HOW BRITAIN BLUNDERED IN THE BALKANS

Noel Malcolm reveals how our mistakes

in Yugoslavia 50 years ago are finally coming home to roost

TEN THOUSAND people gathered on a Serbian hilltop in May this year for an unusual ceremony. It was the unveiling of a statue to Draza Mihailovic, the leader of

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This public act of homage to Mihailovic marks an important stage in the reassessment of mod- ern Yugoslav history. And it also Symbolises the growth of a new semi-official ideology in Serbia itself, an ideology which is playing an ever more powerful role in the post-Yugoslavia political crisis. It is the ideology of Serbia the victim, S. erbia abandoned, Serbia tricked into communism by a conspiracy between her Western allies (above all, Britain) and the Soviet Union. The motives of the ideologists may be suspect, and the actions they try to justify may be inexcusable; yet the ideology itself rests on a degree of historical truth that is only now being recognised.

Uncontested truths about Mihailovic are rare commodities, but the basic facts are these. A roy- alist and an Anglophile, he was a colonel in the Yugoslav army with a special interest in guerrilla warfare. After the German blitzkrieg against Yugoslavia in April 1941, he fled to the hills of Ravna Gora and began to organise a resistance movement, which became known as the Cetniks (the traditional term for guerrilla fighters). The communists under Tito were also organising them- selves, though they only began to resist the Germans after Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union in June. Later that year there were some attempts at co-ordinating the actions of the two movements; but these failed, and fighting broke out between them, grad- ually turning into civil war.

Mihailovic was made Minister of War by the Yugoslav government in exile, and a British officer was sent to liaise with him. Naturally, Mihailovic stood for the preser- vation of society and the restoration of the old order, while Tito aimed at social revo- lution. This difference affected their atti- tudes to German reprisals: Tito was much less bothered than Mihailovic by the destruction of whole villages or towns in revenge for the killing of German soldiers. In late 1942, the officers of British Special Operations Executive in Cairo (which sent men into Yugoslavia and analysed intelli- gence from the country) began to think that the communist Partisans were too active against Axis forces to be ignored any longer, even though they were viewed as revolutionaries by Britain's guest and ally, the young King Peter.

Early in 1943, Churchill was persuaded to authorise making contact with the com- munists. A British officer from SOE, William Deakin, was dropped to Tito's forces in May, and in September he was followed there by a young diplomat-turned- MP-turned-soldier, Fitzroy Maclean, who was sent as Churchill's personal envoy. Both these men filed reports praising Tito and stating that Mihailovic was not just quiescent, but actually col- laborating with the Germans. Maclean's fullest report, written in November 1943, was circulated at the highest levels, and within a few weeks Britain abandoned Mihailovic and was channelling all its aid to Tito. Much of this military material was then used by Tito to finish off his destruction of Mihailovic's forces. After the Ger- mans had retreated through Yugoslavia and Belgrade had been reconquered by the Red Army, Tito captured Mihailovic, subjected him to a show-trial and had him shot.

History, as we know, is written by the victors. Tito's official historians in Yugoslavia soon published vol- umes of documents proving that many of Mihailovic's regional com- manders had made agreements, first with Italian occupying forces and then with the Germans. Much was made of the fact that November 1941, had met with German officers to try to negotiate a truce. (They demanded his capitulation; he refused, and the negotiation ended.) Nothing was said, however, about the similar negotiations which three of Tito's most senior advisers conducted with the Germans in 1943 (when Tito's representatives actually offered to help resist an Allied landing on the Yugoslav coast), or about the various 'par- allel actions' which the Partisans had con- ducted with Axis forces against the Cetniks, or about the many occasions when the Par- tisans refrained from fighting Germans in order to fight Cetniks instead. Any under- lying symmetry between the two resistance movements had to be distorted or sup- pressed at all costs.

