In dock of history over bloodletting in Balkans

country tears itself apart

SIR FITZROY MACLEAN is an authentic, copper-bottomed, Boy's Own Paper

hero, with a life story that would be tailor-made for Hollywood (if he

were an American, that is, and not just a Scottish aristocrat, the

Hereditary Keeper and Captain of Dunconnel). In his time, he has been a

soldier, diplomat, author, award-winning restaurateur, hotelier,

Conservative MP and Minister and, above all, an adventurer and man of

action.

His adventures began in Soviet Central Asia before the war, and

continued in the Western Desert, where he joined the nascent SAS,

raiding deep behind enemy lines. In 1943, aged 32, and already a

Brigadier, he was dropped into Yugoslavia to make contact with Tito's

partisans, and his comrades-in-arms included England's greatest comic

novelist, Evelyn Waugh, and Randolph Churchill, son of Winston. It's all

in his best-selling autobiography, Eastern Approaches.

That should really be the end of the story. But now Sir Fitzroy's

well-deserved retirement, at Strachur on the Cowal peninsula, has been

disturbed by the baying of revisionist historians scenting blood. They

accuse him of being Tito's dupe, or worse, his stooge. They further say

that, in his reports to London, he deliberately inflated Tito's

strength, and masked his clear intention of setting up a postwar

communist state.

As a result, they argue, Churchill was persuaded to dump the only

other credible resistance leader, Draza Mihailovic, a royalist army

officer, whose Cetniks were based in Serbia. Tito was ineffective

against the Germans, they further argue, but used the British weapons he

received to win a civil war against Mihailovic. The inevitable result

was nearly half a century of communist dictatorship.

All summer, one of these discreetly venomous correspondences at which

the English excel, has raged in the columns of The Spectator, one of the

Establishment's in-house journals. It was started by a long article by

Noel Malcolm, a Cambridge don, which went for the jugular under the

heading ''How Britain Blundered in the Balkans''. Many an old warrior

has since dusted off his typewriter, and even Evelyn Waugh's old joke,

that Tito was really a woman, has resurfaced.

But it is no joke for Sir Fitzroy, who now finds himself in the dock

of history. Anything or anyone, it is now being argued, would have been

better for Yugoslavia than Tito, who, far from being the anti-Stalinist

hero feted by the West (the Duke of Edinburgh and Mrs Thatcher went to

his funeral), was a bloodthirsty butcher, who ruthlessly murdered his

opponents after the war. The subtext (and you don't have to be a genius

to work it out) is that things might be very different now if Sir

Fitzroy had never made that fateful parachute jump.

Sir Fitzroy, now 81, seemed to be bearing up well, I thought, when I

met him earlier this week after the launch of SOS for Children, the

Glasgow-based charity that hopes to raise #250,000 for Bosnian war

relief.

''I've taken quite a lot of stick,'' he said, ''but I reckon I can

answer it more than adequately. I know I made the right decisions. There

was quite a lot of argument about this back in 1947, about whether I had

misled Churchill, and whether Churchill had been bamboozled by me. In

the interval, an enormous amount has been published, which shows that I

have a very strong case.

''My brief was quite simple. 'You find out,' Winston said to me,

'who's killing the most Germans, and how we can help them to kill more.'

That was in the summer of 1943, when the war was not won. People forget

that. There's no conceivable doubt Tito and his partisans were fighting

far harder than anybody else. The Cetniks had reached, as Winston put

it, an accommodation with the enemy. They had perfectly sound ideas for

doing that. They considered that the communists were a bigger menace,

and that Tito was smashing up everything they valued most, the king and

the Orthodox Church. What they were not concerned with, which the

partisans were, was all-out resistance to the enemy.

''In what they are now pleased to call my 'blockbuster' report, which

I wrote in November, 1943, two months after I had arrived, I said we

should back Tito because his contribution to the Allied war effort was

infinitely greater. But I also said, 'You have to understand that he is

a Moscow-trained communist, and that he will naturally want to set up a

communist regime in Yugoslavia.' Churchill's answer to that was to ask

me 'Are you going to live there after the war?'

''I also said that a lot depended on whether Tito saw himself in his

former role as an agent of the Communist International, the Comintern,

or as the ruler of an independent Yugoslavia. I reckon that I spotted,

before Tito did himself, that he was heading for very bad trouble with

the Russians. I had been sent there because I knew Russia -- I had just

spent three years at the embassy in Moscow -- and it was quite clear to

me, as it was by then quite clear to Stalin too, that Tito was going to

become a nuisance and that he would have to be got rid of.

