The death of Franjo Tudjman, the first president of independent Croatia, at the age of 77 from stomach cancer and a series of surgical complications, came towards the end of the author- itarian leader's second term as head of state. His departure plunges his young, enfeebled country - and the Balkans more broadly - into a fresh spate of dangerous uncertainty.
Seen from the vantage point of the late 1990s, Tudjman, the national father-figure, emerged as the improbable and unexpected victor of the wars of the Yugoslav succession of 1991-99, the worst carnage seen in Europe since the Nazis.
A committed Communist in his early years, Tudjman developed into an ardent Croatian nationalist, serving two terms in prison in communist Yugoslavia for his heresy. Together with his counterpart - some say mirror-image - in Belgrade, President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, he spearheaded and exploited the surge of nationalist sentiment that seized Yugoslavia's contending parts in the late 1980s and played a pivotal role in Yugoslavia's and Bosnia's bloody dismemberment.
During four years of military setbacks and what seemed like political bungling until 1995, Tudjman presided over two disastrous wars. These brought Croatia international recognition of its independence, but left the country crippled and partitioned by Serb rebels, with Tudjman's ambitions in Bosnia thwarted by Bosnian Muslim defeats of his nationalist proxies.
But the sudden and spectacular series of military routs of the Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia within a few months of May 1995, which set the scene for the American-brokered peace in Bosnia, left Tudjman looking triumphant. He savoured the victories with undisguised relish, whether on the tennis court, at the ballot box, or on the battlefield. While a shrewd and determined negotiator, he was also uncommonly frank about his plans and prejudices.
One crisp morning in January 1991, six months before the wars began and less than a year after he became president, he received me in the locker room at his tennis court on the outskirts of Zagreb. Tudjman had just won a doubles match. The mood was one of backslapping bonhomie with mid-morning champagne by the crate. Stipe Mesic, then president of Yugoslavia, skulked in a corner outside the changing room, banished by Tudjman since Mesic was a chain-smoker. Mesic, then a close associate, later broke with Tudjman when he saw the dogmatic leader failing to grasp the Croatian national interest, especially through the common cause with Milosevic in striving to carve up Bosnia.
As a fleet of BMWs and a team of French martial arts experts in black jumpsuits waited outside, Tudjman revealed his ideal vision for Yugoslavia. The country, he laughed, would be reorganised along the lines last tried in 1939, when the Serbs and Croats reached a deal to turn Yugoslavia into a Greater Croatia and a Greater Serbia. That, of course, meant wiping Bosnia off the map, with Zagreb and Belgrade slicing it up between them.
Bosnia's Muslims might be less than keen on the idea, but Tudjman had nothing but contempt for them, convinced they were just apostate Catholics and cowardly Croats, who would come to thank him eventually. Two months later, he discussed the plan with Milosevic at a secret meeting in a hunting lodge near the Serb-Croat border.
In those days, lunch at the presidential palace was a rich stew of central European and Balkan kitsch - bad, heavy food that put you to sleep, accompanied by a retinue of minions and visitors who stroked and flattered the president. Tudjman would bark orders, grunt disapproval, and interrupt whoever was speaking. He would later do himself no favours by repeating the rudeness with various US secretaries of state.
He was an easy figure to make fun of. But by late 1995, he was having the last laugh. In May that year his forces routed the Serb rebels in central Croatia. In a lightning campaign the following August, he retook the insurgents' centre of Knin, in the south-west. The Croats, in an uneasy and fitful alliance with Bosnia's Muslims, then also swept the Serbs out of large tracts of western and central Bosnia.
The result is an independent Croatia of 4.5m people, cleansed of its 600,000-strong Serbian minority, virtually territorially intact and with Tudjman's nationalist heirs also controlling tracts of western Bosnia-Herzegovina, de facto incorporating them into Greater Croatia.
