British war crime
Sir: Anne McElvoy's perceptive and sympa- thetic article on Europe's abandonment of the peoples of collapsing Yugoslavia falters rather when touching on second world war history. Noting the widespread failure of Croatians to admit to the crimes of the Ustashe government in 1941-45, she fails to consider why this should be so. After all, only a small minority of the present-day Croatian population can bear any personal responsibility for the misdeeds of Pavelic's henchmen, Indeed many, like President Tudjman himself, fought in the ranks of the Partisans.
I suspect that the Croatians with whom she spoke may have found it not a little galling to receive criticism on this score from a Briton. It was after all Britain which did more than most to establish the com- munist regime in power in the first place. It was British forces in Austria in May 1945 which actively participated in Tito's genoci- dal disposal of more than 200,000 Croatian soldiers and civilians, driven back or deceived into returning to death or unspeakable maltreatment in Yugoslavia. So far from regretting this major war crime, the official British view is that the atrocities resulted from some 'grave operational necessity' which entirely justified them. Even now Croatian civilians are being muti- lated and killed by cluster-bombs supplied by the same obliging Defence Ministry which provided Tito with the machine-guns and dynamite with which his killers prac- tised mass murder on their parents' genera- tion.
Miss McElvoy goes on to express shock that a Croat with whom she spoke, had not consideied the unpleasant implications of his country's alliance with the Nazis: 'We did not support Hitler because we agreed with all that. . . We supported him to get our freedom from Serbian domination'. Is this view very reprehensible? Possibly it is, but I do not seem to recall any very vocifer- ous objection in Britain to the wartime alliance with Stalin's Russia. Next time Miss McElvoy considers reproaching a Croat on this score, she might pause to con- sider (inter alia) the British Government's behaviour on discovering the Soviet Union's responsibility for the Katyn mas- sacre of allied Polish officers.
Once again, I dislike criticising such an otherwise excellent report — but fair is fair.
Nikolai Tolstoy
Court Close, Southmoor, Nr Abingdon, Berks.
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