'Great' Serbia.

In 1985, or thereabouts (so, well before the present wars) I was reading in the Croatian newspaper Slobodna Dalmacija an article written by a Serb. It was protesting against Croatian complaints that it was difficult to speak to Serbs. The author said no, it was easy: so long as the Croat could persuade the Serb to agree upon three points: (i) that the population of Serbia was slightly smaller than that of China, (ii) that the territory of `Great Serbia' was slightly smaller than that of the Soviet Union, and (iii) that just because a Serb had once changed planes in Stockholm did not mean that Sweden was therefore part of `Great Serbia'. If you got y our interlocutor to agree about that, the writer said, you could then talk sensibly. And T repeat: a Serb wrote this article.

After the 1984 winter Olympics in Sarajevo, reporters, viewers, and athletes alike returned praising the city. Years before the South African `rainbow coalition', Sarajevo seemed to have that rainbow. (All of Bosnia-Herzegovina, for that matter, was rainbow-coloured.) Multi-ethnicity seemed to be working triumphantly.

Similarly, how many innocent, apolitical tourists, visiting the tourist sites along the coasts of Croatia and Montenegro, visiting Mostar or the national park of Plitvice, realised that they were in Croatia, Montenegro or Bosnia-Herzegovina? They were in `Yugoslavia'.

This was a federation within which the civilians (rather than the politicians) co-existed happily for the most part, although there was strong pressure for less domination from Belgrade: a confederation seemed the right solution. There were `nationalist' bickerings from time to time, certainly; just as there are between Scottish and English football supporters.

So what went wrong? Reporters and commentators seem to have ignored the details of the constitutions of the (internationally recognised) governments of Croatia and Bosnia/Herzegovina. These, if you look at them, give the minorities -- all of them, not only the Serb minorities -- fuller rights and freedoms, and (as the other side of the coin from rights) also duties, than any other European country. It is absurd to contend this point without reading the Constitutions of the two governments.

What went wrong? Reporters and politicians have also chosen to overlook the fact that the very first sentence of the 1974 Yugoslav Constitution gave each Republic the right to withdraw from the Federation.

What went wrong? In 1990, President Kucan of Slovenia, and President Tudjman of Croatia, argued for hours, weeks, and months for a `con'-federation; which would have kept former Yugoslavia together, with a certain amount of loosening up of the centralised Belgrade government. Milosevic the Serbian leader, rejected it all.

He was able to reject it, because after he had organised the overthrow of the `autonomous republics' of Kosovo and Vojvodina, and replaced the government in Montenegro (all in 1989-90), there was a stand-off. For a confederation were Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Macedonia. Against were Serbia, and the puppet-governments in Kosovo. Vojvodina, and Montenegro.

What went wrong? The West was all too anxious to believe the Serbs, when they said that they were only trying to protect endangered Serbs, and to defend the Yugoslav army (JNA) troops besieged in barracks in Croatia. Unfortunately, the attack against Dubrovnik showed this up as the scam that it was. I shall use Dubrovnik as an example, because I was there throughout the war. First, the five per cent of Serbs in Dubrovnik said that they did not want a Serb/Chetnik `defence': formally, in writing, to Milosevic and General Adzic. They denied that they were `endangered'.

Indeed, many Serbs fought heroically to defend the city and commune; and the first victim in the attack on the city was himself a Serb, Milan Milisic, who was at the time of his death engaged in nothing more aggressive than testing the readiness of the soup in his kitchen. He was a great poet, who loved Dubrovnik; and was loved in return. Serb radio and television immediately said that he had been killed by Croats. even though the Croats did not then have the sort of shells that could have killed him (at the time, they had nothing more than hunting rifles, and home-made crossbows).

This fits well with the other propaganda: that Croats had shelled their own city of Dubrovnik (without any planes, wire-guided missiles, frigates, MiG planes?) and had attacked the Serbian Orthodox church -- the only church, out of the 31 churches and monasteries in the Old City, that later proved not to have been savagely damaged. Second, Dubrovnik has had no barracks on its territory since 1964, so could not be accused of besieging any.

The truth about the attack against Dubrovnik came out when in early 1993 Kadijevic (in 1991, the Defence/War Minister of the Yugoslav government) said very calmly, and inter alia, in the treason trial of General Trifunovic -- a trial held in Belgrade -- that the attack against Dubrovnik was planned as an attempt to conquer the whole of the coastline from the border with Montenegro up to Split. The general idea was that if Dubrovnik fell, the rest of the coastal region would be a walk-over. Dubrovnik was symbolically important; and unlikely to resist if besieged by land, sea, and air; and cut-off from water, electricity, and telephone lines; and shelled frequently, especially its monasteries and churches, its kindergartens, its old people's homes, its palaces: and above all, its civilian housing. Even Croats in Zagreb thought that the city of Dubrovnik could not endure such a siege for more than three days; but the city endured for more than three months. However, the county (the zupanija) of Dubrovnik has been burned, looted, desecrated, mined. So: it was to be land-grabbing, especially of tourist money-spinning sites and -- around Vukovar and Osijek -- good agricultural land. The siege of Dubrovnik showed up and focused this point: the attack against Croatia being revealed for what it was: land, and money.

