Martin à  pegelj (11 November 1927 â 11 May 2014) was a Croatian army general and politician who served as the second defense minister of Croatia and, later, the chief of staff of the newborn Croatian army and inspector-general of the army. His efforts to organize and equip the army from scratch were seen as instrumental in helping Croatia survive the first year of the Croatian War of Independence. Partly owing to disagreements with president Franjo TuÃÂman, he retired in 1992, after the war froze with the permanent ceasefire at the end of 1991.
Martin Spegelj was born 11 November 1927 in Stari Gradac, PitomaÃÂa. He was a partisan soldier during World War II. Eventually, he rose to become General of the 5th Yugoslav Army (JNA) Army District based in Zagreb, Croatia.
After the first free elections in Croatia in 1990, he became second Defence Minister. Afterwards he served as head of the Croatian National Guard (ZNG).
At the onset of the war in Croatia in mid 1990, the Croatian Serbs orchestrated an armed rebellion (known as the Log Revolution), refusing to accept Croatian government authority. As they were supported by the JNA (first covertly, then openly), Croatian forces were poorly armed, so à  pegelj undertook a campaign of acquiring arms through the black market community, importing weapons from former Warsaw Pact countries like Hungary and Romania.
He was caught on tape in October 1990 talking to an assistant who was actually an undercover KOS operative. At the time, war in Croatia had not started yet. In the conversations, Ã Â pegelj talks of arming Croatians in preparation for secession of Croatia and the impending civil war.
The so-called à  pegelj tapes were turned into a documentary film by Zastava military film center and aired in January 1991 to the larger Yugoslav public. They were made public in order to bolster the attack of the Belgrade government against the newly elected Croatian government.
The Croatian leadership, including the main "actors" themselves, initially quickly dismissed the tapes as fake, claiming that the presumably innocuous videotaped conversations were subsequently dubbed. Their authenticity, however, was later confirmed by Stipe MesiÃÂ, the president of Croatia, who was one of the first on the Croatian side to admit that the tapes were authentic, although he claimed some of the sentences were taken out of context.
The JNA leadership in Belgrade wanted à  pegelj to face trial for treason for this. As a result of the affair, and to calm tensions, TuÃÂman dismissed him from his post. Fearing for his life, à  pegelj fled to Austria, where he remained for several months.
Considering the rising tensions and the fall of first deaths of the impending war, Ã Â pegelj was persuaded to return to Croatia to become the chief of staff of the new army that was in the process of forming.
When the Slovenian War occurred in June 1991, Ã Â pegelj advocated activating the joint defence plan, which would put Croatia into war against the JNA by attacking its army barracks in Croatia (Ã Â pegelj's plan). However, TuÃÂman feared confrontation and refused to support the Slovenes.
à  pegelj was then made inspector-general of the Croatian army.
Only several months later, full-scale war broke out, and à  pegelj's plan for attacking JNA's army barracks in Croatia was implemented and resulted in the Battle of the Barracks, bringing much-needed heavy weapons to Croatia.
The war in Croatia entered a phase of lower intensity after the signing of a at the start of 1992. Ã Â pegelj then officially retired in early 1993.
Following the war, Ã Â pegelj became a fierce critic of TuÃÂman's politics, accusing him and his followers of war profiteering. In 2001, he published his autobiography, in which he was very critical of the TuÃÂman's HDZ and its political maneuverings, which he argued needlessly escalated the war. He also accused them of supporting Bosnian Croat separatism, which led to their conflict with the Bosniaks during the Bosnian War.
à  pegelj was in turn criticized by pro-TuÃÂman elements of the Croatian military, notably Davor Domazet-Loà ¡o, who considers that the June 1991 Slovenian War was just an excuse to draw Croatia into the conflict.