Letters to the Editor
Guardian
7 January, 2003
THATCHER AS A ‘LAP-TOP BOMBARDIER’
Allan Little approvingly cites Margaret Thatcher as being an early and vociferous advocate of bombing Milosevic and the Serbs (“Finally: the truth”, January 6). But she was also a fan of President Franjo Tudjman, who reciprocated by getting Zagreb University to bestow an honorary degree on Thatcher.
Croatia’s Founding Father and first president was incorrigibly racist. He was unrepentant about the Ustasha regime’s genocidal onslaught against Serbs during World War II, openly boasted “Thank God my wife is neither Jewish nor Serbian” and bizarrely proclaimed that Croatia’s mission was to bring Bosnia’s Muslims up to European levels of civilisation. This is the man that the war crimes tribunal claims it would have indicted had he lived long enough.
Tudjman, after all, openly backed Bosnia’s Croats to the hilt in their war with Bosnia’s Muslims, which culminated during 1993 in the horrific Croat siege of Muslim East Mostar. Then at London’s VE celebrations in May 1995 Tudjman boasted to Paddy Ashdown, now Bosnia’s proconsul, that Croatia would eventually acquire half of Bosnia.
Shortly after in August 1995 Tudjman presidentially oversaw the murderous expulsion in August 1995 of the Krajina Serbs from what were their ‘UN protected’ ancestral lands within internationally recognised Croatia. Worse still, the initial period of occupation by the American-trained Croatian military was marked by the well-documented random murders of several hundred elderly Krajina Serbs who had stayed behind as well as the wholesale destruction of abandoned dwellings. President Tudjman went on to gloat publicly over the departure of the Krajina Serbs and forbade their return.
If ever there were open and shut cases with clear chains of command, these were it. Yet the tribunal had a further four years to indict Tudjman and never bothered to do so, not even after Milosevic was indicted. The fact that Tudjman was welcomed by Washington’s prestigious Walter Reed Hospital for medical treatment in 1996 says it all.
So much for the theory that Milosevic and the Serbs were uniquely responsible for the Yugoslav wars.
Mike Finch
