ZAGREB, Croatia -- President Franjo Tudjman, who led his country to independence from former Yugoslavia but was assailed for nationalist policies that helped fuel the war in Bosnia, has died, state television announced Saturday.
The announcement did not specify the cause or time of death for the 77-year-old leader, hospitalized since Nov. 1. The announcement came at a special 2 a.m. newscast."The president of Croatia, the founder of the independent Croatian state, has died," the announcement said.
Tudjman had been hospitalized since undergoing emergency intestinal surgery Nov. 1. He had received medical treatment in Washington, in 1996, for what U.S. sources said was stomach cancer. But Tudjman denied that, and his medical team in Zagreb said he had been treated for an ulcer and swollen lymph nodes.
"The big heart of president Franjo Tudjman ceased to beat," Parliament speaker Vlatko Pavletic said on television. The constitution calls for Pavletic, who has been filling in for Tudjman, to become the next president.
Tudjman leaves a mixed legacy.
Once the youngest general in communist Yugoslavia's army, he became the first president of independent Croatia, revered by many Croats for establishing statehood in 1991. But he displayed a disregard for democracy, a strong dislike of Muslims and Serbs, and a lust for power and Croat nationalism that led him to suppress dissent and opposition.
In striving to create an ethnically pure Croatia and to control the Croat part of neighboring Bosnia-Herzegovina, Tudjman took actions that contributed to the 3 1/2-year war in Bosnia.
Yet unlike his Yugoslav counterpart, Slobodan Milosevic, he achieved his principal goals -- an independent Croatia bordered by a weakened Bosnian neighbor -- without incurring the severe international condemnation and sanctions which hobbled the government in Belgrade.
Nurturing his reputation as the father of the nation, Tudjman retained his virtual one-man rule to the end despite a reputation for corruption, cronyism and inefficiency that plagued his ruling Croatian Democratic Union.
Tudjman was born May 14, 1922, to a poor farming family in the northwestern Croatian village of Veliko Trgovisce.
At age 19, as World War II engulfed former Yugoslavia, he joined the Communist partisans fighting the pro-Nazi Ustasha regime. After the war, he was promoted to the Yugoslav Army general staff in Belgrade.
In 1960 -- at age 38 -- he was promoted to general in the Yugoslav forces, but he left the military two years later to study history and eventually headed the Institute for the History of the Workers' Movement, an instrument of the communist government.
Tudjman began turning from communism to nationalism during this period.
In 1981, he was sentenced to jail, for three years, and banned from public activity for speaking out against the Yugoslav communist system.
He returned to public prominence in 1989, when he formed his party.
Denouncing communism and tapping into rising nationalist sentiment, Tudjman was elected president in May 1990 in the first multiparty elections in Croatia, then still a Yugoslav republic. He was helped by voters' fears of the growing Serb nationalism Milosevic was fostering in Serbia and the Serb-populated regions of Croatia.
Tudjman proclaimed Croatia's independence from Serb-led Yugoslavia in June 1991.
The move prompted a rebellion by the country's Serbs, who also were angered by Tudjman's revival of Ustasha symbols to promote Croat nationalism.
The rebellion triggered a six-month war in which at least 10,000 people were killed. Serb rebels, backed by the Yugoslav army, seized a third of the country -- territory that Tudjman's forces would recapture only four years later.
In 1992 Tudjman turned his attention to Bosnia, backing Croats there who wanted to break away from the multiethnic state and join with Croatia.
That idea brought him into strange symbiosis with his greatest political foe, Milosevic.
The two leaders shared a goal of dividing Bosnia.