Franjo Tuđman

Franjo Tuđman
1st President of Croatia
In office May 30, 1990 – December 10, 1999
Prime Minister	Stjepan Mesić Josip Manolić Franjo Gregurić Hrvoje Šarinić Nikica Valentić Zlatko Mateša
Preceded by	Ivo Latin (as President of the Presidency of SR Croatia)
Succeeded by	Vlatko Pavletić (Acting)
Personal details
Born	(1922-05-14)May 14, 1922 Veliko Trgovišće, Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes
Died	December 10, 1999(1999-12-10) (aged 77) Zagreb, Croatia
Nationality	Croat
Political party	League of Communists of Yugoslavia (SKJ) Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ)
Spouse	Ankica Tuđman
Alma mater	JNA Military Academy, Belgrade
Military service
Allegiance	Yugoslav Partisans SFR Yugoslavia
Branch/service	Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) JNA Ground Forces (KoV)
Rank	Major General (General-major)
Battles/wars	World War II

Franjo Tuđman (May 14, 1922 - December 10, 1999) was the first president of Croatia in the 1990s.

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 1999.

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 the Partisans. 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. After the war's end Tuđman worked in the Ministry of Defence in Belgrade, attending military academy in 1957.

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 subversive activities during the Croatian Spring. According to Tuđman's own testimony, Yugoslav President Marshal Josip Broz Tito personally intervened to recommend the court be lenient in his case, sparing him a far longer sentence. The authorities of SR Croatia additionally intended to prosecute Tuđman for a sentence of 15–20 years imprisonment and hard labor ("robija") on charges of espionage, which was averted by President Tito's intervention. According to Tuđman, he and Tito were personal friends.
The Croatian Spring was a national movement that was actually set in motion by Josip Broz Tito and Croatian party chairman Vladimir Bakarić in the climate of growing liberalism in the late 60s. 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 put a stop to 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 19th century had mutated into the front for what he claimed was a pan-Serbian drive for domination over non-Serb people.

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 trialed 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 eleven 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 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 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.

• With regard to the burning issuses of national conflicts, his vision was the following (at least at the beginning): he asserted that Serbian nationalism 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 fourth European military force re firepower, 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% of Croatia's population, should gain cultural with elements of territorial autonomy.

• As far as Bosnia and Herzegovina was concerned, Tuđman was more ambivalent: initially, he thought (as did 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% Bosniaks, 17% Croats and 33% Serbs). But, these illusions were soon dispelled.

The President of Croatia

Internal tensions that had broken up the Communist party of Yugoslavia prompted the governments of federal Republics to call for the first free multiparty elections after 1945.

Tuđman's connections with Croatian diaspora (he travelled a few times to Canada and the USA after 1987) proved to be crucial when he founded Croatian Democratic Union ("Hrvatska demokratska zajednica" or HDZ, as it became known after its acronym) in 1989 — a party that was to stay in power until 2000, and which cannot be classified along criteria dominant in stable societies.

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. The aim was to gain national independence and to establish a Croatian nation-state. His party triumphed and got around 60% seats in the Croatian Parliament. After a few constitutional changes, which included his refusal to endorse the Serbs' place in the Croat constitution inflamed Serb opinion in Croatia, resulting in many Serbs being purged from their jobs in the police, security forces, the media and factories. Tuđman was elected to the position of President of Croatia.

Since the split among Communists in Yugoslavia on a national basis was already a fact at that time (according to prevalent opinion, that was primarily Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević's responsibility ), it was inevitable that the conflict should continue after the democratic elections that brought to power non-Communists in Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, while Communists held their position in Serbia and Montenegro. For the tensions and wars that ensued, one should see history of Croatia and history of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

During these decisive years, especially from 1990 to 1995, Tuđman proved to be a master strategist . According to the testimonies of both friends and enemies, he outmanoeuvered Croatia's adversaries on many levels: diplomatic, military, information and economic. While his opponent Milošević was a brilliant tactician who, by many accounts, lacked the 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 how to realize it.

This was seen at crucial junctures of Croatia's history: the all-out war against combined forces of Yugoslav Army and Serbian irredentist rebels, 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 intermediated by foreign diplomats was efficient — when the first cease fire was signed, the emerging Croatian Army had seven brigades; the last, twentieth cease fire the Croats had met with 64 brigades.

Tuđman initiated the process of privatization and de-nationalization with disastrous results: Croatia soon became a hatch of nepotism and favoritism. The official unemployment rate was higher than 20% and all macro-economic indicators, like GDP growth and budget deficit, were showing negative trends. The "Croatian economic miracle", as it was called by President Tudjman (who often claimed that Croatia was economically the most successful post-Communist country) became a nightmare for politicians and system economists who found themselves unable to cope with the growing problems.

