Franjo Tuđman

Biography

Franjo Tuđman was born in 1922 in Veliko Trgovišće in the Hrvatsko Zagorje region, where his father was a local leader of the Croatian Peasant Party. He joined the communist-led Yugoslav Partisans in 1942 and after the war built a career in the Yugoslav People's Army, working in the defence ministry in Belgrade and becoming in 1960 the army's youngest general. In the 1950s he also ran the Partizan sports club in Belgrade.

Leaving the army in 1961, he turned to history. He directed the Institute for the History of the Workers' Movement of Croatia in Zagreb until 1967, taught at the Faculty of Political Science in Zagreb and took a doctorate at the Zadar faculty in 1965. His Croat-centred reading of Yugoslav history, a plagiarism accusation and his backing for the 1967 declaration on the Croatian language cost him his post and his party membership in 1967. He was jailed for his part in the Croatian Spring and again in the 1980s over interviews given abroad.

In June 1989 he founded the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), which won Croatia's first multiparty elections in 1990, and the new parliament elected him head of the republic. He introduced a new constitution, led Croatia to independence in 1991 and through its war with rebel Serb forces and the Yugoslav army. He backed the Croats of Herzeg-Bosnia in their war with the Bosniaks, then signed the 1994 Washington Agreement with Alija Izetbegović; in 1995 he ordered Operation Storm and signed the Dayton Agreement.

Re-elected in 1992 and 1997, he governed in an increasingly authoritarian style until his death from cancer in December 1999. A later ICTY judgment found that he had shared in the joint criminal enterprise of Herzeg-Bosnia's leaders, though he was never charged.