Word: tudjman
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Dates: during 1991-1991
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...week's end the leaders of Serbia and Croatia agreed on the outlines of yet another truce. Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and federal Defense Minister Veljko Kadijevic agreed to call off the offensive, while Croatian President Franjo Tudjman pledged to lift blockades around federal army bases. Both sides also pledged to discuss new political arrangements for the protection of minorities. But the news produced no immediate break in the fighting, raising fears that the atavistic struggle might be beyond diplomatic solution...
Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia's crypto-communist president, has steadily usurped federal authority in championing the resistance of Serbs in Croatia. As Croatians see it, his goal is to swallow up Serb-inhabited territory in the separatist republic. Milosevic might have met his match, though, in Franjo Tudjman, Croatia's fervently nationalist president. After the assault began, Tudjman offered to restore food and utilities to surrounded federal barracks in Croatia, but Kadijevic rejected the offer as inadequate and "cynical." Dressed in combat fatigues, Tudjman vowed to "fight and defend our homeland," and added angrily, "I think it is time for Europe...
Serbs and Croatians plainly were not in the mood to stop it. At the meeting Carrington conducted in Igalo, a seaside resort in the small Yugoslav republic of Montenegro, Milosevic and Tudjman glared at each other fiercely and refused to exchange a word. The agreement they signed never had a chance. When he returned to Zagreb, Tudjman fired his defense minister, Luka Bebic, for carrying out the cease-fire's terms prematurely -- and the belligerents leaped at each other again...
Western officials did not exempt Tudjman from fault. Said a U.S. diplomat: "The Croatian government is far from blameless or democratic, and it has severely discriminated against Serbs living in Croatia." But Milosevic's aims are expansionist, and success on his part threatens to undo everything the E.C. stands...
...persistence of such fears even in the highest echelons of the Serbian government hardly bodes well for peace talks. Croatian President Tudjman, as strident a nationalist as Milosevic, has done little to allay them. Had Tudjman made even perfunctory mention of his republic's 600,000 Serbs -- some 12% of the population -- in the Croatian constitution adopted last December, perhaps the conflict would not have grown as violent...