Last salvo
Sir: Sir Alfred Sherman offers several argu- ments (Letters, 8 May), which are weari- somely familiar to those of us who have to study Serbian propaganda. The first is that the break-up of Yugoslavia was caused by German-led EEC recognition. This is absurd: the war in Yugoslavia started in the summer of 1991, and EEC recognition of Slovenia and Croatia was granted in Jan- uary 1992. It is fantasy to suppose that the Croats could have been persuaded to rejoin Serbia in a Yugoslav state after months of fighting during which Croatian cities had been reduced to rubble by Serbian artillery.
The Serbian government was not trying to reconstitute the old Yugoslavia; it was trying to carve out the territory of a new Greater Serbian state. To that end it had also helped to set up several 'Serb Autonomous Regions' in Bosnia, more than six months before Bosnia received international recognition. These areas rejected the authority of Sarajevo, and received secret arms deliveries from Bel- grade. The eventual recognition of Bosnia served only as a pretext for completing the carve-up by military means.
Another absurdity is Sir Alfred's sugges- tion that the borders of Croatia and Bosnia were invented by Tito for anti-Serb purpos- es. These borders were based on the his- toric frontiers of territories which had been distinct entities for many hundreds of years. The changes Tito made to the borders of Bosnia and Croatia were in fact pro-Serb, not anti: he transferred a small part of south-western Bosnia to Montenegro, and the large eastern tip of the Croatian-Slove- nian territory to Serbia. He did of course also separate Macedonia from Serbia, in view of the fact that the population of Macedonia was overwhelmingly non-Serb. But perhaps Sir Alfred thinks that Macedo- nia today, like Kosovo in 1913, has a Serb majority. There are some loony Serbs who believe this.
I leave aside Sir Alfred's nonsense about my Serbophobia and my imagined war aims. But I must point out that when I com- pared his views on Bosnia with those of a famous historical figure who wanted the break-up of Czechoslovakia in 1938, I was one last shot settlement.' `We're having at a peace not thinking of Mr Chamberlain. Sir Alfred should have another guess.
Noel Malcolm
The Daily Telegraph, 1 Canada Square, London E14
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