From: sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog)
Subject: Re: Croatian dreams
Organization: Enea Data AB
Date: Sun, 13 Dec 1992 19:40:52 GMT

Josip Loncaric (josip@eng.umd.edu) writes:
>Not all Serbs are evil.  Within Serbia, Milosevic's 1991 push for war
>was not universally accepted.  Warmongers won the argument pretty much
>because of their claim that EC/UN would accept Serbian conquests as fait
>accompli (after grumbling for a couple of months).  Had Slovenia/Croatia/etc.
>been recognized early, this argument would have been shown wrong.  Without
>recognition, the warmongers seemed to be on the right track.  The train
>of war left the station in July 1991 and picked up speed, and now it's very
>hard to turn it back.

Looks very good paper, doesn't it? The only problem is that the
first road blocks came up in Knin about a year earlier.

Had you suggested that if the outside in the summer of 1990
had stated that it would recognize Slovenia and Croatia in
case of secession, you might have had a case. (No, I am not
seriously suggesting that such a statement should have been
made.)

>>There might have been a such plan set up, but that doesn't excuse the
>>Croatian leadership for playing the game the Serbs wanted them to.
>
>You forget that the Croatian leadership had all along refused to "play
>the game" of creating war.  
>...
>Croatian leadership, whatever you might think, had no interest in war:

I didn't say that the Croatian leadership wanted war. I said that
they played the game Milosevic & co wanted them do. The game that
would give them enough excuses to start the war. Simply: they walked
right into the trap.

>Given Milosevic's push for war,
>the Croatian leadership did the best they could.

There were a lot more things they could have done. They could have
clearly denounced Pavelic's regime. They could have scrapped the
Croatian coat of arms, which, although centuries old, for many Serbs 
was the symbol of fascism, Ustasha and genocide. They could have 
elected another president with a less funny litterature background.

No, there were a lot more of things they could have done to prove
for for Serbs in Croatia that Croatian independence would not be
dangerous. Psychology seems to be an over-looked subject in the
Croatian leadership.

>Fighting back when attacked has a long tradition, and it is an honorable
>thing to do.  I might add that the Bosnia-Herzegovina government would
>be in a lot better position today had it had more luck in self-defense.

But can folliness be considered honorable?

>Today, the B-H government is being denied the opportunity to defend its
>people from genocide.  This is deeply wrong.  Unless the UN is willing
>to act to protect Bosnia, it must allow it to defend itself.  Otherwise,
>the UN charter and the Helsinki accords and Geneva conventions are not
>worth the paper they are written on.

Yeah, you're right, there are too few weapons in B-H today. Throw in
some more and give equal share to the Muslims and the Croats so that
they kill each other, when they're done with the Serbs. Sure, that
will give us peace in B-H.
-- 
Erland Sommarskog - ENEA Data, Stockholm - sommar@enea.se
Xref: sparky alt.politics.europe.misc:209 soc.culture.yugoslavia:10064