Sir: I take a much more kindly view of Noel
Malcolm's article on Yugoslavia than do your correspondents Andrew Hayward and Annette Street (Letters, 18 July). It pro- vides a useful corrective to the received wisdom that our support for Tito was unas- sailably right.
Tito and his works are fairly familiar to me. As a junior staff officer in May 1945, I had to record in our war diary messages relating to the wretched business of return- ing Cetniks and Domobranci to the Parti- sans, while paradoxically at the same time helping to draft orders designed to halt Tito's incursions into Carinthia. A few years later, as a diplomat, I was posted to Belgrade, and I returned there for a second posting in 1965.
It seems to me that the greatest mistakes by the West were not made in 1943 (or in 1918) but just the other day when we recog- nised not only Croatia (my generation remains haunted by the horrid spectre of Pavelic's 'Independent State') but Bosnia- Herzegovina, which is not a nation but a geographical expression. When people fight each other it does not mean that they can-
'Of course I'm not after your money, the press will see to all that.'
not live in peace, so much as that they do not for the time being choose to do so. We should turn deaf ears to the plea 'For God's sake come and stop us fighting'. They will stop before long. Meanwhile we have thrown away the very idea of Yugoslavia, which was a noble idea.
My Whitaker (1989), spelling out in detail the population of Yugoslavia from census returns, gives the numbers of Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Albanians, Macedonians (no Bosnians, please note) and '1,220,000 Yugoslays'. These last are only about a twentieth of the total population but, even so, a large number. We have let them down badly.
Stephen J. Whitwell
Jervis Cottage, Aston Tirrold, Near Didcot, Oxfordshire
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