In Britain, also, history was written by the victors. Both Maclean and Deakin were talented writers; Maclean has written three books which cover these events, while Deakin, an academic historian, became Warden of St Antony's College, Oxford, and Chairman of the British National Committee for the History of the Second World War. Other writers who had been associated with Britain's wartime support for Tito were also influential — among them Elizabeth Barker (who had worked for the Political Warfare Executive) and Phyllis Auty, whose admiring life of Tito became the standard biography. Known collectively to their critics as 'the Titophiles', they felt that the story they told was a success story for Tito, for Yugoslavia and for Britain. It was certainly a success story for them. Dame Rebecca West, who was no Titophile, used to tell how she was once asked by an aristocratic lady during the war: 'Can you tell me how I can get my son sent out to Tito? I'm told it's the thing for a young man to do if he wants to get on.' More recently, in the scholarly world, agreeing with the Titophile orthodoxy was also the way for a young historian to get on. One academic specialising in this sub- ject tells the story of a job interview at which the chairman of the panel said: 'I see that you claim to disprove the findings of Sir William Deakin ...' (Pause.) 'Sir William is an old friend of mine.' He did not get the job.

The vanquished in the Tito-Mihailovic civil war had less chance to give their ver- sion of events — especially the thousands of them who, at the end of the war, had been bundled into pits, their hands tied with telegraph wire, and machine-gunned. A trickle of emigre publications put the anti-Titoist point of view; but these were obscure works, mainly in Serbo-Croat, and they had little effect on the general ortho- doxy. In the English-speaking world, the defence of Mihailovic was conducted for decades by a solitary American, David Martin, in a series of carefully researched and cogently argued books. After Tito's death in 1980, Martin gained some power- ful supporting fire from other Western writers. One of these was Nora Beloff, whose Tito's Flawed Legacy (1985) was a classic exercise in demythologising (and remains by far the most penetrating study of Tito's life and deeds). Another was Michael Lees, who had himself been a liai- son officer with the Cetniks in Serbia: his book The Rape of Serbia (1990) was the most passionate statement so far of the view that Mihailovic was betrayed by a combination of the romantic wishful think-

ing of Churchill, the gullibility of British officers and the plottings of a communist agent at the SOE office in Cairo. This is a work which really does have sentences beginning 'Why, oh why ...' So passionate, indeed, is Lees's book that it was published in America only, for fear of Britain's ruinous libel laws.

This so-called revisionist view of British support for Tito was met with either silence or scorn. Few were more scornful than Basil Davidson, a pro-Tito man who had been head of the Yugoslav section at SOE Cairo in 1942-3 (though he left Cairo sev- eral months before the decision to ditch Mihailovic was taken), and who has himself written two books which praise the commu- nist Partisans. Just as publishers' blurbs sometimes quote epithets from favourable reviews, joined up in strings of dots ('bril- liant absorbing'), so Davidson's views can be cited as follows. On David Martin: 'legend ... absurd ... cannot tell fact from fiction ... merely silly ... merely insulting'. On Nora Beloff: 'dotty. ... farrago of fanta- sy...demonology. ... daft ... worthless ... silly'.

In Britain, faced with such discourage- ments, the revisionist view gains ground very slowly. In Serbia, on the other hand, the works of Beloff and Lees are selling like hot cakes. Titophilia survives in Britain long after its death in Belgrade. The death- blows there were struck by a Serb historian, Veselin Djuretic, whose revisionist book Saveznici i Jugoslavenslca Ratna Drama (The Allies and the Yugoslav War Drama') was published in 1985 amid howls of protest from the communist press. Sig- nificantly, Djuretic's book was launched at a drinks party where 500 Belgrade intellec- tuals gathered as guests of the Serbian Academy of Sciences. This is significant because it was that Academy which, with its public petition in defence of Serb interests in Kosovo and its 'Memorandum' on Ser- bian nationhood and the Yugoslav consti- tution in the following year, built the edifice of nationalist ideology which has been inhabited by Slobodan Milosevic ever since. Djuretic's re-appraisal of Mihailovic and the Cetniks was one of the foundation stones of that whole edifice. So it is not surprising that Lees's and Beloffs works are accepted with such gratitude in Bel- grade today. Their story of how Britain helped to destroy the Serbian hero, Draza Mihailovic, is a story that Serbs are keen to hear.

