From: pavlovic-milan@yale.edu (Milan Pavlovic)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.croatia
Subject: Franjo Tudjman, dictator.
Date: 21 Dec 1992 14:22:18 -0500
Organization: Yale University Science & Engineering UNIX(tm), New Haven, CT 06520-2158
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: minerva.cis.yale.edu

  From "The New York Times", published on December 18, 1992.  
Reprinted without permission, for "fair use" only.
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		Croatian Uses Past to Hide the Present

By: John F. Burns


   When visitors ascend the winding road that leads to Franjo Tudjman's
sprawling presidential villa, they are greeted by guards who could have stepped
out of a Viennese opera. Stock still, they seem like wax figures in their
scarlet tunics with a cross-hatching of gold brocade, and matching cloaks slung
dashingly across one shoulder.

   Nearly 18 months have passed since Croatia declared its independence from
Yugoslavia, and the signs of self-conscious nationalism are everywhere. Mostly,
this involves a reaching back across history, for flags and emblems and
ceremonial uniforms harking back to a time when Croatia was an outpost of the
Austro-Hungarian empire.

   By reviving symbols of the past, Mr. Tudjman and the strongly nationalist
Government he leads are trying to expunge the memories of more recent history,
when Croatia was an often-fractious component of monarchist, then Communist,
Yugoslavia. They may hope, too, that emblems of a grander past may ease a
troubled present in which Croatia's ambitions of gaining international help in
rebuilding after its war with Serbia last year, and Mr. Tudjman's own
standing, have been marred by condemnation of Croatia's role in the fighting in
Bosnia and Herzegovina. Croatian forces have effectively partitioned a third of
the territory in Bosnia.

  The burdens of those conflicts are everywhere. Nearly a year after the
Croatian war ended with a cease-fire negotiated by the United Nations, a third
of Croatia is still occupied by Serbia, which has defied the provisions of a
United Nations plan that was supposed to make international protectorates of 
the occupied areas. Nothing remotely like this has happened, and President  
Tudjman has threatened to abrogate the peace plan when it comes up for renewal
in March and oust the 14,000 United Nations troops sent here to carry it out.

Bankruptcy and Inflation

    Across the rest of Croatia, the official inflation rate is running at more
than 30 percent a month, and scores of factories and businesses have been idled
or bankrupted by the collapse of the Yugoslav economy. Nearly six million
tourists who used to come annually to resorts along the Adriatic coast have
disappeared, and many of the hotels that housed them have been given over to
some of the 700,000 refugees who have fled the fighting in the Balkans, 500,000
of them from Bosnia.

   Since Croatia had a pre-war population of 4.5 million, the refugees 
represent a population increase of more than 15 percent.

   For all this, Mr. Tudjman, who is 70 years old, brims with self-assurance
when he greets visitors to the villa in Pantovcak, the Zagreb suburb where he
moved his office after Serbian aircraft bombed the presidential palace last
year.

   "We believe Croatia will very quickly overcome the remnants of war," he told
reporters one night last week as they crowded around a vast table where Tito
once held conferences with political and military leaders.

In Tito's Shadow

    A former Communist who was a general in the Yugoslav Army, Mr. Tudjman
lives and works in the villa that was once the Zagreb residence of Tito, who
ordered Mr. Tudjman detained for two yearsin 1970's after his retirement from
the army for what were described as Croation nationalist activities.

   Photographs of Mr. Tudjman  in battle fatigues hang from hooks in the villa
that once carried Tito's portraits. Like Tito, who had a fondness for ceremony
and expected deference from those around him, Mr. Tudjman is known as a
martinet, insistent on presidential prerogatives and dismissive of a divided
opposition that failed four months ago to oust him in the second presidential
election in less than two years.

   Among his critics, Mr. Tudjman is commonly dismissed as a "dictator," no
better in many respects than Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia's President and the
principal architect of the Serbian offensives in Croatia and Bosnia. On the
surface, the similarities are striking. Both men are former Communists and
both built their present power bases on strident nationalism.

   In addition,the Croatian and Serbian leaders have often given the appearance
of being in collusion with one another over the partitioning of Bosnia,
particularly after a meeting in March 1991 in the Serbian town of 
Karadjordjevo, at which a territorial division of Bosnia was allegedly agreed 
between the two men. The reports, never convincingly denied by either leader, 
said they had decided to leave only about 15 percent of the territory to the 
republic's Muslims, who account for 44 percent of the population.

   There are those who contend that there is little to choose between the two
men and their governments, at least in terms of their nationalist agendas. For
months, Mr. Tudjman's  actions have been prompted at least in part by the
possibility that the United Nations might impose economic sanctions on Croatia
similar to those it imposed in May on Serbia.

Possibility of Sanctions

    The possibility of sanctions arose from the actions in Bosnia of the
Croatian Army, and of a nominally separate force of Bosnian Croats known as the
HVO, which have taken control of much of Bosnia outside the two-thirds seized 
by Serbian forces. In effect, the Croatian-controlled region of Bosnia has 
become an adjunct of Croatia, using Croatian money, flying the red, white and 
blue flag of Croatia, and answering, with only a pretense of local autonomy, 
directives from Zagreb.

   The charge that Croatia has behaved in Bosnia little better than Serbia has
blunted Western actions against Serbia, since those reluctant to take strong
action against Serbia over Bosnia have argued that similar actions would have 
to be taken against Croatia, too.

   The assertions have made Mr. Tudjman a virtual diplomatic pariah, traveling
outside Croatia only to negotiations elsewhere in Europe with other leaders of
the former Yugoslavia. Western officials who have met him say he is as elusive,
in his way, as Mr. Milosevic, the Serbian leader.

   "He's shrewd, no doubt about that," said one senior diplomat who has met 
with the Croatian leader at talks in Geneva. "He's not in Milosevic's league 
when it comes to making empty promises, but he's not a man you'd stake your 
life on, either."

Diplomats Mute Criticism

    The assertions of untrustworthiness are vigorously rejected by Mr. Tudjman,
and many diplomats in Zagreb consider them too harsh as well. Some believe 
that Mr. Tudjman's  actions in Bosnia have been dictated in part by the 
failure of Western nations to take a stronger stand against Serbia.

   In this view, the Serbian offensives that took control of most of eastern
Bosnia this summer, and which are continuing across northern Bosnia now, left
Croatia with little choice but to take control of the predominantly Croatian
region of western Herzegovina, and of other towns with large Croatian
populations in northern Bosnia.

   "He's like a squirrel in winter," one diplomat said. "He's taken control of
as much of Bosnia as he can, most of it areas where Croats are a strong
majority, and he'll hang on to it until he sees what happens."

   Mr. Tudjman does not put it so bluntly. But as Western attitudes toward
Serbia have toughened, he has shifted his position and now says that he favors
an independent Bosnia within its present borders, with power divided between
three "national communities" Serbs, Croats and Muslims, who would be 
autonomous.

   "The world has been looking for an alibi not to take action against Serbia 
in Bosnia, and it found it by blaming Croatia as well," Mr. Tudjman told
reporters last week. "But objectively, this guilt does not exist. Croatia
encouraged Croats in Bosnia to participate in the referendum that approved
Bosnia's independence, and we were the first to recognize Bosnia as an
independent state. Where we have fought in Bosnia, it has been to defend those
areas where Croats are a majority. How can anybody call this a crime?"
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Regards,
Milan Pavlovic
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		M A C E D O N I A  =  H E L L A S
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Newsgroups: soc.culture.croatia,soc.culture.yugoslavia,soc.culture.bosna-herzgvna