Yugo II

FermentX#1
May 6,1996

"Confused In All Our Abdications"
Part II

From Socialist Humanism to Rape Camps, 1950-1991

  • 1943-1950: Communist Yugoslavia. Military Dictatorship. World War II-and-a-half on the Adriatic

    Churchill and Stalin came to an agreement on the post-war partition of the Balkans on October 9th,1944. The story attains the very heights of farce. Its most astonishing feature is that the subsequent history of Yugoslavia tends to confirm the clairvoyance of these unlikely conspirators.

    Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden, discouraged by signs that the US was inclined towards returning to its traditional isolationism after the war, left the Roosevelt mansion in Hyde Park with projects for a New European Order to be administered between London and Moscow:

    Churchill was not experienced in dealing with dictators - imperialists, yes - but not uncouth, uncivilized bullies wielding absolute power. He may therefore have reached the conclusion that one had to be rude, bold, shocking, even reckless, in dealing with such people. On October 9th, 1944:

    "Churchill now decided to go to Moscow and discuss the whole range of problems of east and southeast Europe with Stalin, even though Roosevelt, preoccupied with domestic politics, was unable to participate. Churchill arrived in Moscow on October 9th, and during his first private meeting with Stalin immediately drove to the heart of the matter. As he recalls, " The moment was apt for business, so I said, 'Let us settle about our affairs in the Balkans. Your armies are in Rumania and Bulgaria. We have interests, missions and agents there. Don't let us get at cross-purposes in small ways. So far as Britain and Russia and concerned, how would it do for you to have ninety percent dominance in Rumania, for us to have ninety percent dominance in Greece, and go fifty-fifty about Yugoslavia?'""

    "While this was being translated, Churchill wrote out on a sheet of paper the proportions he envisaged for Russia and the 'others':

    ""I pushed this across to Stalin, who had by then heard the translation", Churchill recalls, "There was a slight pause. Then he took his blue pencil and made a large tick upon it, and passed it back to us. It was all settled in no more time than it takes to set down....After this there was a long silence. The penciled paper lay in the center of the table. At length I said, 'Might it not be thought rather cynical if it seemed we had disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an offhanded manner? Let us burn the paper.' 'No, you keep it', said Stalin."" (Herz,pg. 123)

    Churchill had assumed that Roosevelt would back him up, but was mistaken. As soon as the news was received in Washington, Harry Hopkins went right to the President's bedroom .While Roosevelt stood in the bathroom shaving they drafted a message to Stalin while Roosevelt was shaving, stating that they would not consent to any plans for the future of Europe unless all three parties were present. No mention was made of the other countries whose fates were being decided.

    Tito learned of the deal: "In fact, according to Vladimir Dedijer, the Yugoslav Communists, through Randolph Churchill, discovered the existence of this agreement in 1944...Yugoslav discovery of the Churchill-Stalin deal may have contributed further to Yugoslav militancy." (Ra'anan, pg.44)

    In the misty cobwebs of shifting alliances in the immediate aftermath of the war, Yugoslav hostility and suspicion against Britain for a time were complemented by Soviet propaganda against the United States. One finds that before 1948 the Yugoslavs accused the Russians of being British agents, while the Russians accused the Yugoslavs of being tools of the Americans. After 1948 the reverse set in: now Russia portrayed Yugoslavia as being a British puppet, while the Yugoslavs lambasted the Russians as American pawns!

    But there was more than mere rhetoric in the famous percentages agreement. Stalin actually approved of Churchill's plans for a British landing in northwestern Yugoslavia that would push through to Vienna. At the same time it appears that England, Russia and Yugoslavia pursued their completely independent imperialist objectives in Albania and Greece right up to 1948 and beyond.

    "In addition to its other territorial aspirations, Belgrade apparently desired to annex Albania... the conflict in Albania ended only after the Kremlin broke with Tito... Even more militant and expansionist was Tito's policy toward Greece where, without question, he was a prime factor in fueling the Civil War" (Ra'anan pgs. 46-47)

    One should not imagine that the United States was napping while all her allies were plotting conquest and pillage. By 1946, James Angleton and the CIC, forerunner of the CIA, were training and arming the Croatian Ustashe fascists vegetating in refugee camps in Italy for an invasion of Yugoslavia. ( One would, after all, feel a bit queasy if the US were not, as usual, throwing its weight in with the bad guys ). The story has fabulous dimensions of right-wing conspiracy that go beyond the feeble capacities of this writer's imagination, and I can do little more than transcribe it verbatim from the account in Burton Hersh, (see Bibliography). It begins with Allen Dulles' vision of an anti-Communist league along the Danube under the leadership of the Pope:

    " This essentially Balkan construct would anchor an even more engirdling buttress system against Bolshevism, the Intermarium nations. The Intermarium Directorate soon came to include a broad spectrum of sawtoothed reactionaries and ambitious malcontents from Balkan and Slavic refugee encampments. Many were regular go-betweens for British and Abwehr agent-handlers, veterans of the Prometheus nets the British rigged between the wars...... In Italy in 1946 the displaced Croatian community looked especially promising for covert initiatives. Their stockades were replete with smouldering, violent men eager to invade their homeland for a day's tobacco, wards of the UNRRA bureaucrats and international distribution agencies. Many considered themselves Ustase .....Nineteeth-forty-five produced a panic-stricken exodus of Ustase families, with thousands winding up in internment camps in Austria and Italy. These refugees tugged continually at Pope Pius XII's heartstrings; he interceded repeatedly with the United States occupation authorities in behalf of the 'many hundred Croatian families' in camps in Italy..."