''But whereas Stalin said in 1947 'I will lift my little finger and

there will be no more Tito', five years later he was dead, and Tito was

still there, having survived. To my mind, the most important thing about

Tito was that he defied the Kremlin and got away with it. That was the

beginning of the process that is just ending now all over Europe. It was

the first crack in the Soviet monolith, and enormously important.''

What about the revisionists' accusations that Tito duped him (and

through him Churchill) over the future of democracy and monarchy in

Yugoslavia? ''I know what they say,'' Sir Fitzroy replied. ''But I knew

exactly what Stalinism was all about, even more than Tito did himself.

He was not like the apparatchiks I'd met in Moscow. He was very

independent-minded. It wasn't just a question of me being a silly

sucker, and being taken in by somebody who said he was a democrat when

he really wasn't. I had no illusions about that. But after all, we had

already taken the decision to accept the Russians as allies.

''Yugoslavia existed for around 70 years. The regime that Tito set up

lasted for 40 of those. Millions of British tourists have seen what

Yugoslavia was like during these 40 years, and have gone back there. It

was an open country, and you went in and out as you liked. It had a

silly socialist system, which didn't work, but it was reasonably happy

and prosperous.

''Those 40 years were no worse than they had been under the monarchy

before the war, when it was a military dictatorship; people were killing

each other across the floor of the Parliament, and the king was

assassinated by a Croat. I don't think the regime they got, which they'd

have got anyhow, but which they got to some extent because we backed it,

was any worse than anything else. It was certainly infinitely better

than what's happening there now.''

Nevertheless, I said, what about the mass killings at the end of the

war?

''They certainly killed a lot of people immediately after the end of

the war, within a month, at Bleiburg in Slovenia, when the rag, tag and

bobtail of all the people who had collaborated, the Ustashas and

Cetniks, who had fought with the Germans, tried to get out and were

turned back. There was a horrendous massacre. Some of them were

certainly collaborators and war criminals. But a lot, of course, were

simply bewildered peasants. They got massacred in exactly the same way

as they would have massacred the partisans had they won.

''Tito then, ill-advisedly, I think, had Mihailovic executed, just as

Mihailovic would have had him executed if he had caught him. The Balkans

are a very rough part of the world. But I think Tito showed quite a lot

of restraint. There wasn't much ethnic cleansing. His slogan was

brotherhood and unity. That was what he had established in his own

forces during the war, and that was what went on as long as he lived,

and until 10 years after he died.

''Yugoslavs have long memories and, to some extent, what is going on

now is retaliation. What you have to remember is that the Germans and

Italians set up an independent Kingdom of Croatia during the war, which

included large parts of what is now Serbia, and the whole of what is now

Bosnia. They put in Ante Pavelic, who had been one of the people who

assassinated King Alexander and was an extreme fascist. They were the

people who initiated ''ethnic cleansing''.

''Literally hundreds of thousands of Serbs were massacred. Of all the

horrible regimes thrown up by the Second World War, that was the most

horrible. It shocked the Italian and German troops of occupation. When

he was a little boy, General Blagoje Adzic, who was until recently the

Yugoslav chief of general staff, had 40 of his own family slaughtered in

front of his eyes. So he doesn't like Croats. It doesn't excuse what

they're doing now, but it helps to explain it.''

What of the future? ''I can't feel very optimistic about the peace

conference this week,'' he said. ''What united them, of course, was an

external threat. The Germans provided that, and the Russians obliged

thereafter. One of the unfortunate effects of the collapse of the Soviet

Union is that they have nobody to threaten them, and they're just

fighting with each other. But geographically, whether they like it or

not, they've got to live with each other.''

As we parted, he said: ''I don't know if my critics have thought of

what would have happened in Yugoslavia if we'd taken any other line of

policy. The idea of backing both sides was crazy. The civil war would

have been much worse, and we would have been involved. Tito was bound to

win, and if we had gone in to try to stop him, our relations with

Yugoslavia would have been very bad for the rest of history. What could

we have put in instead? Mihailovic's ideologues were planning a Greater

Serbia, on the lines that Milosevic is wanting now.''

There was, I thought, and probably is, no answer.