Yugoslavia: A History of its Demise - Indymedia

202 UNWANTED INDEPENDENCE
Mate Boban, a Herzegovinan. Tudjman began to talk more intensely about a
partition of Bosnia-Herzegovina about that time, not the least, or so one may
suppose, because he was under the spell of the so-called “Herzegovinan lobby”
in Zagreb.
At the end of February 1992, Kljuić told me about some unbelievable but
revealing statements made by Tudjman when he was not yet president and was
only preparing for the first elections. Evidently Tudjman had told Klujić at that
time that he would garner 70 per cent of all the votes in Bosnia-Herzegovina for
the HDZ. To Klujić’s objection that the Croats comprised only 17 per cent of the
population of the republic, not 70 per cent, Tudjman answered that that was not
true; all the Muslims felt as Croats and would vote for the Croatian party.
One cannot, to be sure, reproach Tudjman that he would like to conduct a
Greater Croatia policy vis-à-vis Bosnia-Herzegovina and try to obtain the Drina
as the border for Croatia. As president, Tudjman behaved relatively moderately;
as already mentioned, he had not reckoned with his electoral victory himself. He
could nonetheless not refrain from doubtful statements. Indeed, it is possible that
Tudjman’s attitude, which was well known everywhere, may have encouraged
the Serbs on their part not to accept the newly emergent Bosnian state. The
leadership of the Bosnian Serbs was sooner prepared to respect the positions of
the Croats than those of the Muslims. The Croatian member of the Bosnian state
presidency, Miro Lasić, told me in March 1993 how Karadžić had at one point
offered to cooperate with the Croats, with the remark that together they would
“hurl the Muslims into the sea”.
Croatia’s undertaking, after the outbreak of hostilities in Bosnia in 1992, to
protect its countrymen there, is another matter. Croatia was effective in this
undertaking only in Herzegovina. Opposition politician Zdravko Tomac told me
in September 1992 that Tudjman had said the previous May that the Posavina in
northern Bosnia, i.e., the Sava plain, could not be held by Croatia. But some 300,
000 Croats lived there, albeit not Herzegovinans. It occurred to many people in
Zagreb in summer 1992 that Tudjman had not made any serious efforts to hold
the Posavina, even though this was the crucially important corridor which
connected Serbia with the Krajina and western Bosnia. Only a few bridgeheads
were held, of which one, Bosanski Brod, would later be sacrificed under not
entirely clear circumstances.
Tudjman and other representatives of the Croatian establishment took care to
mention, as a justification, first, that Croatia was under strong international
pressure and second, that a serious engagement in the Posavina would make too
strong a claim on Croatian forces. In fact, the Western states were at the time
threatening Croatia with sanctions, if it continued to maintain its presence on
Bosnian territory. The argument ran that if one was going to cover Serbia with
sanctions because it was supporting the Bosnian Serbs, then one had to do the
same to Croatia in the analogous case.
Against this simplistic argumentation, Tudjman could have offered diplomatic
resistance and could also mobilize support. In reality, Tudjman seemed to have