YWS 11/10

Yugoslav Daily Survey Directory

From: [email protected] (D.D. Chukurov)

10. NOVEMBER 1995. YUGOSLAV WEEKLY SURVEY

CONTENTS:

- CROATIAN CRIMES AGAINST SERBS

- SABOTEURS OF THE PEACE PROCESS

- MUJAHEDIN IN BOSNIA - THREAT TO EUROPE

- PROBLEMS IN KOSMET ARE SERBIA'S INTERNAL AFFAIR

- END TO SANCTIONS - CONTRIBUTION TO DAYTON TALKS

- INVISIBLE U.S. ARMY DEFEATS SERBS

COMMENTS

CROATIAN CRIMES AGAINST SERBS

A Memorandum issued by the Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs and sent to all members of the United Nations last week, so far gives the most complete picture about the genocide character of the crimes against the Serb people committed by the Croatian authorities since 1991 and warns that the aim of the "brutal aggression" are both territories and the civilian population.

"Croatia has been ethnically cleansed", the document said describing the outcome of Franjo Tudjman's aggression on Western Slavonija and Krajina within the U.N. protected areas (UNPAS) west, north and south.

"Croatia, by its aggression and the consequent exodus of the Serbs has created a state which is now formally invoking the calls for the revision and annulment of the constitutional rights enjoyed by the Serbs so far, reducing them to the status of a minor ethnic community doomed to disappear altogether from these parts in the foreseeable future", the document said.

The Memorandum gives a very detailed and fully substantiated description of the conscious and planned execution of civilians, massacres, burnings, all forms of the obliteration of the Serb people and the destruction of their property in regions populated by them for centuries and where they have now been exposed to racist extermination similar to that during World War II during the Fascist so- called "Independent State of Croatia" (NDH).

"In the aggression of the Croatian army on UNPA sector west (Western Slavonija) on May 1, 1995, according to data established to date, over 3,300 Serb civilians were executed and 20,000 Serbs were expelled from this area in the process", the Memorandum said.

The bombing of a column of 2,000 Serb refugees near Nova Varos, the massacres of mainly women, children and old people near Novska, the extermination of entire families, the destruction of 9,000 houses, the expulsion of all Orthodox bishops of the Serbian Orthodox church - all these sombre data published in the Memorandum weigh heavily on the conscious of U.N. forums and western media of which some have concealed the consequences of the mass crimes against the Serbs in Croatia.

The Memorandum gives precise and horrendously detailed data about the biggest exodus in Europe's recent history during the August 4, aggression on Krajina.

"The attack, which aimed to obliterate or expell the Serb population, was carried out with a force numbering 100,000 troops and 50,000 members of the police", the Memorandum said.

"By setting up an information barrier, limiting the movement of representatives of international organizations, by the systematic burning of the people killed and their burial in unmarked mass graves and by washing the roads of blood, Croatia sought to remove the traces of its massive crimes", the Yugoslav Foreign Ministry said on some 20 pages.

The Memorandum said that in a report from September this year, "Amnesty International" said that it has been established that Croatian armed forces were executing Serbs from Krajina without a trial which, together with all other forms of systematically executed crimes, represents "a form of collective punishment of the Serbs in that area with a view of deterring them from returning".

"Captured Serbs were used as a human shield by the Croatian army, and this was even done with 11 senior citizens from the retarded persons home near Topusko", the document said.

"Over 70 percent of Serbian houses were destroyed or burned down by the time of elaboration of this Memorandum", the document said.

Then follows a list of destruction, burning and the total looting of Knin, the destruction of Petrinja, Glina, Topusko, the burning of villages and the organized looting of trains.

The Memorandum quoted the spokeswoman for the U.N. peace force headquarters in Belgrade, Susanna Manuel, who stated on September 27, 1995 that of the total of 240 Serb villages in the former sector south, 73 percent of the buildings had been burnt down.

The document contains a separate chapter on the seizure of property and the prevention of the return of Serbs, which caused Croatia to adopt a regulation on the temporary possession and management of specified property, whereby it, in effect, confiscated all real estate from hundreds of thousands of Serbs expelled from Krajina and parts of Croatia.

