Enter Tito's policeman
Sir: Mr Tibor Szamuely (Letters, 4 April) has got it wrong again. It is not true, as he claims, that in my letter to the Observer I gave the lie to Pendennis or admitted the validity of Mr Szamuely's charges (22 Febru- ary). If he will look at the Pendennis pam- graph again a little more carefully, he will see that it did not deny that the post-war massacres took place. It denied Mr Szamuely's charge that Mr Mitja Ribicic was responsible for them.
If it is any satisfaction to Mr Szamuely, I was one of the anonymous 'experts' men- tioned by Pendennis. As I said in my letter to the Observer, I have spent long periods during the last twenty-two years in Yugo- slavia. Has Mr Szamuely? I am prepared to 'give the lie' to him not only about Mr Ribicic's -responsibility for the massacres, Which I have never denied took place. I also flatly deny that Mr Ribicic has ever been known in Yugoslavia as `Mitja the Murderer'. I can understand Mr Szamuely's bitter% ness about Communism. He spent most of his adult life under the Soviet and Hungarian Communist dictatorships, and, from my own childhood in Hungary, I well remember the reputation of his uncle, the first Tibor Szamuely, Bela Kun's dreaded Minister of the Interior during the first Hungarian Com4 munist regime in 1918. But, for all his back. ground, Mr Szamuely has no title to dog' matise about postwar Yugoslavia. Without Tito's defiance of Stalin and the impetus he gave to liberalising forces in Eastern Europe, Mr Szamuely himself might never have been able to leave the Communist dictatorships for the freedom of the West.
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