PATRIOTS, VILLAINS, AND FRANJO TUĐMAN

Seeing past the image of any political leader is difficult; in Tuđman\u27s case, it is doubly so because he was branded as a radical nationalist by the Yugoslav regime, and he was consistently portrayed as a dangerous nationalist when he emerged twenty years later as the leader of the HDZ. To understand Tuđman historically, it is first necessary to understand the realities of the 1990s, not simply cite and repeat stereotypes, propaganda, and moral injuctions of the period. What emerges when we do so is a Tuđman whose insistence on the rights of small peoples to create their own states made him a villain to some, a patriot to others, and an enigma to most