Like the late Yugoslav dictator, Josip Broz Tito, who Tudjman increasingly sought to emulate in his last years, the president hailed from the rolling, hilly country north of Zagreb, known as Zagorje. His mother died when he was seven. He was just turning 19 when the Nazis and the Italians occupied Yugoslavia in 1941 and sponsored the establishment of the brutal Ustashe state comprising Croatia and Bosnia. Tudjman, along with his father, joined the fledgling partisan resistance headed by Tito that fought the Germans and the Ustashe. He rose rapidly through the ranks, largely on account of his political commitment to communism.
A year after the war ended, his father and his second wife were found shot dead at home. The suspicion of suicide suggests an eerie parallel with Milosevic, both of whose parents took their own lives.
Before he turned 40, Tudjman had been promoted to general, the youngest such officer in the Yugoslav army. As one of its main commissars, he was prominent in attending to communist indoctrination. He was based in the Serbian capital, Belgrade, where his three children were born, and also, ironically, where he served as president of Partizan, the Serbian soccer and sports club which was tied to the Yugoslav military. Decades later as president, he sparked a fans' rebellion by ordering the renaming of the main Zagreb football team.
Tudjman left the military in 1961 to devote himself to historical studies, a shift that resulted in his conversion from communism to nationalism. Studying the details of the second world war that Tito had ruthlessly suppressed, he became convinced that the sins of the Ustashe had been greatly exaggerated, and that Croatia was the victim of a communist and Serbian plot aimed at forever repressing its cultural and political identity and freedoms. His conversion matched the temper of the times in Zagreb, which, in the late 1960s, was in the grip of a national - and liberalising - revival. Tito cracked down hard in 1971 on what was known as the Croatian Spring. As one of the movement's foremost exponents, Tudjman was arrested and jailed. He was later kicked out of the Communist party and branded a fascist for querying the official line on the partisan- Ustashe conflict.
The 1971 crackdown ushered in two decades of Croatian quiescence, known as the silent years, and rudely shattered by the noisy eruptions of 1990-91. Tudjman's growing nationalism, and switch to the right, earned him another jail term in the 1980s. But he emerged from prison into the era in Belgrade of Slobodan Milosevic, who was busy exploiting Serbian nationalism to maximise his power and trigger the collapse of Yugoslavia.
Sandwiched by the uncompromising Milosevic to the east, and the small liberalising Slovenia to the west, eager to secede from Yugoslavia, the Croats had to come off the fence. That happened finally - and before Tudjman's arrival in power - at the last Communist party congress in Belgrade, in January 1990, a pivotal event in the collapse of Yugoslavia. The Slovenes walked out; Milosevic tried to seize control of the party and failed; the Croats hesitantly sided with the Slovenes and walked out, too. Three months later, the Croatian communists collapsed at their first free election after introducing a first-past-the-post system that backfired by entrenching Tudjman in power.
His rightwing Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), was set up in 1989, its coffers generously filled by the sizeable anti-communist diaspora in North America, Germany and Australia. Tudjman romped home with 41% of the vote, which gave him more than two-thirds of the seats. The campaign message was one of uncompromising nationalism, with no gestures of goodwill to the Serb minority. Tudjman was grateful, he told supporters, that he was married neither to a Serb, nor a Jew. Such latent anti-semitic sentiment re-emerged in his book Wastelands, a laboured and impenetrable work which sought to explain the Holocaust - and triggered allegations of racism and anti-semitism.
With Milosevic entrenched in Belgrade and spoiling for war, and Tudjman, by now triumphant in Zagreb and conspiring by his every blunder to help Milosevic, it was left to the Bosnian leader, Alija Izetbegovic, to wryly remark that the choice between the two was like choosing between leukaemia and a brain tumour. Despite the fragile alliance with Bosnia's Muslims forced on him by the Americans, Tudjman never stopped despising the Muslims.
After losing the 1991 war to Belgrade-backed Serb rebels, Tudjman, having won diplomatic recognition, played a canny waiting game, smuggling in arms and building up his army, before, with western backing, launching the 1995 strikes to recover his territory. By 1997, he had also recovered from the Serbs a final valuable strip of territory flanking the Danube in the east, known as eastern Slavonia.