Further: if indeed the Serbs in Croatia are or have been threatened, why were there relatively few attacks on Zagreb, where the vast majority of Croatian Serbs were concentrated? There was only one major attack on the capital, which targeted the Presidential Palace; intended, presumably, to kill President Tudjman and his cabinet. It was no accident that this attack, on October 7, 1991, came the day before the Croats were due to implement their declaration of independence; delayed -- conceding to the request of the European Community in Brijuni on July 8 -- for three months. No more than it was an accident that the so-called `Mickey Mouse' war against Slovenia started the day after Slovenia and Croatia declared that they would implement the overwhelming majority vote for independence.

What went wrong? The beleaguered JNA troops, and their formidable armaments in Croatia, were allowed to leave, under the auspices of the UN. The condition was that they should leave Croatian territory. We now know exactly where they went: to Bosnia/Herzegovina, to give the Bosnian Serbs such a huge military advantage.

What went wrong? Also the fact that the West has failed to realise the extent of the atrocities against the Albanians in Kosovo. This, after Milosevic removed Kosovo's `autonomous' status in 1989, should have been a warning to outsiders. For more than 15 years Albanians -- who comprise over 90 per cent of the population of Kosovo -- have been, and are being . . . I run out of words, `tyrannised', `oppressed' come to mind; but these terms are too feeble. So: a more objective fact. Once Milosevic removed the `autonomous status' from Kosovo and from Vojvodina, the constitution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), became, in national and in international law, unconstitutional; by its own 1974 constitution.

Kosovo, Kosovo . . . this has proved the most appalling example of tyranny in Europe since the Second World War. It has proved too embarrassing for the West to do more than say `tut, tut; we wish you wouldn't do that' when the Albanians are being killed, forbidden to have their own schools, imprisoned in appalling conditions under terms that flout all recognised international conventions, treated as second-class citizens. For example: the Serbian media made much of an alleged attack by Albanian men upon a Serb man: raping him with a broken bottle. This made huge headlines, and encouraged some Serb poet to write lyrics about him. When it was finally understood that the alleged victim was a psychotic who had made up the entire story, and had mutilated himself with his own broken bottle, this fact was reported -- if at all -- in two or three lines in back pages of Serb newspapers. Serbs are encouraged to believe, it seems, that every Albanian rapes at least one Serbian nun before breakfast.

Serbia makes much of the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. What they never say is that this battle was one of a series of defeats suffered by the Serbs, and that the final Ottoman Turk victory did not come for another sixty years. But, to repeat, propaganda and symbols are very powerful.

What went wrong? The dream of `Great Serbia'. This has been fuelled since 1844, under a programme planned by the Serb politician Ilija Garasanin. It was a Serb nationalist plot organised by officials of the Belgrade government that arranged the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 and thus caused the First World War. The `Great Serbia' dream culminated, perhaps, in the Serbian Academy of Sciences' `Memorandum' of 1986/7, which claimed that the Serbs, in Croatia and elsewhere, had been exploited by the rest of the Republics. Milosevic used the `Memorandum' to reinforce his propaganda about `oppressed Serbs'. This, however, chimes badly with the fact that Serbs had overwhelming majorities (in all the Republics) in the military, in the judiciary, in high business appointments, in control of factories, in the preponderance of police officers . . . in short, in virtually everything. Crudely, former Yugoslavia just was `Great Serbia'. That is why we in the West did not hear much about it until Croatia, and Slovenia, started complaining: unwilling to feed the finances of a government that spent 25 per cent of its income on suppressing the Albanians in Kosovo. Croatia and Slovenia funded 40 per cent of the tanks, planes, ships and artillery of the Yugoslav army; which then came to be used against them.

What went wrong? In the interests of `Great Serbia', Milosevic sent General Ratko Mladic first to Croatia, to Knin. Here he commanded troops which shelled hospitals, schools, and civilian housing with abandon. Next, he went to Bosnia. There his slogans were `Roast!' and `Pound them senseless!'. The US has branded him as a war criminal for his actions in 1992. He certainly is. In July he and the Bosian Serb leader Dr. Karadzic have been indicted as `war criminals' by the UN.

