Franjo Tuđman

Franjo Tuđman (AFI: [ˈfraːɲɔ ˈtudʑman] listen^ⓘ) (Veliko Trgovišće, May 14, 1922-Zagreb, December 10, 1999) was a Croatian historian, writer and politician, who became the first president of Croatia after the country's independence.

Biography

Franjo Tuđman (pronounced /fraño túchman/ in Spanish phonetics) joined, at the age of nineteen, the anti-fascist guerrilla of Josip Broz Tito, although he had an irrelevant role in it and, after the war, he was the youngest general of the Yugoslav People's Army, at only twenty-three years old.

Before reappearing on the Yugoslav political scene as leader of the HDZ, he was a political dissident due to his ultranationalist ideas, for which he was imprisoned in 1971 and tried in 1972.

He defended Croatian nationalist positions after the death of Tito in 1980, and already in the 1990s he led the Croatian party called Hrvatska Demokratska Zajednica - HDZ (Croatian Democratic Union) which, in turn, was the tip of the Croatian independence movement at the end of the 20th century. When Tudjman declared, at the first national convention of the HDZ, that the Ustasha State had managed in its own way to realize Croatian independence aspirations, the majority of the intellectuals who had initially joined the party broke away from it. The HDZ, however, did not However, he managed to rally the absolute majority of the Croatian people in both Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina in the first democratic elections, just after the fall of communism in socialist Yugoslavia. Its objective was crystallized on May 30, 1990 through a national referendum for the independence of Croatia. From various quarters, his rise to power was interpreted as a return to the fascism that governed Croatia during World War II.

His nationalist and secessionist positions led him to the presidency of Croatia and the independence of that country. He skillfully stopped the Yugoslav Army (JNA) in Croatia, then far superior in weaponry, with the combination of armistices and defense of the country's territory. After the international forces of UNPROFOR finally stood between the self-proclaimed Serbian state within Croatia and the Croatian forces, Tuđman decided to organize and arm the Croatian Army (HV), preparing for 1995 operations "Bljesak" and "Oluja", with those that recovered the territorial integrity of the country. Accused of ethnic cleansing against the Serbian population of the Krajina region, he was investigated for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and some media outlets indicated that he would have been indicted by it had he not died.

His detractors, such as his successor as president of Croatia Stipe Mesic, accuse him of not having understood the situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the national reality of the Bosnians. It seems that Tuđman counted on this group as an integral part of the Croatian people, considering them "Croats of the Islamic religion", as was already the case during the Ustasha mandate in Bosnia in the Second World War. This and other miscalculations on his part led to a war between the Bosnian Croats led from Zagreb (the Croats of Bosnia-Herzegovina) and the Bosnians, which raged for much of the Bosnian War. The Bosniaks did not want any part of Bosnia-Herzegovina to be separated and annexed to Croatia. Others accuse him of having negotiated directly with Milosevic, through the Karađorđevo Agreement, the division of Bosnia-Herzegovina between Croatia and Serbia, relying on certain visual documents.

Illness and death

In 1993 he was diagnosed with stomach cancer that would eventually cause his death in 1999. On November 1, 1999 he appeared in public for the last time. While he was hospitalized, opposition parties accused the ruling HDZ party of hiding the fact that Tuđman was already dead and that the authorities were keeping his death a secret in order to gain more seats in the next general election in January 2000. Tuđman's death It was officially declared on December 10, 1999. A funeral mass was celebrated in the Zagreb Cathedral and he was buried in the Mirogoj cemetery. Upon his death, more moderate positions came to power, beneficial for ethnic integration and celebrated by the rest of the Balkan states.

Personality

Tuđman was a Croatian nationalist or at least became a nationalist in the last decades of his life. It was believed that he was a chosen one, and that the nation of Croatia had a "historical destiny"; (Greater Croatia). He liked to present himself to people as a historian. That pseudo-racial nationalist vision has been compared to that of Hitler. He was authoritarian, arrogant, vain and had a total lack of humor. In his early years he was communist and atheist, but as time went by (and especially after the death of Tito) he renounced communism and ended up dying blessed by the Catholic Church (it must be remembered that the Holy See, along with Germany, were the first to recognize the Independent Croatia). He was imprisoned for the Croatian Spring riots in 1971. In 1980, after Tito's death, he was imprisoned as a Croatian separatist. Another reason he was imprisoned was for being a Holocaust denier, since who defended that in the Jasenovac concentration camp they died "only" about 60,000 people, when official studies give around 600,000 victims. He disinherited one of his daughters for marrying a Serb.

He was one of the main actors - along with Milosevic, among others - in the Yugoslav wars that led to the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. In the case of Bosnia, he had no problems dividing it between Serbia and Croatia. with a secret agreement with his theoretical archenemy, the Serbian nationalist Milosevic (see Karađorđevo Agreement). It has been commented on this agreement between Tudjman and Milosevic:

[...] More than one analyst has suggested that Tudjman then paid, and more, his enormous naivety. If, on the one hand, he believed that Milosevic had no interest in Krajina and Slavonia—two regions that were gradually ethnically cleansed by the Serbian militias and the federal Army—on the other he laboriously threw himself into an impresentable division of Bosnia that, immoralities and injustices on the other, only brought Croatia unwise.

Without a doubt, one of the darkest episodes was in August 1995, when an ethnic cleansing (Operation Storm) began, carried out by the Croatian Army, in which more than 250,000 Serbs were displaced from Krajina.

Another controversial episode is that, as the head of the Croatian government and army, he had to know about the existence of Muslim concentration camps in Bosnia occupied by the Bosnian-Croats. They were the first concentration camps in Europe since the Second World War. Symbolically, the destruction of the Mostar bridge in Bosnia by the Croats did great image damage to his cause. All this sank the image of Franjo Tudjman and Croatia in the West, so that when he died in 1999, no senior foreign representative was to his funeral.

He was an admirer of Francisco Franco. He even thought of creating a Croatian Valley of the Fallen together with the remains of Ante Pavelic and Tito.

According to the Bosnian-Croat intellectual Predrag Matvejevic, his heritage is not exactly exemplary:

[...] A policy and its creator are judged according to the legacy they leave: a state in which virtually one party reigns, a private democracy of justice, a control exercised over the media, an expansionist policy that has ventured to the conquest of the territories of Bosnia-Herzegovina, impoverishment of the population and pillage of public property, unsustainable despotism and unused nepotism, Croatia was even more unacceptable.

He was investigated for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and some media outlets indicated that he would have been indicted by it had he not died. Some of his generals, such as Ante Gotovina, Dario Kordić, Rahim Ademi, Petar Stipetic and Janko Bobetko were investigated, and some were tried by the court.