West Grapples With Tudjman Even in Death

Today’s funeral for President Franjo Tudjman has confronted Western democracies with the same diplomatic dilemma they struggled with during his lifetime: What show of respect is due a man who led his people out of Communist dictatorship only to impose his own brand of authoritarian rule?

The diplomatic messages received here Sunday confirming the attendance of foreign dignitaries for Tudjman’s interment reflected the high-level hand-wringing over which emissaries--and what message--the world’s leading democracies wanted to send, as few major powers had responded by nightfall.

Only Turkey planned to send its head of state, and only Hungary and Macedonia from the 20 countries that had confirmed some form of official attendance were dispatching their prime ministers for the graveside rituals at Mirogoj Cemetery and a memorial service at Zagreb Cathedral.

The United States did not send an envoy from Washington and will instead be represented by the ambassador to Croatia, William D. Montgomery, said a State Department official in Washington. A Croatian Foreign Ministry official said the office had received no word whatsoever from Washington about U.S. attendance, nor from Britain, France, Germany or most other European nations.

The slow responses and modest delegations reflected the outside world’s judgment that Tudjman, who died Friday, was to blame for much of the violence and bloodshed that afflicted the Balkans during his decade in office, even if the chief instigator is widely seen to have been Slobodan Milosevic, now president of Yugoslavia.

During the trials of Bosnian Croat war crimes defendants, Tudjman was identified as the ultimate power behind Croatian military excesses in Bosnia-Herzegovina. He was also believed to be under investigation for complicity in crimes against humanity, if not among those actually named in sealed indictments.

But with politicians of a more democratic stripe currently positioned to defeat Tudjman’s cronies in parliamentary elections next month, some Western diplomats worry that they could be missing an opportunity to signal support for Croatia’s new political inclinations by sending a prominent figure to the departed autocrat’s last rites.

Other analysts, however, see the reluctance of U.S. and other Western leaders to attend the funeral as the appropriate message to Croatian voters that they will never be accepted as part of a democratic Europe if they persist in electing nationalist leaders.

“I don’t think it risks showing disrespect for the independence and sovereignty of Croatia to send the U.S. ambassador. It’s a sign of support for a democratic Croatia to withhold high-level representation” until a more progressive leadership is in power, said John Fox, director of the Washington office of the Open Society Institute, which supports democracy-building in Eastern Europe.

Some European officials, including British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook and Italian Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema, took the opportunity of Tudjman’s passing to urge Croats to consider embarking on a more democratic path.

Tudjman took office in early 1990, after free elections that, along with those in Slovenia, led to the breakup of the Yugoslav federation and to bloody struggles for independence a year later. Human rights groups have loudly criticized his leadership for driving at least 300,000 Croatian Serbs from their homes in the Krajina region since Croatia won it back militarily in August 1995.

Tudjman also took an increasingly hard line against political rivals over the past few years, jailing media critics, enacting a law against insulting the president and blocking the work of war crimes investigators.

Despite the setbacks he dealt Croats seeking closer ties with the rest of Europe and an escape from the legacy of Balkan chaos, Tudjman enjoyed the respect, even devotion, of many of his countrymen for bringing about their first sovereign state in 1,000 years.

No date for a new presidential election has been set by acting head of state Vlatko Pavletic, but the vote must be held within 60 days of Tudjman’s death, meaning it will come no more than a few weeks after the Jan. 3 parliamentary elections.