International Herald Tribune, 06/05/1999

A Croatian Perspective

Regarding "Kosovo Is a Political Problem, Not Just a Moral Crusade" by José Cutileiro (Opinion, April 21):

Mr. Cutileiro, secretary-general of the Western European Union, fails to provide a grasp of history and to place events in perspective.

"The biggest, quickest and most thoroughly organized" episodes of expulsions, akin to those occurring now in Kosovo, were prefigured during Serbia’s war against Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The legacy that leads directly to Kosovo began with the siege and destruction of Vukovar and other Croatian cities and towns.

In 1991, more than 500,000 Croats and others were uprooted from their homes as Serbian paramilitary forces and the Yugoslav Army occupied approximately 25 percent of Croatia’s territory.

This dirty war left more that 13,000 dead, 1,700 missing and 34,000 injured and resulted in more than $20 billion in direct damage to Croatia’s infrastructure.

This pattern was repeated in neighboring Bosnia-Herzegovina, leading to 2 million refugees and displaced persons - with Croatia sheltering more than 500,000 Bosnian refugees - and about 200,000 deaths as Bosnian Serbs seized two-thirds of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The trajectory of expulsions leads directly to Kosovo from Vukovar, Dubrovnik, Prijedor, Omarska, Sarajevo, Zepa and Srebrenica.

In 1995, Croatia ended four years of hostile occupation by routing Serbian paramilitary forces - supported and supplied by Belgrade with logistics, material, intelligence and key command officers - in a quick, limited operation. Despite repeated demands from President Franjo Tudjman of Croatia and the Croatian government to the local Serbian population to remain in their homes, approximately 90,000 Serbian civilians chose to follow the lead - and orders - of their defeated military and political leadership, and left Croatia.

Croatia’s actions helped to prevent the fall of the United Nations "safe haven" of Bihac, which would have yielded to the Bosnian Serbs soon after Zepa and Srebrenica. Tragically, we know that the fate of Bihac’s 230,000 residents would have been the same as that of the people of those other cities. The combined effect of our action was to temper the arrogance and power of Serbia’s military and compelled them for the first time to seriously negotiate a peace settlement, namely the Dayton/Paris peace accords.

Smiljan Simac.
Paris.
The writer is Croatia’s ambassador to France (from 1995 to 1999).