Tudjman was a nationalist zealot, obsessed with his place in history. His nationalist drive brought him to purge the language of foreign elements and "Yugoslavisms", to rename the currency, streets, squares and even football teams, to denounce the democratic opposition as traitors, and to preside over a creeping rehabilitation of the quisling Ustashe regime.
In his final years, he appeared to be increasingly disturbed, obsessed with deathbed demons and foreign plots to undermine his achievements, which he regarded as a millennial apotheosis of Croatian aspirations. The prime targets of his wrath were western human rights monitors and philanthropists like George Soros, as well as the US state department and other "democracy-builders", who, he was convinced, were bent on rebuilding a new Yugoslavia and incorporating Croatia in a Balkan federation, when by rights it was a more sophisticated and civilised polity belonging to central Europe.
The Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in the Hague was another focus of his contempt, and he courted diplomatic isolation and economic sanctions by subverting cooperation with the tribunal and refusing to hand over suspects.
But Tudjman was a complex figure, who also adored the communist Tito. His increasing tendency to imitate the late Yugoslav dictator included taking over Tito's Zagreb and Adriatic residences, donning similar shining white uniforms, and telling a biographer that Tito was "the greatest Croatian politician so far" - until Tudjman, that is.
As he lay in hospital in Zagreb over the past month, his sycophantic spokesmen bragged that "Tudjman created Croatia". He embodied in his own emotional and political development a form of divided self that runs through Croatian history and continues to define the country's political life. Historically, the country had split between its pro-Yugoslav and pro-nationalist tendencies. During the second world war, this duality showed itself in the partisan-fascist civil war.
And Tudjman's ruling party continues to be riven between hardline nationalists and moderate conciliators. Many of the hardliners, previously grouped around the late defence minister Gojko Susak and now headed by Ivic Pasalic, Tudjman's key adviser, stem from Herzegovina or the diaspora - fierce anti-communists who fled Tito's Yugoslavia, or the offspring of old Ustashe families who escaped his revenge at the end of the second world war.
Tudjman has been both. First, a communist and Tito acolyte, then a Croat nationalist, anti-communist and anti-Yugoslav. He held the balance between the two wings of the ruling party, forever playing one side off against the other - while also seeking to reconcile them. He viewed himself as history's agent. The primary task was to preside over the birth of Croatian statehood and independence. That accomplished, he was obsessed with healing the national split personality and reconciling the two wings.
His most notorious and insensitive attempt at this came in late 1995 when he proposed literally digging up the past in a mass healing ritual. The remains of the Ustashe families buried at Bleiburg after being massacred by Tito's partisans in revenge killings should be dug up, he proposed, and laid to rest at Jasenovac, the infamous concentration camp where the Ustashe murdered tens of thousands of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies. The proposal sparked distaste and outrage. Croatian journalists who denounced the scheme were put on trial for slander.
Tudjman died without concluding his Croatian healing mission. The danger now is that the pervasive divide will be reopened, imperiling the peace in Bosnia and producing endless feuding in Zagreb. His HDZ could fall apart, with moderates around the foreign minister Mate Granic breaking with the hawks led by Pasalic, who controls the security and power apparatuses. Parliamentary elections are slated for January 3 and the HDZ could lose.
Paradoxically, the Yugoslav wars, which started as a Belgrade-sponsored quest for Greater Serbia, have produced a Croatia shorn of its Serbian minority. But if, in the longer-term, Croatia develops into a relatively stable, tourism-based, prosperous democracy, even Zagreb liberals and democrats who despised Tudjman may come to see him as a necessary figure in the establishing of modern Croatia.
Tudjman leaves a wife, two sons, one of whom has served as Croatian intelligence chief, the other a university lecturer, and a daughter who is a wealthy trader.
Franjo Tudjman, politician, born May 14 1922; died December 10 1999