Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

Croatia within Yugoslavia. Ultimately, he served only nine months. Later, in 1981, a similar
situation occurred; this time, he served only eleven months of a three-year sentence.
In the aftermath of Tito’s death in 1980, Tudjman, an unabashed Croatian nationalist,
voiced his chauvinism more and more openly, increasingly seeking to assert greater autonomy
(though stopping short of calling for independence outright). He was, however, at
the forefront of those advocating secession by 1991, as Croatia joined Slovenia in its call
for an exit from the federal state. Fending off Serbian military efforts to thwart Croatian
self-determination by heading up a bloody and destructive war for independence,
Tudjman emerged as a public hero throughout Croatia. Having won independence and
now claiming a mandate, Tudjman then led Croatian forces into Bosnia-Herzegovina in
1992 in a quest to achieve the Greater Croatia that had been mapped out half a century
earlier by the occupying Germans. This, at first, brought him into conflict with Slobodan
Milosevic (1941–2006), the president of Serbia, and his (Milosevic’s) ambitions for a
Greater Serbia in Bosnia. Eventually, they agreed to partition Bosnia and expel the
Muslims by means of ethnic cleansing.
The Dayton Agreement of November 21, 1995, and the Paris Protocol of December 14,
1995, blocked this dream, though the Croatian part of Bosnia is now effectively an extension
of Croatia. Throughout his tenure as the president of independent Croatia, Tudjman
tried to revive radical ethnic nationalism by frequent references to Croatia’s Ustashe past
during World War II, when the Germans permitted a larger Croatia, including much of
Bosnia. Though he claimed not to be a fascist, many of his actions pertaining to national
issues made him appear as one: in addition to his ethnonationalist ideas and policies, he
also harbored a violent antisemitism. (A 1988 book by Tudjman, for instance, asserted
that nine hundred thousand, not 6 million, Jews died in the Holocaust—a historical
episode that was, in his view, greatly exaggerated.) While he was still alive, Tudjman was
never indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY)
for war crimes, though documentary evidence uncovered later demonstrated his complicity
in planning and authorizing ethnic cleansing against Serbs and Bosnian Muslims in
Croat areas. Since his death, Croatian political life has moved closer to the political center,
and the type of state created by Tudjman has been largely reformed, modernized, and
brought into the mainstream of European life.
Tuol Sleng. Tuol Sleng was a Khmer Rouge prison in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
Originally a high school, in 1975 it was converted by the Khmer Rouge into a prison. It
became, in fact, the main interrogation center of the Khmer Rouge’s génocidaires, codenamed
S-21 (Security Complex number 21) by the Santebal, the Khmer Rouge’s feared
secret police. Between 1975 and the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, at least sixteen
thousand victims were incarcerated in Tuol Sleng prison (so far as can be ascertained, only
seven victims came out alive, having outlasted the regime), “interrogated”—that is,
tortured—and executed, mostly on trumped up charges of having supported (in one
capacity or another) the enemies of the Khmer Rouge’s communist revolution. Indeed,
most of the victims were innocent, regardless of the “confessions” they made that were
extracted under inhuman treatment.
Significantly, those who ran the prison—in particular, the prison director, Khang Khek
Iev, known as “Comrade Duch” (b. 1942)—explicitly designed it to serve as a source of
terror, a symbol of the government’s omnipotence. Its functionaries were not especially
interested in the innocence or guilt of their victims, but in expeditiously processing a
TUOL SLENG
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