The Memorandum, which unequivocally reveals the real face of the Croatian democracy, until recently highly praised in the West, said that the new regulations openly show the Serbs in Croatia that they cannot count on the possibility of a speedy organized return to Krajina.

Another chapter in the Memorandum deals with the condemnations of Croatia by international factors.

One of the few adequate reactions to Croatia's genocide activities is a report by the European Union monitoring mission which accuses Croatia of "deliberate hostile operations characterized by killings, the burning of houses and the looting of the property of the remaining Serbs and of preventing all those who had fled in the course of 'Operation Storm' from returning to the area".

The Memorandum publishes a letter by German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel, Croatia's apparent ally in the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia. In a letter to his Croatian counterpart Mate Granic, Kinkel condemned the conduct of the Croatian authorities and pointed to the dangers of the destruction of "the life base of the Krajina Serbs" which "ultimately result in their ethnic cleansing". ("Tanjug's Daily Bulletin", Belgrade, November 6, 1995)

SABOTEURS OF THE PEACE PROCESS (by Miodrag Dundjerovic)

Certain Western papers now return to exploiting a simple mathematical-propaganda fabrication touched on as a possibility last July at a news conference in Tuzla by Ema Bonino, former Commissioner of the European Humanitarian Affairs Commission, concerning the "case" of Srebrenica.

Completely unverified and not proven statements about a massive plight of Muslims from the former "safe area" are taken as "arguments" in accusing the Serb side in Bosnia at the time the crucial peace talks are being held in Dayton.

The background and purport of this campaign are further revealed through the attempts to shift the responsibility for alleged crimes onto Belgrade which has in no way whatsoever been involved in the war in Bosnia and which has since its outbreak been striving for a just peace and which has equally condemned every crime, all acts of violence, no matter who had perpetrated them.

The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (F.R.Y.), as it was reiterated by its President Zoran Lilic on Thursday, sincerely hopes that the latest peace initiative will bear fruit and believes that America does want to have peace accomplished and that it will insist on bringing to their senses all those who are trying to sabotage the peace process.

The authors commissioned to write commentaries, in which they have these days blown up the "Srebrenica case", only confirm that those are many who deceive and do everything to create the worst atmosphere possible for what are, as many assess, the decisive negotiations in Dayton.

This has been done according to a verified and notorious prescription of satanizing one party to the conflict - with the ultimate objective of attributing all responsibility, without any arguments, to Belgrade in order to enfeeble its negotiating position.

At this point, what is entirely overlooked again and again are the crimes by Muslims and Croats, while the facts are suppressed about the sufferings of hundreds of thousands of Serbs expelled from Krajina and Central Bosnia.

This sheds light also on another objective of this campaign: to use lies to hush up and disparage the terrifying Croatian crimes in Krajina and to distract attention from the plight of Serb refugees in Western Bosnia who are still under the open sky without an adequate international aid.

Yugoslavia's stand is well known - that all the crimes must be punished, that the perpetrators must be named and that the criminal acts must be proved.

But, ahead of the meeting in Ohio, the different media in the different places in the West had renewed a story about the fate of "at least 12,000 vanished people" that had once been so artfully launched by Ema Bonino.

The victims, of course, were Muslims, and the executors were Serbs.

Ema Bonino had arrived at this figure upon estimates that Srebrenica was populated by around 40,000 people, residents as well as refugees, while no more than 30,000 of them arrived in Tuzla and Zenica.

To confirm "a lack" of as many as 12,000 people what was used was even an aerial photo from a NATO plane, showing a freshly dug soil on a soccer field.

It was of no avail that later an official international commission had denied statements about the alleged massive graves in the city soccer field, nor was it of any use that the same finding was reached also by representatives of international humanitarian organizations.

Official spokesman for the U.N. high commissioner for refugees Ron Redmond, despite insistence by some journalists in Geneva last week, was unable to present any tangible proof that crimes against Muslims had occurred in the Srebrenica region.