It may be popular; but is it true? Michael Lees looks at the actions of three people above all: Fitzroy Maclean, William Deakin and a junior officer at SOE Cairo, James Klugmann. Of these, Maclean appears to be the most directly responsible for the dumping of Mihailovic, since it was his so- called 'blockbuster' report of 6 November 1943 that finally made up Churchill's mind. Some of the statements in Maclean's report reduced Michael Lees to apoplexy. Maclean had claimed, for example, that Tito's forces numbered 220,000 men. This was a gross overstatement. It was twice the German estimate, and three times the fig- ure reported by Deakin a few months earli- er. Extraordinarily, it also contradicts the figure later recalled by Maclean himself from his first conversation with Tito, when the communist leader only claimed to have 'over 100,000' Partisans.

In his report, Maclean also wrote that Tito had 30,000 men in Serbia and Mace- donia: another gross overstatement (per- haps ten times too large), and one which was central to the case for dropping Mihailovic, given that Serbia had always been regarded — correctly — as the heart- land of the Cetniks. British officers and crashed American air crews who travelled hundreds of miles across Serbia in 1944 were to find popular support for Mihailovic wherever they went; yet Maclean reported that the Partisans had 'the whole-hearted support of the civil population', and that Mihailovic was 'thoroughly discredited in the eyes of most of the population'. Maclean, who did not speak Serbo-Croat and had spent less than three weeks at Tito's headquarters, was simply not in a position to make judgments about public opinion throughout Yugoslavia. In the words of one British officer who served in Serbia, Erik Greenwood, Maclean's asser- tion about Tito's popularity was 'manifestly a stupid statement'. Lees called it 'sheer rubbish'.

Recently, Maclean has stated, 'I had liai- son officers with a great many Partisan for- mations in different parts of Yugoslavia and I got their reports, and from them I was able to tell what a contribution the Partisans were making. As for Serbia, I think it is quite true that the Partisans were relatively weak at that time.'

Maclean's November report was merely an extreme version, however, of the argu- ments which had been building up inside SOE Cairo for months. In furnishing the material for those arguments, Deakin's reports all through the summer and autumn of 1943 had probably had a gleater effect. And the errors in Deakin's reports were in some ways more serious than Maclean's. He seems to have accepted the Partisans' claims that any local forces Which collaborated with the Axis were 'Cetniks' and therefore acting under Mihailovic's authority. In his main report, sent in August 1943, he wrote that Cetnik collaboration with the Germans had been 'close, constant and increasing' for the past two years — a statement with which no present-day historian could agree. How had Deakin come to believe this? The answer clearly emerges from his own auto- biography. He depended on the Partisans for his information. Lees claims that one of Tito's henchmen, Vlatko Velebit, has described how he used to take Deakin aside and apply a 'system of indoctrination' to him. Both Deakin and Maclean seem to have had that common failing of British Officers and gentlemen, an inability to imagine that people — even foreigners — can be telling them outright lies.

Before he went out to Yugoslavia in May 1943, Deakin had already spent several months at SOE Cairo, where he had become a pro-Tito man in an internal feud between supporters of the Partisans and the Cetniks. The most eloquent and per- suasive Titoite was a junior officer, James Klugmann, a Cambridge communist, a friend of Guy Burgess and probably a co- recruiter for Soviet intelligence with Anthony Blunt. While others came and went, Klugrnann remained in the Yugoslav section of SOE from February 1942 to July 1944, analysing and summarising reports, Passing them on (or not, as the case might be) to London, briefing those who were going to be dropped into the country, and developing a curiously close relationship With the operational head of Balkan SOE, Brigadier Keble. The evidence accumulat- ed by David Martin strongly suggests that Klugmann used his position to promote the Yugoslav communist cause and help bring about the decision to drop Mihailovic. Commenting on Martin's arguments, Basil

Davidson has written: 'It is merely laugh- able to think that Lt. Klugmann could have influenced any such decision.' But the clearest statement of that 'laughable' Proposition comes, oddly enough, from a book about SOE by none other than Basil _D•avidson, which describes Klugmann's bril- liance and persuasiveness at length, and says of the period when the internal feud- ing began in Cairo: 'The fact is that politics moved in at this period ...It could even be called the Klugmann period, and it changed a great deal.'

