy in Croatia will have the chance to flourish." His legacy, however, is still strong in Croatia; there are schools, monuments, squares, buildings, and streets in many cities named after him, and statues have been erected. Plans to create a square in Zagreb after the late president has attracted strong debate among his supporters and the oppositional ruling party of Zagreb (the Social Democratic Party of Croatia) on the location of the square; his family and supporters wanted the Roosevelt or Tito square while the SDP refused and wanted a square away from the center of the town. The SDP won, and a different square was chosen in December of 2006.

An impressive bridge, the northern entry to Dubrovnik, is also named in Tuđman's honor.

Family

• wife Ankica Tuđman - head of the Za djecu Hrvatske(For the children of Croatia) humanitary fund, a somewhat infamous, and during Tuđman's presidency seemingly ubiquitous organization.
• son Miroslav Tuđman - secret service chief during his father's presidency.
• son Stjepan Tuđman
• daughter Nevenka Tuđman - declared guilty of corruption but never imprisoned because too many years had passed from the time of the crime which was during her father's presidency.
• grandchild Dejan Košutić - in the beginning of Franjo Tuđman's presidency he was the owner of a company that imported drinks; later Dejan Košutić built a private shooting range "Domagojevi strijelci." Afterwards, he was a part-owner of the Kaptol bank - the bank was liquidated because of the negative media campaign. In 2002 he opened a business for package delivery in Serbia, in 2005 he started a information security consulting company in Croatia, and in 2008 he founded the Information security portal.
• grandchild Siniša Košutić - racecar driver whose cars were sponsored by a state company during his grandfather's presidency.

Party Political Offices
Preceded by: post created	President of Croatian Democratic Union 17 May 1989-10 December 1999	Succeeded by: Vladimir Šeks (acting)
Political offices
Preceded by: Ivo Latin as Chairman of Presidency of the Socialist Republic of Croatia	post created President of Croatia 30 May 1990 – 10 December 1999	Succeeded by: Vlatko Pavletić (acting)

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Gagnon, V.P. The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. ISBN 978-0801442643.
• Glenny, Misha. The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers, 1804-1999. New York, NY: Viking Penguin, 1999. ISBN 978-0140233773.
• Mahmutćehajić, Rusmir, Francis R Jones and Marina Bowder trans. The Denial of Bosnia. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. ISBN 027102030X.
• Sells, Michael. The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998. ISBN 978-0585130279.
• Tuđman, Franjo. Bespuća povijesne zbiljnosti : rasprava o povijesti i filozofiji zlosilja (in Croatian). Zagreb: Matica hrvatska, 1994. ISBN 978-9531690331.
• Tuđman, Franjo. Genocide & Yugoslavia: Exposing the Myths. Washington, DC: Regnery Pub., 1996. ISBN 978-0895264404.
• Tuđman, Franjo. Horrors of War: Historical Reality and Philosophy. New York, NY: M. Evans, 1996. ISBN 978-0871318381.
• Tuđman, Franjo. Nationalism in Contemporary Europe. East European monographs, no. 76. Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1981. ISBN 978-0914710707.

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