Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity | Tudjman, Franjo

[MAY 14, 1922–DECEMBER 10, 1999]

First Croatian president

Franjo Tudjman was born in Veliko Trgovisce, a village in the Hrvatsko Zagorje region in northern Croatia. He was the first president of Croatia, following its creation as an independent state in 1991.

During World War II Tudjman fought alongside his father and brothers as an officer in the partisan forces of communist leader Joseph Broz Tito (Marshal Tito) against Croatia's pro-Nazi Ustache regime, founded on April 10, 1941, as the so-called Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Drzava Hrvatska, NDH). After the war Tudjman served in the Ministry of Defense and was a member of the general staff of the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) in Belgrade, attaining the rank of major general. In 1961 Tudjman left the JNA to pursue an academic career in Croatia. From 1961 to 1967 he was the director of the Institute for the History of the Workers Movement located in Zagreb. In 1967 Tudjman resigned from the institute after Croatian communist authorities sharply criticized the Declaration on the Croatian Language that he had signed. The same year Tudjman was expelled from the Croatian Communist Party and thus began a new period in his life as a dissident and nationalist. In 1972 he was jailed for two years as a result of his activities in support of the "Croatian Spring" (the Croatian movement which advocated greater political autonomy in former Yugoslavia); he was jailed again in 1981 for three years for his writings on Yugoslav history. As a historian, Tudjman was accused of being a Holocaust revisionist because of his controversial 1989 book, Bespuca povijesne zbiljnosti (Wastelands: Historical Truth, translated also as The Horrors of War), in which he attempted to minimize the number of Jews who had perished in the Holocaust.

In 1989 Tudjman established a political party called the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) and became its chairman. The HDZ won the first free elections in Croatia in 1990. As its presidential candidate, Tudjman declared that NDH, the puppet state of Nazi Germany, "had not simply been a quisling creation, but was also an expression of the historical aspirations of the Croatian people to have their own state." During the same campaign he also declared, "Thank God, my wife is neither a Serb nor a Jew."

In 1990 Tudjman became the first democratically elected president of the newly proclaimed state of Croatia. In the elections of 1992 and 1997, he was reelected as president.

After the declaration of Croatia's independence in 1991, which coincided with open aggression by Serbia and the federal army against the newly founded state, Tudjman's policy, which combined military and diplomatic means, secured the existence of Croatia as a sovereign state. In 1995 Croatia's military forces in their Operations Flash and Storm liberated about 25 percent of the territory that had been occupied by Serbian paramilitary forces since 1990. These military operations resulted in the mass exodus of the Serbian population as approximately 200,000 fled to Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, or more precisely the Serb Republic (Republika Srpska).

In regard to Bosnia and Herzegovina, Tudjman's policy was both ambiguous and controversial. He engaged in secret negotiations with the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic to partition this state.

Following Operation Storm, Tudjman became the subject of an investigation by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) but he was never formally charged for the war crimes that occurred during and after this campaign in August 1995. Tudjman's name, however, appeared in the ICTY's indictment of the Croatian General, Ante Gotovina, for war crimes. In it the Chief Prosecutor of the ICTY, Carla del Ponte, accused Gotovina and President Tudjman of participating "in a joint criminal enterprise, the common purpose of which was the forcible and permanent removal of the Serb population from the Krajina region."

SEE ALSO Croatia, Independent State of; Karadzic, Radovan; Mladic, Ratko

Reneo Lukic