Preserving the peace in Serbia - 5 August 1994

I suppose because the Second World War happened in the early 1940s and the early 1990s being exactly 50 years away from those great events, we were bound to be drenched as we'd been lately with anniversaries. And yet in talking to people alive and accessioned then and now, I find I'm not alone in harbouring personal anniversaries more than what Sir Walter Scott writing about the battles against Napoleon called the "big bow-bow" events.

Well this week, there passed a date that to me strikes a note of recognition like no other date in my lifetime. I imagine everybody has one other date apart from their birthday that has for them a special what shall I say, I'm trying to avoid the dreadful buzzword resonance, let's say then a date that rings a bell in the memory. My date is 4 August and this year it resounded more than ever because it flashed me back to a small boy 80 years ago to the day sitting tailor-legged on the sands inverting a small bucket and making a fourth gun emplacement to the castle I was building. Wafting in across the Irish Sea and the smell of seaweed was a band playing on the central pier, it was playing I learn the name of the tune later Alexander's Ragtime Band. My father, who'd been supervising the construction of my fortress, had gone off up on to the promenade to see what all the bother was about. There was a boy maybe two boys shouting their heads off, they were waving something I remember paper banners some such flapping poster. My father's form grew bigger as he strode across the sands and stood against his deckchair. All he said was, "We're at war with Germany". Of course, this meant very little if anything to me, he might have said we're at war with Tibet, but two or three people lying nearby sat upright, it was a shocker an absurdity, why Germany, over what?

In the months and the years that followed while I was studying in school, the causes of the Wars of the Roses or the 100 Years War, I was picking up from the newspapers the causes of the war we were in, which we called then the Great War. And I remember almost as sharply as I recalled the names of the early battles, the Battle of Mons, the Battle of the Somme, certain place names that were memorable because they were so odd and up to that time unknown, names like Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro. There was one city you could almost parrot as a one-word cause of the war, it was the capital city of Sarajevo where some Emperor of Austria, I think, had been assassinated for reasons nobody was going into with an 8-9 year old, that was the prime cause why, don't ask me me why, we the British had to go in and save what we called gallant little Belgium.

Later on when it was all over and studying the great First World War became a normal part of modern history, we began to hear from our masters; our schoolmasters some of them were now back from the front. All through that war, I was taught by women. We heard about something called Greater Serbia that it seems is what the Serbs had wanted all the time, whatever Greater Serbia meant it was a big enough threat in the summer of 1914 to engage subsequently about 20 nations in an enormous slaughter, but by the mid-'20s we'd forgotten all about those odd named countries, no wonder, they'd all been wiped off the map and come under the general label of Yugoslavia.

In the following, believe me, 60-odd, 70 years, none of us Americans as well as British gave a thought to those old vanished or absorbed countries until three years ago. As for the phrase Greater Serbia, I hadn't heard it until I talked just lately with a Croatian doctor in London, a young man pretty close to despair. The Geneva Partition had just been drafted and urged on the contending countries, this man as you can imagine had a point of view very different from our own, he regarded the partition as a "reward for aggression, a Munich," he said. And since the aggression had included the practice of genocide under the sanitised name of ethnic cleansing, this angry doctor said, "it's worse than the Munich surrender, it's the signing of a Munich after Dachau. What he wondered, is America going to do about it, what had held America back two years ago.

He evidently assumed that the United States was the one automatic protector of small oppressed nations everywhere. This gave us awful pause. Of course, the slaughter of his own countrymen and the seizure of much of their land was the dreadful personal hurt, but he maintained that the big ominous threat that lay beyond the present horrors was the urge for a Greater Serbia, as he said, in 1914 that's what tolled the old bell.

Does America realise that he almost cried this phrase aloud, "the Serbs are only 12 miles away from the Adriatic"; that, he maintained was what Serbia had wanted all along and Russia. His view of Russia as you might guess was also very different from ours, he didn't believe Russia had given up it's yearning for or its claim to a greater Russia. And with their ancient allies, the Serbs, they could make Romania, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia vassal states again. He was a man plainly obsessed with the fear of the Russian-Serbian Alliance as the cause of the next big war and believed that if the Geneva Partition was accepted, it would be only a kind of Munich pause before another bout of expansion.

I suggested that the Russians had had a change of heart since the break-up of the Soviet Union, whether or not he said Moscow has given steady and open diplomatic support to the Serbs throughout the two years of this war. And Russian businessmen more than anybody have ignored or broken the United Nations economic sanctions. But now I said, I'm told the Russian foreign secretary himself has sworn that if the nationalist Serbs don't accept the partition and the war breaks out again in full force, Russia will play no intervening part. Of course, he said on a note of bitter triumph that's a way of giving the Serbs a free hand to gobble up more of our countries.

The most interesting part of this disturbing talk, to be quite cold blooded about it, was to me the presumption on the doctor's part, and he was close to Croatian diplomats, the presumption that the United States had been scandalously lax in not fulfilling an historic obligation, what obligation? To be the protector of small oppressed nations everywhere. He was evidently under the delusion that the United States was the dominant power of the world and the only power that could do this.

I said as calmly as I could that this is a delusion fostered by America itself by presidential candidates in their campaign speeches and more than anybody by one President John F Kennedy, who in his inaugural speech made a glowing promise that echoed round the world, a promise that was wonderful as rhetoric, ruinous in fact, impossible as policy. It was, remember, that swinging sentence about supporting any friend opposing any foe making any sacrifice for the maintenance and success of liberty.

At that point, January 1961, the United States had tacit if not signed agreements with 41 nations, any one of them or a combination of them were to be the beneficiaries of America's sacrifice and protection. Of course, the factor then as now was that very few Americans were going to give up their automobiles or accept food rationing or make any other sacrifice to assure the success of liberty in any but one or two of those 41 countries. Vietnam called the bluff and look what immense sacrifices at home we made, not even taxed for it, which might be one of the unmentioned causes of the deficit.

Anyway, while expressing all the human sympathy I could muster from my Croatian friend I told him that with the severe cuts in defence spending and the now settled mood of Americans not to go into any war that might entail many men getting killed or wounded, the United States was in no condition to fight more than one conventional war two at most!

By way of a practical warning and gently suggesting he should not expect too much from any further American promise, I said something like, "once you go into a small country you never know what your getting into" and that took us back again to 4 August 1914 and how if you'd missed reading the papers for two or three days only, the British declaration of war on Germany was a thunderbolt was preposterous until two days before Britain went in, the British cabinet had by a unanimous vote declared it would not intervene in this remote Balkan dispute. You were there cried this astonished young doctor apparently believing me to be about 110? No I said, I was at a toddler building a fortress against a possible invasion from across the Irish Sea, I heard the name of your country then and didn't hear it again until a young beanpole of a Yugoslav tennis player appeared at Wimbledon two years ago and insisted on being introduced as a Croat. Goran the doctor cried, Goran Ivanišević, a great friend. He gave me a warm smile and shook my hand, so he said returning to his Armageddon mood, nothing much is to be expected from the United States then? Not I thought from America's specific mood and not so long as America wants to stay friendly with and helpful to Russia and the Russians want to preserve on the side their ancient I'd say unbreakable alliance with the Serbs.

All of this from the Archduke Franz Ferdinand to the recent plan to give the Serbs control of 49% of Bosnia territory from Sarajevo to the doctors Munich after Dacal, all of this was tapped by the memory of that sunny hot 4 August 80 years ago and a small boy building sandcastles and hearing his father say the meaningless sentence, "We're at war with Germany".

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