Exaggeration, misinformation and the exertions of an 'agent of influence': all these played their part. But the reports received and processed by SOE were not the only sources of information. There was also a large quantity of signals intelligence, including high-level 'Enigma' decrypts. In early 1943, these showed that the Germans still regarded the Cetniks as a real enemy. But by the time Maclean's report was circu- lating at the end of the year, signals intelli- gence was revealing a number of negotiations and deals between regional Cetnik commanders and the Germans. This, in the end, would have been decisive, even without Maclean's arguments. But why did those regional commanders feel obliged to seek the protection of the Ger- mans in November 1943? The main reason was itself partly a consequence of British policy. The crucial turning-point had come with the surrender of the Italian forces in Yugoslavia in September, when the Parti- sans had seized their stocks of arms and munitions, thus acquiring a huge superiori- ty in fire-power over their rivals, the Cetniks. In this the Partisans had been assisted by the British; but when the Cetniks tried to disarm an Italian division, they were prevented from doing so by their British liaison officer. At this stage. senior Cetniks already felt that Britain had trans- ferred its backing to Tito — as indeed SOE Cairo had. By the time Britain broke offi- cially with the Cetniks, its accusations of German collaboration were at long last true. A self-fulfilling prophecy had reached fulfilment.

Looking back on their support for Tito, most of the Titophiles involved have emphasised the purely military factors. A few have commended Tito's political pro- gramme, which Basil Davidson calls 'intro- ducing the ideas and practices of an egalitarian democracy' — a somewhat rosy description of a one-party communist state. But there is one argument. aired from time to time by most of the Titophiles, which has acquired an 'I told you so' edge to it: the claim that only Tito's federal plan for Yugoslavia could have kept the country together. Mihailovic was, according to Fitzroy Maclean, 'Pan-Serb, anti-Croat and violently reactionary', and had 'no prospect of uniting the country'. This argument contains some truth. Two of Mihailovic's most senior advisers, Molje- vic and Vasic, were fervent advocates of a 'Greater Serbia'. A map drawn up by Mol- jevic (a Bosnian Serb) in 1941 has a painful topicality in the summer of 1992: it shows Serbia extended to include not only Mon- tenegro and Macedonia, but also the whole of Bosnia, most of the Croatian and Dal- matian coast (including Dubrovnik), and parts of southern and eastern Croatia which correspond quite closely to the areas occupied by Serbian forces last year. A Cetnik proclamation of December 1941 (probably drafted by Moljevic) refers to the aim of creating 'an ethnically pure Great Serbia' and the 'cleansing of all national minorities from the state's territory'. That word 'cleansing' (ciscenje) is the one used today by followers of the Serbian extremist Vojislav Seselj, whose private guerrilla army, calling itself 'the Cetniks', has been responsible for some of the worst atrocities of the war.

Mihailovic signed that proclamation; so he can scarcely be dissociated from it. But some distinction can be made between him and his fanatical advisers. His first loyalty was to the King, who was King not just of Serbia but of Yugoslavia. Mihailovic's basic idea was to rebuild the country as a tripar- tite kingdom — Serbia, Croatia and Slove- nia — with a large degree of autonomy for each part. No doubt the enlargement of Serbia which he envisaged would have been unjustified in its scope and unpleasant in its execution. But it is hard to imagine that a Western-allied constitutional monar- chy would have inflicted as much suffering, murder and economic stultification as Tito's regime did. What is now abundantly clear is that the imposition of communism solved none of Yugoslavia's national prob- lems, and merely encouraged them to ran- kle and fester. The suppression of national feeling has made it take new and more vir- ulent forms. The suppression of historical truth about Mihailovic has had a similar effect. The consequence is a movement in Serbian politics which combines the ruth- lessness of communist practice with the wildest extremes of Cetnik theory — the very worst of both worlds.