Gerald Warner commentary in The Scotsman
To: Letterr_ts@scotsman.com
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2004
Subject: Gerald Warner commentary
My letter to the e-mail address I had for The Scotsman came back
undeliverable, so I went directly to their web site and wrote the whole
thing over in their "letters to Editor" message. Keep this in mind in
case anyone else wants to write to them.
Hilda
The Scotsman
Dear Editor:
One would have to be hard pressed to find a better, more historically
correct commentary than the one by Gerald Warner in the Scotsman on
Sunday 8 Aug.
The response from a Serb, Mr. Dorich of Los Angeles, had the typical
exaggerations regarding the numbers of Serb victims in various wars.
Worse, Mr. Dorich could not even keep his dates straight, by writing that
Serbia's king was killed three years prior to the killing in 1914 of
Austria's Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo by a Serb, precipitating
WWI. Fact is, the Serb (Yugoslav) king Alexander was assassinated in
Marseilles in 1934, a full twenty years later, and not by, as he states,
a Croatian, but by Vlada Gheorghieff , a Macedonian revolutionary. He
mentions that the Congress of Berlin (1876) gave Austria the right to
keep Bosnia as a protectorate for 44 years and "when it became time to
return Bosnia to the Serbs, Austria and the Archduke refused". Simple
arithmetic shows that it would have been 1920 not 1914 for Austria to
give up the protectorate of Bosnia - which by the way was not part of
Serbia previous to the Ottoman Turk conquest.
Furthermore, Mr. Dorich omits mentioning that king Alexander abolished
the constitution of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes shortly
after the assassination in 1928 of the six Croat leaders in the Belgrade
Parliament and he then renamed the country "Yugoslavia" in 1929,
establishing a royal dictatorship. Serbia's heavy, oppressive hand was
felt not only by Croats but by all the other south Slav nations cobbled
together into this Yugoslavia after WWI.
Sincerely,
Hilda M. Foley
National Federation of Croatian Americans
13272 Orange Knoll
Santa Ana, CA 92705, USA
714 832-0289