Meanwhile the army command of the Republika Srpska, the state of Bosnian Serbs, had more than once denied the allegations about murders of civilians, and it was last August that the "mystery" of the disappearance of "several thousand Muslims" was solved down to the last detail.

An official bulletin issued last August by the International Committee of the Red Cross says that the "vanished" - or those persistently claimed to have been killed by Serbs in Bosnia - now are under arms among the ranks of the Muslim army.

Hence, there is no mystery at all, while the deception methods, intentionally changed subject matters, dual standards, and media manipulations have become an inseparable part of the civil war in Bosnia, as had been completely clarified by former European Union mediator Lord David Owen when he said in a BBC TV interview that the Muslim army even had deliberately - in the interest of its propaganda war against Serbs - been shooting at its own population.

In this interview in late October, Lord Owen admitted that all this had been taking place also during his mandate as peace mediator. ("Tanjug's Daily Bulletin", Belgrade, November 3, 1995)

MUJAHEDIN IN BOSNIA POSE TERRORIST THREAT TO EUROPE (by Sasa Dimitrijevic)

Muslim fundamentalists, mujahedin, have become a threat for the delivery of international humanitarian aid in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

British relief workers have abandoned some relief centres in towns and villages in Bosnia-Herzegovina because their lives have been threatened by "Allah's Warriors", Norwegian relief Worker Elza Varum has said.

Varum, who works at the office of a Norwegian humanitarian organization in the Muslim-held town of Zenica in Central Bosnia, has herself been threatened.

She has testified that she has seen at a Bosnian Muslim check point a mujahedin carrying three cut-off human heads, holding them by the hair. One was a man's, one a woman's and one a child's, Varum specified.

A local Muslim official contacted by Varum conceded that Muslims were having problems with the Mujahedin who were helping them fight the war against the local Serbs.

The Norwegian daily "Dagbladet" has described Bosnia-Herzegovina as a stronghold of Islamic terrorism. It has offered evidence to substantiate its view that Bosnia-Herzegovina is becoming an Islamic state and a bridge for getting Muslim terrorism to Europe.

The daily, which boasts the highest circulation in the country, has quoted a classified United Nations report about a growing threat of Muslim fundamentalism. According to the report, all chances are that the mujahedin will get out of control.

The report says that "Hizbollah", a Lebanese Islamic fundamentalist organization, is the "epicentre" of Muslim terrorism.

According to the document, "Allah's Warriors" are becoming increasingly powerful in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which they see as a base for the export of terrorism to Europe and the former Soviet Republics.

The report says that the goals of "Allah's Warriors" are the founding of an independent Islamic state in Europe, the turning of Bosnian Muslims into Muslim fundamentalists, and continued attacks against Islamic states which are not fundamentalist.

"Dagbladet" has drawn attention also to Iran's growing influence in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

It has published a photo taken by its reporter of an Iranian delegation on a visit to the Muslim-held town of Bihac in Western Bosnia. The delegation was headed by ayatollah Yanah, one of the most powerful and conservative religious leaders in Tehran. 3,000 Mujahedin in Bosnia-Herzegovina are experienced fighters. Many of them fought in Lebanon and Afghanistan and are "personae non gratae" in their countries because of the brutality for which they are known.

Spurred by terrorist organizations and funded by Arab money coming from oil exports, the mujahedin have found a new battlefront in Bosnia-Herzegovina as professional soldiers.

The task of mujahedin is to recruit Bosnian Muslims, to which end they have set up training camps and are paying the newcomers more than the state.

"Dagbladet" said the mujahedin in Bosnia-Herzegovina had grown stronger since last year, when the classified U.N. report had been drawn up.

It said "Allah's Warriors" were responsible for a recent abduction of two Norwegian U.N. troops in Bosnia-Herzegovina. ("Tanjug's Daily Bulletin", Belgrade, November 6, 1995)

SERBIAN OFFICIAL: PROBLEMS IN KOSMET ARE SERBIA'S INTERNAL AFFAIR

Yugoslav Parliament Deputy Zivorad Igic said Saturday that problems in the Kosovo-Metohija (Kosmet) province were exclusively an internal affair of the Yugoslav Republic of Serbia.

