By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, April 30, 1990; Page A13

ZAGREB, YUGOSLAVIA -- His bodyguards are downstairs eating cookies, staring out windows and scrutinizing leafy streets for possible assassins.

Upstairs in a suburban house turned command center, former Yugoslav army general Franjo Tudjman, whose nationalist party won a crushing victory April 22 in Croatia's first free election since World War II, explains his need for protection.

"It is not far from their reasoning that they would try an assassination attempt. You know that they killed a Croat leader in parliament in Belgrade. They do not like a situation where they do not dominate," said Tudjman, 67, who is soon to become president of Croatia.

"They" are Serbians, people of the largest and most populous republic in Yugoslavia. Here in Croatia, the second-largest and second most-populous republic in the Yugoslav federation, it is rare to hear a successful Croat politician speak of Serbians without alarmist adjectives. Among Tudjman's favorites are "hegemonistic" and "expansionistic."

The overwhelming victory of his party in this month's elections is the most compelling evidence so far that the post-Communist politics of Eastern Europe are going to be swayed -- and often controlled -- by nationalist insecurities, ancient land disputes and demands for "historical justice." Tudjman's Croatian Democratic Union party appears set, after the first round of parliamentary elections, to win more than 60 percent of the seats in the Croatian legislature.

When he takes power, Tudjman says his first order of business will be to "remove" a number of Serbs who now hold jobs in the Croatian government, police and media. There are "five to six times as many as there should be," he said.

Then, Tudjman and his advisers say, they plan to cut in half the amount of taxes that Croatia pays to the federal capital in Belgrade, located in Serbia, and to rewrite the Croatian constitution in such a way that the republic will become a "sovereign state."

If the federal government in Belgrade does not like it, then Tudjman's party is committed to making Croatia -- with its 4.6 million people, its oil resources and its booming tourist industry -- "an independent state outside Yugoslavia."

Tudjman's electoral triumph, along with the victory this month of a separatist coalition in the neighboring western republic of Slovenia, seems likely to force Yugoslavia either to redefine itself as a loose "confederation" of sovereign states or else split into several new nations.

"This election was formally a multi-party election, but what it really amounted to was a plebiscite in which the Croatian people voted for Croatia," said Svonko Lerotic, a professor of political science at the University of Zagreb.

"Mr. Tudjman understood this better than any other candidate. He is the first political leader who has managed to free the Croatian people of their complex about being second-class citizens. He unburdened them," said Lerotic, who ran as a candidate for parliament but finished a distant second to an opponent from Tudjman's party.

Ever since he was a 15-year-old student in Zagreb, Tudjman said, he has been worried by what he calls "Great Serbian hegemonistic desires." He turned to Marxism as a "revolutionary means to make a free and sovereign Croatia."

He fought with the Communist partisans against the Germans in World War II and joined the Yugoslav government of Tito. He became a general in Belgrade, where he was a key theoretician in the creation of the People's Army, which trained soldiers in every factory.

Tudjman, however, gave up on Marxism, as well as on the cushy life of a Belgrade general, when it became clear that Communist Yugoslavia was not about to grant sovereignty to Croatia.

He came home to Zagreb in 1961, got a PhD in history, wrote four books and insinuated himself into the Croatian nationalist movement. In 1972, after Tito crushed the Croatian movement, Tudjman was sent to prison for a year. Ten years later, after he demanded sovereignty for Croatia in interviews with foreign journalists, he was imprisoned again.

When free politics became possible last year, Tudjman organized the Croatian Democratic Union. He had far greater organizational skills than his competitors, and he barked orders like the former general he is. He recruited 600,000 party members, set up local party units in nearly every town in Croatia, attracted money and expertise from Croats living abroad and delivered up to four stump speeches a day. By the end of the three-month campaign, Tudjman's rallies were drawing crowds of nearly a quarter-million people.

The message was simple, endlessly repetitive and brazenly nationalistic. His staff waved the Croatian flag, his singers sang long-banned Croatian folk songs, and he proclaimed "the genuine and inalienable right of the entire Croatian nation, within its historical and natural borders, to self-determination including secession."

"Tudjman succeeded in collecting all the fears and frustrations in Croatia," said Branko Caratan, a spokesman for the republic's communist party, whose 45-year lock on power was shattered by Tudjman.

Nearly all the fears and frustrations of the Croats are tied to ancestral conflicts with Serbia. The two Slavic peoples share a common language but little else.

The religion of Croatia is Roman Catholic, the alphabet is Roman, the historical ruler was the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The religion of Serbia is Eastern Orthodox, the alphabet is Cyrillic, the historical ruler was Turkey.