Furthermore, it should be noted that critics all over the World have blamed Tuđman and his party for having manifested a benevolent attitude and all but formally rehabilitated the Nazi Independent State of Croatia, for alleged harassment and campaigns against Serbs in the eve of Yugoslav wars and for war crimes, above all for what many consider to have been an ethnic cleansing of the majority Serb population of Krajina in 1995 (Operation Storm).

Unlike Serbia's President Slobodan Milosevic, Mr Tudjman managed to promote his equally rampant nationalism without attracting widespread condemnation. He achieved this by currying favour with the West by creating the impression that he was creating multi-party democracy at home. Yet, he has been accused that his domestic policy is quite non-democratic.

Even during his presidency there were circles in society who claimed that Mr Tuđman's rule was autocratic and that he showed little sensitivity to criticism. In particular, these circles consider that during the Tuđma era civil rights record to the minority Serb population was poor. In 2001 a review from the IPI reported about an increased number of libel law suits that were initiated during Tuđman's mandate.

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.

Bosnian War

Main articles: Karađorđevo meeting and Bosnian War

Secret discussions between Franjo Tuđman and Slobodan Milošević on the division of Bosnia and Herzegovina between Serbia and Croatia were held as early as March 1991 known as Karađorđevo meeting or Karađorđevo agreement. Following the declaration of independence of Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Serbs attacked different parts of the country. The state administration of Bosnia and Herzegovina effectively ceased to function having lost control over the entire territory. The Serbs wanted all lands where Serbs had a majority, eastern and western Bosnia. The Croats and their leader Franjo Tuđman also aimed at securing parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina as Croatian. The policies of the Republic of Croatia and its leader Franjo Tuđman towards Bosnia and Herzegovina were never totally transparent and always included Franjo Tuđman's ultimate aim of expanding Croatia's borders.

Franjo Tuđman meets Slobodan Milošević

In 1997, the HDZ government undertook several programs to refurbish Tuđman's tarnished image, especially in the eyes of the West.

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.

In 2004, six Croats from Bosnia and Herzegovina were accused by ICTY for joint criminal enterprise which included mass war crimes against Bosniak population during creation of ethnically pure Croatian quasi-state Herzeg-Bosnia on the territories of internationally recognized state of Bosnia and Herzegovina. According to the indictment numerous persons participated in this joint criminal enterprise. Each participant, by his or her acts, omissions, practices or conduct, both individually and in concert with or through other persons, substantially contributed to carrying out the enterprise and accomplishing its purpose. Franjo Tudjman, among others, participated in the joint criminal enterprise. As the indictment mentions not just former President of the Republic of Croatia, Franjo Tudjman, but also other key figures from the Republic of Croatia (Gojko Šušak, former Minister of Defence and Janko Bobetko senior General), the government of the Republic of Croatia in 2006, filed the motion to be allowed to participate in the trial as the amicus curiae in order to "assist in the interpretation of historical and political facts and the determination of truth". The ICTY dismissed Croatia’s motion to appear as amicus curiae in the case, concluding that "it would not be in the interests of justice to allow a state – whose former political and military officials are named in the indictment as the participants in the joint criminal enterprise – to participate in the proceedings as the amicus curiae."

War crimes allegations

Had Tuđman lived longer, he would have been possibly brought up on war crimes charges by the UN Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague. Graham Blewitt, a senior Tribunal prosecutor, told the AFP wire service that "There would have been sufficient evidence to indict president Tuđman had he still been alive." 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 other minority belongings & means." In 1995, Carl Bildt had suggested that Franjo Tuđman was as guilty of war crimes as the "Krajina" Serb leader Milan Martić. Bildt was declared a persona non grata by Croatia following these statements.

Privatization controversy

Main article: Croatian 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" (Template:Lang-hr). Nepotism was endemic and during this period many influential individuals with the backing of the ruling party acquired state-owned property and companies at extremely low prices, afterwards selling them off piecemeal to the highest bidder for much larger sums. In the vast majority of cases this 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. 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 300,000 and 800,000. Many researchers such as the Israeli Yad Vashem of the center for Holocaust studies and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, still maintains similar figures, which were also reported by German, Italian, Croatian and partisan generals during the war. However some Croatian historians and some other international organizations such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Jasenovac museum are speaking of some 100,000 victims. That number is supported also by Croatian Jewish historiographer Ivo Goldstein. The last serious research of victim numbers before the Yugoslav wars was conducted by Croatian economist Vladimir Žerjavić and Serbian researcher Bogoljub Kočović. 59,589 victims (again of all nationalities) have been identified by name (in a Yugoslav name list that was made in 1964). 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 dissagrement with the official figures of Jews killed in concentration camps and in some parts anti-semitism. Tuđman is said to have estimated that a total of only 900,000 (as opposed to 6 million) Jews perished in the Holocaust of the Second World War. (New York Times, April 22, 1993.) However, this was reportedly a misinformation that caused some Croats to accuse the "New York Times" of anti-Croat bias and calumny). In his "Horrors of War", Tuđman had accepted German historian Reitlinger's estimates that the number of Jewish victims during WW2 was closer to 4 million as opposed to the most quoted number of 5 to 6 million men, women and children murdered. 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" (1989, 2 ed., p. 149). 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, etho-centrism 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" (cit. in Tuđman's work, p. 316-319). 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 (ibid., p. 320). 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". (ibid., p. 320). However, in another part of the book (p. 160), 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" (p. 160-161).