What went wrong? This dream of `Great Serbia'. The slogans are many and various. `All Serbs in one state', `Better a grave than a Euro-slave', `Wherever there is a Serbian grave, there is Serbia'. Such hype would allow Scotland to claim all of England, and vice versa, or Britain to claim all of its former empire. Or, for that matter, for Turkey to claim almost all of Serbia. Such slogans are, of course, nonsense; but the power of hypnotic and repetitive formulae cannot be overestimated. Particularly when the media are so heavily controlled.

What went wrong? Croatia until the present day, and Bosnia-Herzegovina until a year or so ago, had not realised the importance of public relations. Not surprisingly: Serbs dominated Tanjug, the main Yugoslav press agency; and virtually all the senior posts in embassies around the world went to Serbs. So when the crisis first started (in the late eighties but exploding in 1991) British and other Western diplomats turned for information to the diplomats and to the Yugoslav news media. These were predominantly Serbian. In 1993 I met a woman from the `Voice of America'. She told me that before these wars, the `Yugoslav' department in the `VOA' had eleven reporters, of whom ten were Serbs.

It is evidently not easy for countries like Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina to create, more or less overnight, embassies with ambassadors and supporting staff, and press-liaison officers, in hundreds of countries. Croatia is lagging behind Bosnia-Herzegovina in this respect.

Now, to Bosnia-Herzegovina. I would like to hear anyone able to explain why the UN, and NATO, cannot go in there, in force. I would also like to hear any reasoned argument that parallels with Chamberlain at Munich in 1938 do not hold. It cannot be because the weapons are not good enough; we have seen them in action in the Gulf War: missiles turning right at traffic-lights, climbing up buildings, dropping down chimneys. The technology is there. Is the reluctance due to the fact that Gorazde and Sarajevo do not have as much oil as Kuwait?

This is not, whatever America says, another Vietnam. The technology, and the terrain, are completely different. So is the cause: to protect civilians, and to try (unsuccessfully) to combat the policy of `ethnic cleansing': which should more accurately be described as `violent eviction'.

It is relevant and important to point out the atrocities being perpetrated, also, in some African countries and the Near and Far East. However, it is easier to do something in your own backyard than to act efficiently in, for example, Nigeria. Former Yugoslavia is at the heart of Europe. If your neighbour's house is on fire, then you can act in a way that you could not if you heard that some family in Sydney had a fire in their house. Proximity does make some difference, in terms of efficient action.

This article, to a large extent, says only what has been said repeatedly in the world's media. But one point has not, to my mind, been adequately stressed. The Bosnian Serbs, and to a jar lesser extent the Croats and Muslims, have used civilians as a war weapon. The CIA reports show that the Serbs are responsible for 90 per cent of the atrocities. Shelling of civilian areas (in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina); shelling hospitals, Kindergartens, monasteries, churches; taking hostages; raping women; mass executions of Muslim forces; blowing up mosques all around the Serb-held regions of Bosnia, including two sixteenth-century glories of architecture in Banja Luka; using hostages as shields; and above all, evicting civilians from homes in which they have lived for generations. This is the Ratko Mladic programme, which has proved all too successful. (`Ratko' is a diminutive of `Ratislav', which means `War of the Serbs'.) All of this attack upon civilians and their way of life is banned by the Geneva Conventions and international law. Anyone participating in these actions is a war criminal.

So: talk of `being neutral' no longer makes any real sense. Even though there is no black/white moral line to be drawn, the Serbs -- and especially the Bosnian Serbs -- are, in terms of a black/white standard, very dark grey when compared to the Muslims' and the Bosnian Croats' pale grey. Thirty two per cent of the population before the war in Bosnia Herzegovina were Bosnian Serbs; who now sit (add an `h' to that verb as human excrement was a large part of their `leavings' when they were retreating from shelled, looted, and burned Bosnian and Croatian villages) on about 70 per cent of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Finally: if a young man or woman joins the armed forces voluntarily, as they do in the UK or the US, then they are opting for a career that might put their lives at risk. They are trained to use rifles and tanks; the other side of the coin is that they might have rifles and tanks aimed at them. This is their choice: whether it means that they go to Northern Ireland, Cyprus. the Falklands, the Gulf, Bosnia-Herzegovina, or anywhere else. Given that they are not conscripted, the governments of (nonconscripted) troops should not treat them as though they were made of delicate porcelain. This is not fair to them. Like firefighters, they know what risks they are running when they decide to join. Like athletes, they know the costs of their chosen profession. Surely we should respect their choices.

The victims, as always, are the civilians. While we tolerate the crimes of `Great' Serbia, I shall never again describe myself as coming from `Great' Britain.

[Dr. Kathy Wilkes is a Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at St. Hilda's College, Oxford. She has had a long time involvement with academic bodies in Dubrovnik and was made an honorary citizen of that city. She is also the author of several books and articles on philosophy.]