The settling of the so-called question of ethnic Albanians in Serbia is not and will not be a condition for solving the crisis in the former Yugoslavia and lifting the U.N. sanctions against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Igic said in an interview published in Sunday's edition of the "Dnevnik" daily published in Novi Sad, the capital of Serbia's northern province of Vojvodina.

A strong separatist movement of ethnic Albanians has been active in Serbia's southern province of Kosmet for several decades and its leaders have even illegally declared the province a republic, aiming to secede it from Serbia and Yugoslavia and join it to neighboring Albania.

Igic, who is member of the Defense and Security Committee of the Parliament's Lower Chamber said ethnic Albanian separatists were expecting their program of independence to be included in the process of settling the overall crisis in the former Yugoslavia.

He added, however, that their hope had been dispersed the moment that relevant international factors had told them that Kosmet was an integral and inseparable part of Serbia.

Referring to a memorandum sent by Kosmet Albanians to the United Nations and its Secretary-General Boutros Boutros Ghali prior to the current negotiations in Dayton - in which they threatened to set ablaze the entire Europe unless the question of Kosmet was also included in the peace process - Igic described the move as a "desparate cry and the saving of face before their fellow-compatriots, whom they have been deluding".

Igic said that Kosmet belonged to all Serbian citizens who lived there equally but that the territory of that province belonged exclusively to Serbia and nobody else.

He said that there could be no further talks on the matter with anyone or ever and that this should be clear to all friends and enemies of Serbia and Yugoslavia, primarily to the ethnic Albanian separatists.

"A 'Kosovo Republic' and a 'Greater Albania' will be possible only if someone succeeds in destroying the Serbia of ten million people at the heart of the Balkans and Europe", Igic said. ("Tanjug's Daily Bulletin", Belgrade, November 6, 1995)

FROM DOMESTIC AND FOREIGN PRESS

END TO SANCTIONS WOULD CONTRIBUTE TO SUCCESS OF DAYTON TALKS

There are at least three big reasons for lifting the unjust U.N. sanctions imposed on Yugoslavia on May 30, 1992, the Belgrade daily"Vecernje Novosti" said Friday.

Firstly, it is an irrefutable fact that Yugoslavia has long since met all the conditions set by the Security Council, the daily specified.

Secondly, the sanctions should be lifted for a purely ethical reason because they are mainly affecting children, the elder, ill and refugees, it said.

The third reason is that the sanctions have failed to produce the results expected by the world power brokers, since the civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina continued without the fighting abating any, the daily set out.

"Vecernje Novosti" quoted two objective Western European analysts as saying no other country in history had been punished as brutally as Yugoslavia by sanctions.

There has, at the same time, been no other instance of the sanctions being introduced on the basis of a false and rigged information, one subsequently "refuted even by those who originally launched it", the daily said.

The reason for Resolution 757 on the introduction of the sanctions was formally a massacre in Vase Miskin Street in Sarajevo. However, it was soon shown that Muslims and not Serbs were responsible for the tragedy, "Vecernje Novosti" set out.

"It is a phenomenon that the sanctions were introduced under the untenable accusation of Yugoslavia as aggressor in Bosnia-Herzegovina", "Vecernje Novosti" said.

"It is well known, however, that Boutros Boutros-Ghali had before May 30, 1992 a report verifying that the last soldier of the former Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) had left Bosnia-Herzegovina territory by May 19 that same year", it specified.

At that same time, Croatia's regular army troops were fighting in Bosnia-Herzegovina but Croatia "has not even been admonished, let alone punished with sanctions", the daily said.

World power brokers can atone in Dayton for at least some of the sins committed against Yugoslavia if they oblige the Security Council to lift the sanctions, "Vecernje Novosti" set out.

The lifting of the sanctions or at least their suspension would at this point contribute to a successful outcome of the peace talks, the Belgrade daily said. ("Tanjug's Daily Bulletin", Belgrade, November 6, 1995)

INVISIBLE U.S. ARMY DEFEATS SERBS (by Charlotte Eager)

The United Nations soldiers said: "Why don't you write about Visoko airport? Planes land there all the time and we think they 're American'.

