Franjo Tuđman

Franjo Tuđman was born in Veliko Trgovišće in 1922 and fought with the Yugoslav Partisans during World War II. After the war he rose to major general in the Yugoslav People's Army by 1960, then left the military to become a historian, earning a doctorate in 1965 and teaching at the Zagreb Faculty of Political Sciences. He was imprisoned in 1972 for his role in the Croatian Spring reform movement and spent the late communist years in relative obscurity. In 1989 he founded the Croatian Democratic Union, which won Croatia's first parliamentary elections in 1990, making him president. He pushed through a new constitution and an independence referendum that passed with 93 percent in May 1991; Croatia declared independence in June. Serb-majority areas revolted with Yugoslav Army backing, and Tuđman led the country through its War of Independence. A 1992 ceasefire came as fighting spread into Bosnia, where his government sided with Herzeg-Bosnia during the Croat-Bosniak War - a move that drew international criticism and an ICTY finding that he shared in a joint criminal enterprise for ethnic cleansing, though no conviction followed. He signed the Washington Agreement i