Franjo Tuđman

Franjo Tuđman
File:Tudjman.jpg
1st President of Croatia
Preceded by	none
Succeeded by	Stjepan Mesić
Personal details
Nationality	Croat
Political party	Croatian Democratic Union

Franjo Tuđman (May 14, 1922 - December 9, 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 late 1999. In English, his surname is spelled "Tudjman".

The Communist

Franjo Tuđman was born in Veliko Trgovišće, a village in the Hrvatsko Zagorje region of northern Croatia.

During WWII Tuđman 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 1960s — a fact which some observers linked to the fact that he sprung from Zagorje, a region that gave few Communist partisans.

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 guerilla 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.

The Dissident

Apart from the book on guerilla warfare, Tuđman wrote a series of articles attacking 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"), 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 so-called "Croatian Spring".

The Croatian Spring was a reformist movement that was actually set in motion by Tito and Croatian party chief 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 manifestation of dissatisfaction with the position of the Croatian people in Yugoslavia, and it began to threaten the party's political monopoly. The result was a 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 himself from the Croatian Communist leadership that he himself helped gain power earlier, and sided with the Yugoslav ruler.

During the turbulent 1971, Tuđman's role was that of the dissident who questioned the central myth of modern Serbian nationalism, the number of victims of the Jasenovac concentration camp, as well as the role of centralism in Yugoslav and the continuation of ideology of unitary "Yugoslavism". Tuđman felt that this originally Croatian romantic pan-Slavic idea from the 19th century had been mutated in harsh realities in both Yugoslav states into the front for a 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, Tuđman remained mostly within the framework of Communist ideology. His sentence was commuted and Tuđman had been released after nine months.

Tuđman 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.

The Controversy surrounding The Horrors of War (Bespuća povijesne zbiljnosti)

In 1989 Tuđman published his most famous work, The Horrors of War (Bespuća povijesne zbiljnosti) in which he questioned the number of victims during World War II in Yugoslavia. "The Horrors 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).

Politically-motivated history writers had claimed that the number of Serbs killed in Jasenovac was between 500,000 to 800,000. These numbers were likely inaccurate, yet they were propagated, manipulated and intensified for political reasons: the Ustaše were a defeated enemy from World War II that had to be portrayed as ultimately negative. The fact that such claims were promoted by some members of the Serbian intelligentsia, made it look like it was a scientific fact rather than an opinion. It was Franjo Tuđman's firm opinion that all this was done in an attempt to create and solidify Greater Serbian domination on the ruins of the destroyed, post-Titoist Yugoslavia.

Tuđman had, relying on some earlier investigations, concluded that the number of all victims in the Jasenovac camp (Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, Croats, and others) was somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000. Some current investigations have bracketed the figure in a similar scale — between 56,000 and 85,000 — therefore supposedly confirming that Tuđman's estimates were closer to the reality than the official, Communist propagated ones. They were, however, considerably lower than the official numbers and most previous estimates, which caused ample controversy.

Another controversy surrounding The Horrors of War was Tuđman's alleged anti-Semitism, supposedly expressed in this book and elsewhere. Tuđman reportedly estimated that a total of 900,000 Jews perished in the holocaust of the Second World War. (New York Times, April 22, 1993.) However, this was a misinformation that caused some Croats to accuse "New York Times" of anti-Croat bias and calumny.In his "Horrors of War", Tuđman had accepted German historian Weitlinger's estimates that rounded the number of Jewish victims during WW2 closer to 4 million than to the most quoted cipher of 5 to 6 million men, women and children murdered. Aside from war statistics issue, Tuđman's book contained views on Jewish role in history that many readers found simplistic and, at least partially, 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 inmates's behavior, emphasizing their clannishness, etho-centrism and apartness. Tuđman picked this presentation, which is at most a personal reminiscence, as a dispassionate analysis of Jewish behavioral traits- which it, evidently, is not.

Accusations of anti-Semitism had been amplified and constantly drummed upon by three sides: Serbian propaganda machine, Holocaust revisionist historians and political machinators who saw in Tuđman's insensitive and, frequently, superficial generalizations a chance to promote their own political agenda. The anti-Semitic legend was in practice dispelled through Tuđman's contacts with representatives of Jewish World Congress (Tommy Baer) and various Jewish intellectuals (Alain Finkielkraut, Philip Cohen). Still, it is sometimes invoked for propaganda reasons.

Published works

If Tuđman’s stature as a historian and publicist is to be evaluated, it would probably be along the following lines:

• his voluminous (more than 2,000 pages long) “Hrvatska u monarhistickoj Jugoslaviji”/Croatia in Monarchist Yugoslavia, has become standard university textbook analyzing this period of Croatian history;
• his shorter treateses on national question (“Nacionalno pitanje u suvremenoj Europi/The National question in contemporary Europe; “Usudbene povijestice”/History’s fates) are still valuable essays on this particular problem;
• his most celebrated work “Bespuca povijesne zbiljnosti”/”Horrors of war”, consciously distorted and misused by anti-Croat propagandists of various affiliations, will, in all probability, become regarded as a book of historical importance only, since its value lies mostly in publicly dismantled central Greater Serbian modern myth- the hyperinflation of number of Serbian victims in Jasenovac concentration camp.

Generally, Tuđman’s historical works are considered to have gained the status of indispensable synthetic surveys of Croatian 20th century history, while his shorter political-cultural analyses and geopolitical essays belong to the treasury of classical Croatian political thought. However, Tuđman’s overly Marxist treatises and polemical squabbles are period pieces that will, in all likelihood, vanish into oblivion.

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. He knew that this process would eventually corrode all Greater-Serbia projects, only if it could be implemented in peace.

• 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 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 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 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, Tuđman was elected to the position of President of Croatia.

Since the split among Communists in Yugoslavia was caused by the pan-Serbian movement led by Slobodan Milošević, 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 outmanoeuvred 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 proces of privatization and de-nationalization with mixed results: Croatian economy coped with the war extremely well, having in mind all the pros and cons; only in the last two years of Tuđman's tenure the detrimental effects of "wild" and unrestricted capitalism had become visible. After the war and to this day, croatian economy is suffering. The charge of nepotism, fascism and favoritism, frequently levelled at Tuđman, seems to be unresolved yet: his personal property was, as the official proving of will had shown, acquired in a completely legal way.

On the other hand, it is 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 all 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.

The most common accusation of all is that of autocratic behavior and "despotism". This claim is both true and false: Tuđman was a strong, but democratically elected national leader and this was a mixed blessing. 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 proved beneficial in crucial matters, as the Croats under Tuđman started the nation-state, at least partly thanks to this characteristic. Because of Tudjman's politics, civil war in Yugoslavia started, claiming over 300 000 souls.

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 internal hemorrhage on December 9th, 1999, after his life supporting machine was disconnected. His death was announced the next day.

Quotes

• 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 (hence, cannot be "trusted" as the leadership of a national movement), I am very happy to say that my wife is neither Serbian nor Jewish, so they cannot question my credentials with regard to that matter.

External links

• Croatian Radio Television: Dr. Franjo Tuđman, historian and statesman
• BBC: Franjo Tudjman: Father of Croatia