In a valley north-west of Sarajevo lies a new airport runway near the Bosnian town of Visoko. It is long enough to land a C-130 Hercules, the standard U.S. Military cargo plane.

Its surface is packed gravel and, surrounded by huge earth-movers, it is constantly being improved, say U.N. officers based in the area. Planes, including C-130 transport, the officers say, fly there regularly. Similar flights were also reported by the U.N. over the northern Bosnian town of Tuzla last spring, but denied by NATO.

Senior U.N. sources confirm that both American intelligence and military are deeply involved in Bosnia and Croatia.

Despite the U.N.-monitored arms embargo on Bosnia and Croatia and the no-fly zone over Bosnia, patrolled by NATO, the Bosnian and Croatian armies have improved dramatically over the past three years in the summer, Croatia retook a quarter of its territory from the rebel Krajina Serbs. In the past two months, joint Bosnian and Croatian operations in western Bosnia from the Bosnian Serbs, amounting to 30 per cent of the land mass of the country.

Somebody has helped Croatia and Bosnia to rearm and interviews with dozens of soldiers, intelligence officers and officials point strongly to American involvement. What astounds sources almost as much is the subtlety of America's operation. "What amazes me", said a U.N. sources "is that they have managed not really to get caught".

Visoko is known to be the logistics centre of the Bosnian army, run by Visoko-based Halid Cengic, head of the powerful Cengic family from eastern Bosnia. Nicknamed Hadzija - which means "man who has been to Mecca" - Cengic is known to have grown rich from this war.

"Visoko is our airport", said one senior Bosnian politician. "We get a lot of anti-tank weapons by plane. We have to fly them in because the Croats don't want us to get strong. The military help we get from America is sadly negligible. The politician sighed, looking coyly from beneath his brows. "But we get lots of help from the Islamic countries".

Other Bosnian politicians say that America is the "number one donor of all weapons into Bosnia". British political sources say that the airport at Visoko has been built with American help.

U.N. military sources in Bosnia say that, although they frequently report flights into Visoko back to their headquarters, they never receive any feedback from those monitoring the no-fly zone. "The Awacs (air warning and control systems planes) have sighted only two fights into Visoko in the last five months", said one U.N. source. "There have been dozen of fights reported from the ground". Other U.N. military sources point out that only America has the power to make the Awacs "blind". The Awacs are flown out of the NATO air bases in Italy. Some Awacs have NATO crews but others are manned only by Americans. It is these latter which are suspected of being in the air at the time of the reported fights.

Tuzla airfield also produced a spate of stories of secret flights earlier this year, with C-130-style transporters reporttedly doing low-altitude drops. Former American servicemen based in the area identified the sound as that of C- 130s. Dutch soldiers based in the area said. "Our soldiers repeatedly saw U.S. weapons and packaging".

They added that when they saw helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft over Tuzla and Srebrenica, they were told by U.S.- uniformed personnel in Tuzla that the aircraft were delivering vital supplies and "it was not in their interest to know what".

*

Visoko airport is just the tip of the iceberg of American involvement in the Balkans. Like an elaborate cake in Mittel Europe, the involvement is layered, from the obvious icing of the Holbrooke-brokered peace plan and the fact that America stopped policing the arms embargo last autumn, to the secret little layers of jam lurking in the centre.

The key to that involvement bas been Military Professional Resources Inc. (MPRI), a Virginia-based American private company of retired generals and intelligence officers. The American embassy in Zagreb admits that MPRI is training the Croats, on licence from the U.S. government, but says that it concentrates on "democratisation", transforming the Croatian army from a Communist structure to a Western one.(...)

Croatia military sources say that MPRI gives a series of seminars to officers at Cenomerec, the Croatian officer training school in Zagreb.U.N. sources say that initially the Croats were given lectures on human rights abuses. "They were pretty disappointed", said one sources, "but after a while they began to get what they wanted".

