Franjo Tuđman

 

Franjo Tuđman
1st President of the Republic of Croatia
In office May 30, 1990 – December 10, 1999
Preceded by	Position established
Succeeded by	Stjepan Mesić
Born	May 14 1922(1922--) Veliko Trgovišće, Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes
Died	December 10 1999 (aged 77) [1] Dubrava clinic, Zagreb, Croatia
Nationality	Croat
Political party	Croatian Democratic Union
Spouse	Ankica Tuđman

The title of this article contains the character Đ. Where it is unavailable or not desired, the name may be represented as Franjo Tudjman.

Franjo Tuđman (May 14, 1922 - December 10, 1999^[1]) 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 usually spelled Tudjman.

The Partisan

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, finding the love of his life and 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. Franjo Tuđman declared that his parents had been killed by the Ustaša at that time but after the breakup of Yugoslavia he blamed communists for the killing. This version has become the official version in modern Croatia. After the war's end Tuđman worked in the Ministry of Defence in Belgrade, attending military academy in 1957. In this Belgrade 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 sprung 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.^{[dubious – discuss]}

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 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 so-called "Croatian Spring".

The Croatian Spring 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 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 the Croatian people in Yugoslavia, and threatening the party's political monopoly. The result was suppression by Tito, who used the military and the police to crush what he saw as separatism, and the 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 brought forth by the Croatian Spring.

During the turbulent 1971, Tuđman's role was that of a dissident who questioned what he saw as a cornerstone 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, as he claimed, pan-Serbian drive for domination over non-Serb peoples^{[citation needed]} — 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 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 got three years of prison, but again he only served a portion, this time eleven months.

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 issues 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 that Bosnian Muslims or Bosniaks are, essentially, Croats of Muslim faith and will ^{[citation needed]}, 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 traveled 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.

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 won and got around 60% 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, resulting in many Serbs being purged from their jobs in the police, security forces, the media and factories^[2]. Tuđman was elected to the position of President of Croatia.

Since the division of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia ("Savez Komunista Jugoslavije", or SKJ) on a national basis was already complete 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 outmaneuvered 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 modern Croatia's history: the war against combined forces of the Serbian nationalist rebels (assisted at first by the Yugoslav People's Army), 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 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. In March , 1991 he supposedly signed the Karađorđevo agreement a military pact signed between Croatian President Franjo Tuđman and Serbian President Slobodan Milošević in the town of Karađorđevo . The treaty was, the believers in the story aver, meant to limit conflict between Bosnian Serb and Croat forces by allowing both parties to concentrate on taking Bosnian territory . Franjo Tuđman intention in this is to annex part of Bosnia with Croatian minority so that his state will have borders similar to Banovina Hrvatska ^[3]. However, there is no evidence, neither factual nor circumstantial that such a deal has been reached. [1]

Privatization controversy

Tuđman initiated the process of privatization and de-nationalization in Croatia, however, this was far from transparent and in majority of cases against the law. 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" (Croatian: "privatizacijska pljačka"). An analyis of the privatization, conducted between 2001 - 2006, on the demand of the Coatian parliament (the Sabor) finds that a total of 1,936 unprosecuted criminal acts were commited during this period, against standing Croatian regulations of privatization . ^[4]. 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) caused the bankruptcy of the (previously successful) firm, causing the unemployment of thousands of citizens, a problem Croatia still struggles with to this day.
This was all helped, not just by the allegedly purposeful inadequacy of legal restrictions, but also by the apparently active support of the new Croatia's authorities, ultimately controlled by Tuđman from his strong presidential position. In the end this shed an increasingly negative light, and cast a shadow on his notable successes as a strategist and wartime statesman. Excluding the mostly rural rebel-occupied areas (the so-called Republic of Serbian Krajina), in the last two years of Tuđman's first tenure the detrimental effects of "wild" and unrestricted capitalism had become strikingly visible, with more than 400,000 unemployed citizens.

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. 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.^[5][6][7][8]. 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 ^[9] and in second half of the 1990s (Franjo Tuđman's second tenure), his grandchild, Dejan Košutić, became the owner of the Kaptol bank ^[10] and had emigrated from Croatia to Serbia after his grandfather's death. Franjo Tuđman is often accused of having acquired his personal property by dishonest means ^[11].

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 Croatian HDZ government undertook several programs to refurbish Tudjman'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 Tudjman, and was never published^[12][13].

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 10, 1999.

