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Although he fought with Tito's Partisans against the Croatian fascists in World War II and became the youngest general in Tito's Yugoslavia, Tudjman would later become a vehement Croatian nationalist, criticized for his historical writings that vastly downplayed the number of Jews and Serbs killed at Croatia's World War II Jasenovac concentration camp.

Tudjman benefited by the perception in the West that he was the lesser evil compared with Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, whose Serbian forces benefited by the acquisition of the military hardware of the Yugoslav National Army (JNA). As Serbian forces and paramilitaries conquered large swathes of territory in Croatia and Bosnia in an effort to carve a "Greater Serbia" out of the remains of Yugoslavia, they brutally expelled and killed Croats and Muslims. Some 8,000 Croatians were killed, and 200,000 were forced to flee, as Serbian forces conquered a quarter of Croatian territory. Another 200,000 people were killed in Bosnia.

In the calculus of the Balkans wars, Tudjman was perceived not only as a lesser evil than Milosevic but as a necessary one, the only viable bulwark against Milosevic's genocidal campaign to wipe out Muslims and Croats in the territory he claimed as Greater Serbia. In 1994, Washington sent retired U.S. military officers to train Tujdman's army how to wipe out Serbian gains. In addition, Washington's ambassador to Croatia, Peter Galbraith, secretly negotiated a deal by which arms were shipped to the terribly outgunned Bosnian Muslims via Croatia, which took a cut of the arms -- this in violation of an international arms embargo on the former Yugoslavia which disadvantaged the landlocked Bosnian Muslims.

In 1995, Tudjman's U.S.-trained Croatian army conducted Operation Storm, the wildly successful and horribly brutal military operation that rooted Serbian forces from Croatia, forced hundreds of thousands of Serbian civilians to flee for their lives, and ultimately forced Milosevic to the negotiating table.

But Operation Storm, in which Croatian commanders strategically used terror to force Croatia's entire Serbian minority to flee, would later come to haunt Tudjman and his generals, who came under scrutiny from the U.N. international war crimes tribunal this year for atrocities against civilians.
salon.com | Dec. 13, 1999

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