TWO LETTERS

Liberal Democrat News - 03.09.04

 

Dear All

You will recall a letter I had published in Liberal Democrat News a few weeks back. A Serb sympathiser replied, and you can get the gist of what she said from my published response below. However, not only my letter was published, but also one from Mr David Orchard, which is better than mine! Proof positive that not everyone in the UK is anti-Croat as some may think.

Brian

 

Dear Editor

Re: The forgotten war, letters, 13 August 2004 Cllr Peacock implies that I 'condone' brutality against civilians. This is quite unjustified, and cannot go without answer.

Roy Gutman, the Pulitzer Prize winning Newsweek writer who exposed Serb run concentration camps in Bosnia has also written on concerns over UN indictments for Operation Storm - an action certainly not aimed at civilians. His record on human rights is unimpeachable.

Cllr Peacock calls my justification for Operation Storm - saving Croatia and Bosnia, stopping Milosevic "astonishing". Most revealing. Her criticism of 'condoning brutality' is perhaps more applicable to herself. Operation Storm stopped genocide and the concept of 'Greater Serbia', after all.

Croatia and Bosnia had every right to recover their territory - which the Serbs had murdered over 200,000 people to occupy. Some abuses did occur, but they were relatively few and hardly comparable to Serb acts.

The tragic Serb refugee problem is the fault of the Serb leadership. They have publicly admitted that they ordered and coerced Serbs out of Croatia. They were used to fill up Serb held areas in Bosnia and Kosovo.

Given "tolerant" Serbia's many elected extremists, worries over minorities is not "prejudice" - but legitimate concern.

Advocating a "neutral perspective" sounds reasonable, but history tells us a "neutral perspective" allows the Serbs to do as they like - as seen at Srebrenica.

If anyone wants further information on these issues, please email me.

Yours sincerely

Brian Gallagher, London

 

 

Editor

Frances Peacock (13 August) defends Serbia's behaviour towards civilians in the 1990s conflicts. But there is another - and darker - side to the coin.

Two episodes will suffice:

a.. In Vukovar (Croatia) I visited a mass grave of over 4000 civilians slaughtered by the Serbs in hospitals and child nurseries in 1991, amidst the ruins of a once prosperous town which had the misfortune to lie too close to the Serbian border in Slavonia. Hard to forget.

b.. During the journey there, my Croatian colleague told me how she frantically had to shelter - with her children - in late 1991 under the counters of the Zagreb food market while "their own airforce" - Yugoslav fighters manned by Serb pilots - mercilessly machine-gunned the Croatian civilians shopping for lunch. This left something of a lasting impression upon her, previously a Yugoslav federalist, and subsequently a Croatian nationalist.

Meanwhile, indicted war criminals such as Radovan Karadzic are still sheltered from justice by their gang of outlaw warlords in and around Pale in the Serb enclave in Bosnia.

So I can't agree that Serbia is quite as advanced towards democracy and tolerance as Frances Peacock claims.

Personally, having myself recently visited Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia (the new ex-Yugoslav EU member-state to the north of Croatia), I think our Party might best start in Slovenia for a civilised approach to Balkan relations; the Slovenes know their neighbours well and have local credibility that Brits can't easily match.

David Orchard