    Yugoslav refugee organizations stirred up the West with reports of a rebellion brewing among opponents of Tito who "escaped into the forests", backed by "growing discontent of the workers". An Ustase based anti-Communist movement, the Krizari ( Crusaders) claimed widespread sabotage successes - including a Military Technical Institute - along with arms and supplies 'straight out of the Vatican',..... A CIC Special Agent who specialized in tracking down Fascists, William Gowen , located the fugitive Ante Pavelic himself - by one account browsing inside the Papal library, " Pavelic's contacts are so high and his present position is so compromising to the Vatican" Gowen's status report admits, " that any extradition of Subject would deal a staggering blow to the Roman Catholic Church.".......By 1945, Jim Angleton would concede, he was coordinating many matters with the Vatican's sophisticated intelligence apparatus, They shared the confidences of the Secretary of the Croatian Cofraternity of Saint Jerome in Rome, Dr. Krunoslav Draganovic...... CIC agents in Italy had tagged Draganovic as an unreconstructed Ustase and the "Croat representative to 'Intermarium' in a quasi-official capacity." Both SPINNE ( Otto Skorzeny's pervasive exfiltration network for SS officers on the run), and the CIC in Vienna depended on the swarthy Croatian prelate to bribe off harbor officials before shipping through some terrified ex-Nazi - Klaus Barbie, among many - to Paraguay or Buenos Aires."

    The account goes on in much the same vein. The CIA lost interest in Yugoslavia after 1948, but England, Greece, and Yugoslavia itself were gung-ho for an invasion of Albania. Eventually the British cajoled the Americans into joining them. Operation Valuable was to be the CIA's first-ever covert operation.

    " Despite their determination the British wanted American help, especially financial backing and the use of certain facilities.......An Albanian campaign fit squarely with United States policy objectives in force since 1948." (Prados pg.46)

    Predictably the British went scurrying around to dig up a king somewhere, but the only plausible candidate, King Zog, turned out to be so disgusting that they agreed to settle for the overthrow of Enver Hoxha by 'popular guerrilla leaders' of their own choosing. The campaign was a lamentable failure and only resulted in the imprisonment and death of scores of idealistic Albanian 'freedom fighters', foolish enough to believe that the Western powers were going to give them any real help when the going got rough. It was to be a dress rehearsal for a pattern that the CIA were to repeat all over the world throughout the Cold War.

    One way of interpreting these events is to say that World War II was still being fought in the Balkans over a period of at least 5 years after peace had returned to most of the rest of Europe. The climate of hostility and extreme suspicion on all sides goes far towards explaining, (though not in any way justifying), both the harshness of the Communist regime in Yugoslavia in the 40's, and the eventual parting of the ways between Belgrade and Moscow. It also casts some light on the deceitful, confused and unpredictable policies of the major powers towards the republics of the confederation in the 1990's.


    Bibliography

    1. Communist Regimes in Comparative Perspective: The Evolution of the Soviet, Chinese and Yugoslav Systems; Peter Ferdinand; Harvester Wheatsheaf,Barnes & Noble Books, 1991

    2. Yugoslav Socialism; Harold Lydall, Clarendon Press,1984

    3. US Policy Towards Eastern Europe & The Soviet Union", Selected Essays 1956-1988 ; Robert Byrnes ; Westview Press, 1989

    4. International Policy Formation in the USSR- Factional "Debates" during the Zhdanovschina; Gavriel D. Ra'anan ; Archon Books 1983

    5. Yugoslavia after Tito; Andrew Borowiec; Praeger Publishers, 1977

    6. The Soviet-Yugoslav Controversy,1948-58;A Documentary Record; Editors, Robert Bass & Elizabeth Marbury; Prospect Books, 1959

    7. The Rebirth of History; Misha Glenny, Penguin Books, 1990

    8. The President's Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations since World War II; John Prados ;William Morrow and Co., 1988

    9. The Old Boys-The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA; Burton Hersh; Scribners; 1992

    10. The New Class; Milovan Djilas; Harcourt,Brace & Jovanovich; 1983

    11. Revolutions in Eastern Europe; Roger East; Pinter Publications; 1992

    12. Socialist Unemployment: The Political Economy of Yugoslavia 1945-1990; Susan L. Foreign & Domestic Policy in Eastern Europe in the 1980's- Trends and Prospects ( William Zimmerman on Yugoslavia,pgs. 27-46) Editors, Michael J. Sodaro, Sharon L. Wolchik; St. Martin's Press;1983

    13. The Paris Commune of 1871; Frank Jellinek; Grosset & Dunlap, Universal Library,1965

    14. The Lenin Anthology: "The State and Revolution, pg. 311) Edited by Robert C. Tucker; W.W. Norton; 1975.

    Home