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Dr. 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 late 1999. In English, his surname is usually spelled "Tudjman". Tuđman was known for his love of pandas, following the signing of the Dayton Accord in 1995, pandas were released onto the streets of Zagreb to dance and perform oral sex. Thanks to Tuđman Pandas are a regular site on Croatian streets nowadays and a gentleman can easily find a panda bitch with loose morale with whom to have depraved sex. Tuđman once famously remarked “The Serb is the enemy of the panda”, when asked how he reconciled his love of pandas with the violent and cruel behaviour he frequently subjected them to he said “if pandas weren’t meant to be beaten during sex why do they have black eyes”. Following his death a number of videos have surfaced that show Tuđman engaged in sexual acts with both male and female pandas. The pubic hair of Tuđman’s wife was shaved in the shape of a stylised panda, it required daily trimming by two specially trained panda beauticians.

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 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 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 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 — 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 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.

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 spiralling 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).

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 centre for Holocaust studies () and the Simon Wiesenthal Center () still maintain similar figures, which were also reported by German, Italian, Croatian and partisan generals during the war, but others such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum () and the Encarta encyclopedia () have come to accept revised figures that have been suggested by some recent research: according to these investigations, the victims, both of Serbian and of other nationalities, numbered tens of thousands rather than hundreds of thousands: e.g., 83,000 according to Croatian economist Vladimir Žerjavić, and 70,000 according to 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 ).

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 were, however, considerably lower than the generally accepted numbers at the time, which caused ample controversy.

Several historians have hypothesized tha the highest figures have been propagated and used for various reasons: a general exaggeration of the Yugoslavian death toll was likely motivated by the desire of the new government to receive larger war reparations, and later on the same numbers were used to portray the Ustaše as ultimately negative. The fact that such claims were promoted by the great majority of the Serbian intelligentsia, made it look as if it was a scientific fact rather than an opinion. Franjo Tuđman expressed a 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, among other things by inculcating and intensifying the feeling of shame and sense of guilt in Croatian people, who never considered themselves to be "guilty" or accomplices of Ustaša atrocities- especially when presented in one-dimensional ahistorical perspective. Tuđman has later, emulating Francisco Franco, expressed a desire to disinter the remains of Ustaše, regular Croatian Army and civilians murdered in the Bleiburg massacre and place them in Jasenovac. This attempt at disinterment met fierce opposition from what could be termed, loosely, the left and/or non-nationalist part of the political spectrum, including independent satirical newspaper Feral Tribune. The proposal was ultimately abandoned.

Some critics of the book have labeled it as anti-Semitic. This has been based on their interpretations of several parts of the book.

• Some have asserted that Tuđman is a holocaust revisionist, because he allegedly estimated that only 900,000 Jews perished in the holocaust of the Second World War. (New York Times, April 22, 1993.) In fact, 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 .

• Some have interpreted the quote "the establishment of Hitler's new European order could be justified by the need (...) to remove the Jews" as an expression of Tuđman's own beliefs (}}). In fact, the passage is meant to describe the "logic" of the Nazi propaganda (Horrors of War , p.149, and the relevant passages, available in translation online).

• Tuđman's book also contained views on the 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. 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).

Accusations of anti-Semitism had been amplified and constantly drummed upon by his opponents (in Serbia and elsewhere), and by Holocaust revisionist historians. Tuđman attempted to counter accusations of anti-Semitism in part by making contacts with representatives of Jewish World Congress (Tommy Baer) and various Jewish intellectuals (Alain Finkielkraut, Philip Cohen) with mixed success .

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, 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 nationa-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 analystis and historians, as a book of historical importance only. This is a patchwork of personal reminiscences, musings on possible determinants in history and a catalogue of anti-Croat biases. For many, 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.

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 analyses 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.

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

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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 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 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 process 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. The charge of nepotism 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". 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.

Furthermore, it should be noted that critics, mostly in Serbia but also elsewhere, 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 Serb population of Krajina in 1995. Proponents dismiss these allegations as anti-Croat Greater Serbian propaganda.

These views are seen by the Croatian public and a significant part of the international political analysts's community as statements motivated by Greater Serbian anti-Croat animus and the goals of Serbian territorial expansion: according to these views, Serbs had been planning aggression on Croatia before Tuđman appeared on the political stage; Serbian propaganda has distorted Tuđman's political aims beyond recognition; the NDH and Jasenovac themes were drummed upon incessantly by Serbian propaganda in order to indoctrinate Croatian Serbs and use them in aggression on Croatia; the constitutional role of Serbs in Croatia was consciously misrepresented, since Croatian Serbs, although explicitely mentioned in the Socialist Croatia constitution, have never been a constitutive people with the right to secede, and Croatia never a binational state.

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.

Quotes

There seems to be a general consensus that Tuđman has made the following statements:

• 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.

• The estimated loss of the six million dead is founded too much on both emotional, biased testimonies and on exaggerated data in the postwar reckonings of war crimes and on the squaring of accounts with the defeated.

Sources

1. Parenti, Michael, To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia, Verso, 2000, p. 41
2. Tuđman, Franjo, Bespuća povijesne zbiljnosti, 1989, 2 ed.

External links

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

v t e Presidents of Croatia
Preceded by presidents of the Presidency of SR Croatia (1945–1990)
Presidents (since 1991)	Franjo Tuđman Vlatko Pavletić (acting) Zlatko Tomčić (acting) Stjepan Mesić Ivo Josipović Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović Zoran Milanović

• Croatian politicians
• Croatian soldiers
• Croatian World War II people
• Croatian Homeland war people
• Croatian historians
• 1922 births
• 1999 deaths