Stjepan Mesić
Stjepan Mesić was president of Croatia from 2000 to 2010, the last president of the Yugoslav federal presidency, whose chair he held from July to December 1991 while the country he presided over fought itself, and who said in his last address to the federal assembly that he had fulfilled his duty, Yugoslavia no longer existed. He had been Tudjman's first prime minister of 1990 and the speaker of the Croatian parliament. He broke with Tudjman in 1994 over the war in Bosnia, in which Croatia was fighting the Muslims for a share of the country, and over the Herzegovinian lobby's hold on Zagreb. He spent six years in a small party of his own before the election of January 2000, six weeks after Tudjman's death, which made him president with fifty-six per cent in the run-off as the man who would end the 1990s. The two terms did that. The presidency's powers were cut by the constitutional changes of 2000 that he asked for. The generals who wrote an open letter against him in September 2000 retired the next day. The archives of Tudjman's office were opened. There was the cooperation with the Hague tribunal that delivered the generals Gotovina and Markač in 2005 and 2001, over which the country's veterans marched. There were the visits to Belgrade and Sarajevo and the apologies exchanged with the Serbian president Tadić in 2003 and 2010 for the crimes of each side, and the application to the European Union in 2003 and the accession talks opened in 2005, the entry into NATO in April 2009, and the refusal to send troops to Iraq. He was born in Orahovica in 1934, studied law at Zagreb, was mayor of Orahovica and a deputy in the Croatian Sabor in the 1960s, was jailed for a year in 1975 after the Croatian Spring, worked in construction. He joined Tudjman's party at its founding in 1989 as its secretary-general. The eastern European tour of 2009, the Hague testimony of 2002 against Milošević, the veto on the Bosnian Croats' third entity, and the quarrel with the Church over the Ustaša mass at a Bleiburg commemoration were the presidency's arguments. The corruption case against his own party's former treasurer and the state-funded villa were the afterlife's. He handed over to Josipović in February 2010. He sits on the boards of the Balkan reconciliation groups. At ninety-one he is the last living signatory of the federation's end.
- Lived: 1934 CE – ?
- Nationality: Croatian
- Roles: president, politician
