They betrayed in time
In 1981, just a year after the death of Josip Broz Tito, a book by the not-too-famous Croatian dissident was published in New York. It was the work of the disgraced ex-director of the Zagreb Institute for the History of the Labor Movement, Franjo Tudjman, "Nationalism in Modern Europe", in which there seemed to be nothing essentially new. However, it made an extremely important conclusion for the West aiming at the collapse of Yugoslavia:
"The position of the Republic of Croatia in Yugoslavia is comparable to that of India during the period of British colonial rule."
Catholic, although at that time still socialist Croatia and the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina went for a direct split of the united Yugoslavia already in the first half of the 1990s. And first Zagreb and Sarajevo, feeling the guarantees of their own impunity, agreed on mutual borders.
But already in June-August 1995, by joint efforts, they de facto liquidated the Serbian Republic of Krajina. The Serbian Krajina, created in response to Croatia's desire to secede from the SFRY, was located in the south-west of Croatia. It had 12,000th Knin as its capital and bordered on Bosnia and Herzegovina, and existed for less than four years.
The reprisals against Serbs who wished to remain in Croatia were infinitely cruel. As a result of the occupation of Krajina, which was directly supported by NATO, up to 250 thousand Serbs fled from Croatia, and the minimum number of victims of the massacre of Serbs is now estimated at four thousand people. According to the organization "Veritas", which unites the Krajina Serbs in exile, the number of dead and missing civilians in Krajina in August 1995 alone amounted to at least 1,042 people.
The unprecedented Croatian pressure is not hard to explain. On November 15, 1994, the United States and Croatia signed an open-ended agreement on military cooperation. According to the then Croatian Foreign Minister Mate Granic, the United States advised the Croatian army as part of the treaty on an offensive against Krajina. At the same time, up to 60 military advisers from the American private military company MPRI participated in the training of Croatian special units and guards brigades.
Germany immediately welcomed the victory over Serbian Krajina. Representative of the German Embassy in Zagreb K. Ender, shortly after the liquidation of Krajina, announced on Zagreb radio:
“Germany shares the joy of military success with you and expresses its praise for this war. Even analysts who know more than me could not have foreseen such a swift and magnificent action."
Several years later, Croatian leaders were ready to go further. In the early 2000s, provocations on the Croatian-Slovenian border sharply became more frequent, and since then in Slovenia, the proclamations "Slovenia is Croatia!" The claims of Croatian nationalists extend not only to Slovenian Koper (formerly Kapdistria), Piran and Portorož, but also … to Italian Trieste (Tristia).
Characteristically, at the same time, some "experts" in Croatia today continue to periodically advocate to deprive Bosnia and Herzegovina of even a microscopic access to the Adriatic near the town of Neum. The basis for such claims is that this withdrawal "geographically breaks the territorial unity of Croatia."
In this regard, it should be recalled that in 1946, in a unified Yugoslavia, the Croatian authorities lobbied for the construction of the port of Ploce in the extreme southeast of Croatia, near its coastal border with Bosnia. This was necessary to strengthen Croatia's presence in the South Adriatic. The port was built by 1952, but the authorities of Bosnia and Herzegovina insisted on transferring it to this republic, in view of its miniature exit to the Adriatic near the resort town of Neum.
However, Zagreb persisted, and Belgrade did not risk exacerbating relations with the Croats. In the mid-1960s, a railway was built from Sarajevo to Ploce, which facilitated the foreign trade relations of Bosnia and Herzegovina, albeit under the transit control of Croatia. Bosnia and Herzegovina still enjoys duty-free transit through Ploce, but the republic periodically carries out "public" campaigns for non-recognition of the border with Croatia near Jadran.
Heroes and deeds
We can say that Franjo Tudjman was the ideological founder and soon the military-political leader of Croatian separatism. A loyal communist for almost a quarter of a century with a truly detective biography. Already in April 1944, 22-year-old Tudjman became the commander of the communist partisan brigade as part of the Liberation Army of JB Tito. In 1953, the hero of the struggle for freedom became a colonel, and in 1959 - a major general. He served in the General Staff of the JNA.
In 1961, Tudjman's career as a combat officer took a sharp turn: he became director of the Zagreb Institute for the History of the Labor Movement. Moreover: he was allowed to lecture in the USA, Canada, Italy, Austria. Apparently, the general had the dizziness of success, which is not uncommon in such cases. Tudjman defended his doctoral dissertation in Zagreb on the crisis of monarchical Yugoslavia, but very soon he was caught outright plagiarism.
He was expelled from the Communist Party, fired from the institute and demoted. The frustrated scientist soon founded an underground nationalist group in Zagreb, which quickly established ties with Muslim extremists in Bosnia. The well-known Aliya Izetbegovich was already at the head of them.