"It is West versus East. Croats belong to the West culturally. The Serbian people belong to the Oriental culture. This difference should not be a reason for confrontation," said Cardinal Franjo Kuharic, the Roman Catholic bishop of Zagreb and a Croat.

But that difference has fueled savage confrontation, particularly in this century. The assassination that keeps Tudjman's bodyguards on their toes in the Zagreb suburbs occurred in Belgrade in 1928, when Tudjman was 6 years old.

Stjepan Radic, a popular Croat nationalist and member of the Yugoslav parliament, refused to cooperate with the Serbian-controlled government. He called members of the cabinet "swine." He was shot on the floor of parliament by a Montenegrin deputy. The Yugoslav republic of Montenegro is a traditional Serbian ally.

Tudjman's party says there was an assassination attempt in March of this year when a Serb with a pistol charged a podium from which Tudjman was speaking. The weapon, however, was a non-lethal gas-powered pistol, according to a Croatian journalist who witnessed the event and later examined the weapon.

The governments of Croatia and Serbia fought on opposite sides in both world wars. During World War II, the Croat Ustashi regime collaborated with the Nazis and used its position to massacre Serbs, Jews and Gypsies. Some historians say about a quarter of a million people were murdered.

The April 22 election revived this most bitter of memories. The Serbian assembly in Belgrade debated how Croatia should pay reparations for its war crimes. Politika, a Belgrade newspaper that espouses the Serbian nationalist position, referred to election-night celebrations at Tudjman's headquarters as "a vampire ball."

Tudjman, who turned historian after giving up his military career, has written that the victims of the Ustashi numbered fewer than 70,000. Although he condemns the "fascist crimes" of that "quisling" regime, against which he actively fought, his campaign speeches have praised the Ustashi government as "the expression of the historical aspirations of the Croatian nation for its independent state."

Tudjman has been described by a close acquaintance as "an authoritarian" personality who runs his campaign organization along the lines of "Bolshevik partisan traditions."

This description, not coincidentally, is also used by students of Yugoslav politics to describe Slobodan Milosevic, the tough-talking president of Serbia.

Milosevic made himself famous and powerful in Serbia -- and feared elsewhere in Yugoslavia -- by telling Serbs that nationalism is a good thing. Tito's strategy for preserving Yugoslavia had been to keep Serbs from thinking -- or at least saying -- any such thing. Serbs make up 42 percent of the population, and their frustrated sense of national destiny makes them an explosive force.

By unleashing decades of pent-up Serbian nationalistic feelings, Milosevic became a kind of folk hero in Serbia. For the sake of nationalism, the Serbs, who tend to be strongly anti-Communist, have even tolerated the fact that Milosevic is an old-time doctrinaire Communist.

Here in Croatia, Milosevic is seen as a Serbian devil. The standard personality sketch, which is offered by waiters and cabbies, young mothers and old politicians, paints Milosevic as a man following what one called "the classic pattern of megalomaniacal, hegemonistic Big Serbia."

"If it weren't for Milosevic, Tudjman could never have happened," said a Western diplomat here.

In Croatia, as in much of Yugoslavia, nationalism is proving a far more potent force than anti-communism and a hunger for free-market change, the two major political forces that propelled revolutionary changes elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

Reform Communists in Croatia received more than twice as many votes -- about 28 percent of the total -- as the Coalition of National Agreement, an umbrella group that emphasized free-market economic reform over nationalism. The reform Communists are the least nationalistic of the parties in Croatia, arguing that the Yugoslav federation must be maintained.

"What happened here is unique in Eastern Europe. There is no center. The Communists did better than any other {Communist party} in Eastern Europe," said a Western diplomat.

Communists in Croatia, whose roots are in the partisan movement and whose economic policies have been moderately successful, are clearly not as hated as elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

Returns show, also, that nearly all 500,000 ethnic Serbs who live in Croatia voted Communist, apparently hoping to blunt what they fear will be Tudjman's anti-Serbian purges.

In the endless cultural complications of Yugoslav politics, emerging nationalist leaders seem as interested in righting historical wrongs as in charting a post-Communist future.

Tudjman, for example, insists that the bordering Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Hercegovina is "an integral part of one geopolitical unity" with Croatia. He says he does not think that religious differences -- most Bosnians are Moslems -- are an impediment to this unity.

In Serbia, likewise, Milosevic and a number of nationalist politicians argue that much of Bosnia falls within the true borders of Serbia.

Tudjman, speaking in the same confident general's tone that he used when he predicted his own landslide election, says the way to settle the burning issue of Bosnia is with democracy.

"If the question is given them, {the Bosnians} will be for Croatia," Tudjman said. "We have a large number of Moslems who feel themselves as Croats."