The View from Bosnia and Herzegovina on Franjo Tuđman’s “Bosnian Policy”
The View from Bosnia and Herzegovina on Franjo Tuđman’s “Bosnian Policy”

Summary/Abstract: What Franjo Tuđman thought and wrote about, and his policies toward Bosnia and Herzegovina were and still are much debated. Thousands of newspaper articles, hundreds of analyses, and dozens of books have been written about Tuđman’s attitude toward Bosnia and Herzegovina. Most of them are grounded in the myth of the “partition of Bosnia and Herzegovina” which Tuđman allegedly arranged with Serbian President Slobodan Milošević. This is the favorite theory of Bosniak nationalists, Tuđman’s opponents in Croatia, Yugo-nostalgists, and all of those who attempt to justify all that transpired in Bosnia and Herzegovina in this manner. The latter category in particular includes all European/British diplomats who considerably contributed to the wartime horrors in Bosnia and Herzegovina and who cannot come to terms with Yugoslavia’s collapse. But it is precisely the accountability for the collapse or partition of Yugoslavia that is ascribed to Tuđman. Even when he is accused of “partitioning Bosnia and Herzegovina.” However, rarely, if ever, is any consideration given to the manner in which the political and social elite of Bosnia and Herzegovina treated Tuđman and where the roots of these accusations lie.

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