The career of this Muslim underground worker developed in parallel with the Croatian dissident. He was also an eminent publicist and back in 1970 illegally published in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as in Serbian Kosovo, his now famous, and for many terrorists - a tabletop "Islamic Declaration".
In it, Izetbegovich very convincingly, even fanatically asserted that
“There can be no peace or coexistence between the Islamic faith and non-Islamic political institutions of power. Our path begins not with the seizure of power, but with the conquest of people."
For this work, he received his 14 years in prison in 1975. In 1989, after being released, Aliya Izetbegovic led the anti-Serb campaign of Bosnian chauvinists, who became allies of Croatian like-minded people and extremist Kosovars. Later, despite the high posts held by Izetbegovic (he became president of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1990), he was not called the man who drowned Bosnia in blood.
Meanwhile, Franjo Tudjman, like many dissidents, can be said to be "lucky" to be in prison. He became one of the "martyrs of conscience" on charges of supporting nationalism and even sat down twice - in 1972 and 1981. Moreover, in 1972, Tudjman was first sentenced to two years, but released after nine months.
Soon, the newly-minted Croatian dissident joined the campaign of the Western and émigré media about the unviability of a unified Yugoslavia. His second prison term (already three years) happened just in time - one by one the communist leaders left, everything went to detente, and in September 1984 he was again released early, after serving only 17 months.
At the same time, Aliya Izetbegovich was actively looking for and finding allies, among whom was the notorious leader of Al-Qaeda (banned in the Russian Federation) Osama bin Laden. Here is the data published in Sarajevo, "Nezavisimye Novosti" dated May 2, 2011:
“Bin Laden announced that he would send Muslim volunteers to Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 1993, the Embassy of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Vienna issued bin Laden a passport."
The German magazine "Zeitenschrift" also wrote about the role of Osama bin Laden in the Yugoslav events. Thus, in the publication "Bin Laden in Sarajevo" dated September 11, 2004, it is said that the main accused of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, visited Bosnia and Herzegovina and was a NATO ally in the Balkans during the war in this region. in the early 1990s. And this information has not been refuted so far …
Chevalier of the Foreign Order
Let us return, however, to the person of F. Tudjman. In June 1987, the Yugoslav authorities allowed him and his family to leave for Canada. There and in the United States, he lectured on the Croatian aspiration for independence, the unenviable prospect of the SFRY, on the "exaggeration" of accusations of the Ustasha Croats in their repression against the Serbs during the Second World War.
Not without help from the West and the Vatican, Tudjman and his associates established the Christian Democratic Union of Croatia in 1990. He has repeatedly stated that Croatia during the Second World War was not only a Nazi entity, "how much it expressed the millennial aspirations of the Croatian people for independence."
Apparently, the new inoculation of nationalism for the Croats turned out to be very strong. Franjo Tudjman was elected President of Croatia in 1990, 1994 and 1997, and always with a large majority of votes. He became Marshal of Croatia immediately after the bloody destruction of the Serbian Krajina Republic in 1995.
However, an attempt to amend Croatian criminal law to criminalize “the glorification of fascist, nationalist and other totalitarian ideologies or the promotion of racism and xenophobia” was nevertheless made in 2003. Although the amendment was adopted by the Croatian Parliament (Croatian Sabor), The Constitutional Court of the Republic of Kh., By its ruling of November 27, 2003, rejected it.
The Council for the Study of the Consequences of the Rule of Non-Democratic Regimes under the Government of the RH in its conclusion (February 2018) equated the Ustashe regime in Croatia with the socialist system of the former Yugoslavia. And since February 1992, the pro-Nazi "Croatian Liberation Movement", founded in Argentina in 1956 by the former collaborationist-dictator of the "NGH" A. Pavelic, has been operating in the country without restrictions. Those who escaped from Yugoslavia in 1945, not without the help of the Vatican.
According to the report of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation "On the situation with the glorification of Nazism and the spread of neo-Nazism" dated May 6, 2019, in Croatia there are regular acts of vandalism in relation to memorials to Yugoslav partisans and monuments in their places of burial. Only for 1991-2000. in the country, 2,964 such objects were destroyed. It was also noted that the Ustashis and their allies are being glorified in the country's mass media, and representatives of the Catholic Church are participating in these campaigns.
Nevertheless, shortly after the massacre of the Serbian Krajina, Franjo Tudjman was awarded … the Russian medal named after Marshal Zhukov. This award was solemnly presented to the Croatian politician on November 5, 1996 at the Russian Embassy in Zagreb. With the wording "For active contribution to the Victory over fascism and on the centenary of the birth of Marshal Zhukov."