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 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 spiraling towards the true center of the work: the attack on what he claimed was a hyperinflation of Serbian casualties in the Independent State of Croatia (NDH).

Serbian history writers had claimed that the number of Serbs killed in the Jasenovac concentration camp was between 500,000 to 800,000. Authorities such as the Israeli Yad Vashem center for Holocaust studies ^[14] and the Simon Wiesenthal Center ^[15], still maintain similar figures, which were also reported by German, Italian, Croatian and partisan generals during the war, but Croatian historian and other international organizations such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum ^[16], Jewish virtual library ^[17] and Jasenovac museum ^[18] are speaking about less of 100 000 victims. Last serious research of victims numbers before Yugoslav wars has been from 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). See also relevant article and the official Jasenovac concentration camp Website ^[19]). 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. 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 900,000 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^[20]). In his "Horrors of War", Tuđman had accepted German historian Reitlinger's estimates^[21] 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. Another frequently mentioned quotation is the claim that "the establishment of Hitler's new European order could be justified by the need both to remove the Jews" (1989, 2 ed., p.149), which supposedly actually describes the hidden agenda of the Hitlerite propaganda machine rather than Tuđman's own opinions. Aside from 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 clannishness, etho-centrism and apartness. Ciliga stated 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 fact 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 is expressed in the Old Testament (ibid., p.320). 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 of 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 viewed as Israel's aggression and atrocities in the Middle East, he pointed out that they arose "from historical unreasonableness and narrowness in which Jewry certainly is no exception" (p.160-161).

The accusations of anti-Semitism were frequently countered through Tuđman's contacts with representatives of Jewish World Congress (Tommy Baer)^[11] and various Jewish intellectuals (Alain Finkielkraut, Philip Cohen). Still, it is sometimes invoked by Tuđman's opponents. During his 1990 election campaign, Tuđman notoriously said: "I am doubly happy that my wife is neither a Serb nor a Jew".^[22]

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”/Croatia in Monarchist Yugoslavia, has come to be assigned as reading material ^[23] concerning this period of Croatian history at many Croatian universities;

• his shorter treatises on national question (“Nacionalno pitanje u suvremenoj Europi/The National question in contemporary Europe; “Usudbene povijestice”/History’s fates) 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”/”Horrors of war”, 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. It should be noted that in 2004, in what was considered a significant gesture, Croatian Prime Minister Ivo Sanader condemned his country's World War II atrocities and paid tribute to the victims of the notorious concentration camp.

Generally, Tuđman’s historical works are considered, especially in Croatia, to have gained the status of indispensable synthetic surveys of Croatian 20th 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.

Legacy

Despite the controversy, Tuđman is credited with creating the basis for an independent Croatia, and helping the country move away from socialism and towards democracy. He is sometimes given the title "father of the country" for his role the country's independence. Prime Minister Ivo Sanader, the head of the HDZ (Tuđman's party), has stated, "His work is great and his opponents and those who have tried to belittle what he did will be forgotten, while Franjo Tudjman will be remembered in history." His legacy 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 smaller square away from the center of the town. The SDP won, and a different square was chosen in December of 2006^[24].

Family

• wife Ankica Tuđman - president of humanitarian agency in time of husband presidency^[25]
• son Miroslav Tuđman - secret service chief in time of father presidency.
• son Stjepan Tuđman
• daughter Nevenka Tuđman - declared not guilty of corruption because too many years have passed from time of crime which has been in father presidency.
• grandchild Dejan Košutić - in beginning of Franjo Tuđman presidency he is owner of company for importing drinks. Later Dejan Košutić is building private shooting range "Domagojevi strijelci" which will receive state contracts. In the end he is owner of Kaptol bank where his important partner is Hrvoje Petrač who is today in prison^[26]. Bank will go out of business after grandfather death. In 2000 he has escaped to Serbia where he is opening new company^[27].
• grandchild Siniša Košutić - race driver for which cars were sponsored by state company in grandfather presidency.

References

External links

• Croatian Radio Television: Dr. Franjo Tuđman, historian and statesman

Preceded by Ivica Račan as President of the Socialist Republic of Croatia

post created President of Croatia 1990 – 1999

Succeeded by Stjepan Mesić

Leaders of Croatia since 1945
Socialist Republic of Croatia (1945-1991), CC Secretaries	Špoljarić · Bakarić · Dabčević-Kučar · Planinc · Bilić · Vrhovec · Špiljak · Stojčević · Račan
Republic of Croatia (since 1991), Presidents	Tuđman · Mesić

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