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 J. Cohen). Still, it was invoked by Tuđman's opponents. During his 1990 election campaign, Tuđman notoriously said: "Since many government-paid propagandists insinuate we (HDZ/CDU) are in fact agents of UDBA and KOS (Yugoslav political police), and point out that many of our founding members have Serbian and Jewish wives, I am very happy that my wife is neither Serbian nor Jewish, so they cannot question my credentials with regard to that matter."

On 22 April 1998 President Tuđman received the credentials of the first Israeli ambassador to Croatia, Natan Meron. In his speech Tuđman said, among other things: 'During the Second World War, within the quisling regime in Croatia, Holocaust crimes were also committed against members of the Jewish people. The Croatian public then, during the Second World War, and today, including the Croatian government and me personally, have condemned the crimes that the Ustasa committed not only against Jews but also against democratic Croats and even against the members of other nations in the Independent State of Croatia.'

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 (Template:Lang-en), 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 (Template:Lang-en) and Usudbene povijestice (Template:Lang-en) 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 (Template:Lang-en), has become regarded, by the majority of Croatian analysts and historians, as a book of historical importance only.

Legacy

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

The transition to a democratic state has proven slower and more problematic in Croatia than in neighbouring CEEC candidates for EU accession. Partly due to the years of war and ethnic cleansing, and the lack of any solid experience of democracy before the war, and partly due to the ruling regime of Franjo Tudjman, and his HDZ. President Tudjman, who came to power in 1990 and presented himself as the ‘hero of national resistance to Belgrade’s hegemony’, no longer enjoyed the unanimous support of the Croatian public by the end of the millennium. Signs of discontent became increasingly obvious to everyone, particularly in connection with the social problems arising from an unemployment rate variously estimated at between 18 and 20%. Croatian progress towards democracy has been marked by many failures. According to reports by the OSCE and the Helsinki International Federation for Human rights, respect for human rights in Croatia falled far short of European standards during his ruling. These reports criticise the arrangements for the return of persons displaced during the war, the reform of the electoral law and the situation with regard to the independence of the press, freedom of association, freedom of information and co-operation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The two organisations found that arrangements for the return of refugees discriminated against Croatian Serbs had been obliged to flee the country during the war. The revised electoral law, while preventing the over-representation of Bosnian Croats, was not found to guarantee adequate representation of the Serb minority. The situation of the Croatian media was found to have significantly deteriorated. The annual report of the Helsinki International Federation for Human Rights reported cases of harassment and telephone bugging of journalists and pressure being brought on the independent media (e.g. the attempt to close down Radio 101). President Tudjman’s popularity declined further in the course of 1999 in the wake of revelations concerning corruption and privatisation operations which allegedly had benefited the ruling party. Given the authoritarian and corrupt nature of the ruling clique and its potentially destabilising impact on the region, analysts predicted that there would be a change in the ruling coalition immediately after the legislative elections.

Despite the controversy, Tuđman is credited with creating the basis for an independent Croatia, and helping the country move away from communism and towards democracy. He is sometimes given the title "father of the country" for his role the country's independence. His legacy is still strong in parts of Croatia; there are schools, squares and streets in some cities named after him, and statues have been erected. Plans to create a square in Zagreb after the late president, proposed by his family and supporters, encountered discontent among the citizens. Their attempt of changing the Roosevelt or Maršal Tito square failed, and a large square near the Ilica Street in Črnomerec, Zagreb was named after him in December 2006.

See also: List of places named after Franjo Tuđman

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 an information security consulting company in Croatia, and in 2008 he founded the Information security portal.

• Grandchild Siniša Košutić - race car driver whose cars were sponsored by a state company during his grandfather's presidency.

• Grandchild Franjo Tuđman - son of Stjepan.

External links

• Croatian Radio Television: Dr. Franjo Tuđman, historian, author and statesman
• Site in a tribute of Franjo Tuđman Template:Hr icon