One Croatian officer said "They lecture us on tactics and big war operations on the level of brigades, which is why we needed them for Operation Storm when we took the Krajina. At the beginning of the war, we had no real army. Every man was a hero and thought he could win the war by himself. The Americans taught us to change all that".

U.N. officers point that whatever Washington may say, the results of MPRI training are visible on the ground. One Western observer who witnessed Croatian commandos crossing the River Una in September into Serb-held Bosnia said it was "a textbook U.S. field manual river crossing. The only difference was the troops were Croats".

At the gates of Cernomerec barracks two American retired officers state through the one-inch gap of their car window. "Don't talk to us, talk to our boss, Mr Griffith".

Mr. Griffith was hardly more forthcoming. He boomed down the phone from his office in the barracks: "I have no intention of being a target for some terrorist over here, Ma'am there's a war going on".

MPRI became involved in Croatia a year ago, as part of the "U.S.-Croatian Military Cooperation Agreement" requested by Zagreb. In a letter, seen by "The Observer", the Croatians asked the U.S. for" assistance in educating our present and future leadership in military-civilian relations, programme and budget".

The Croatian government cannot make up its mind whether it knows about MPRI or not. "We haven't even heard of them", said Natasha Rajakovic, spokeswomen for President Franjo Tudjman of Croatia.

MPRI is not yet officially "democratising" the Bosnian army, but the U.S. Senate Arms Committee has already publicly stated it will train and arm the Bosnian army if peace is signed and it is thought MPRI will bid for the contract. "We hope MPRI will come and help us", said Vice-President Ganic of Bosnia. "They are not here yet".

MPRI may not be, but there is other evidence of American military training. Dutch NCOs said they were convinced that U.S. special forces were involved in training the Bosnian Croat Army (HVO). "They use the tactics we have been taught, said one Dutch soldiers. One Dutch officers said that he had encountered "fit young Americans said they were on holiday".

Croatian intelligence sources claim the U.S. shares satellite information with the Croats, which the U.S. strongly denies. U.S. drone planes, low-level unpiloted reconnaissance aircraft, have been sighted and even shot down over Serb-held areas of Croatia and Bosnia. A U.S. base for flying these planes was discovered by the Associated Press news agency in February this year on the Croatian island of Brac and then the Croats and Bosnians attacked the Serbs this year.

*

Bosnia is a place that breeds conspiracy theories. All the elements are there, bloody war, international intrigue and a lot of time to sit and think. U.N. sources talk darkly of "black operations", CIA speciality in which, should it go wrong, none of the operators can be traced back to the U.S.

"It's bloody hard to put your finger on anything", said one U.N. source, "but there is so much circumstantial evidence of U.S. involvement or connivance". It became obvious that, post 1989, the U.S. would try to bring as many former Warsaw Pact countries under its wing as possible. It was Washington's interest, to appease the Islamic lobby, that Bosnia be included.

"I simply don't believe that the U.S. could allow the last Islamic state in Europe to be wiped out, for geopolitical reasons", said Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown.

The most obvious example of U.S. military help was last summer's NATO air strike campaign. Publicly the U.N. says that the point of the air strikes, which destroyed Serb heavy artillery, ammunition dumps and communication links in Eastern Bosnia, was only to force the Serbs to remove their artillery from around Sarajevo.

Privately, they admit it would be naive to imagine such a campaign would not help the Bosnian and Croat war effort.

"We just levelled the killing field", one U.N. source said at the time. "We couldn't arm the Bosnians to level them up, so we levelled the Serbs down".

The American Embassy in Zagreb, unsurprisingly, denies all knowledge of training and covert operations, but admits the U.S. is supporting the Bosnians in the fight for peace.

A key glimpse into how U.S. strategy has been made in the Balkans came six months after the Croat-Muslim federation when a top-level delegation of U.S. generals secretly visited Bosnia. Picked up by "Jane's Defence Weekly", the tour included Brigadier-General Mike Hayden - head of intelligence for U.S. European Command - and four-star General "Chuck" Boyd. Significantly, the party also included Washington's soon- to-be chief Balkans pace envoy Richard Holbrooke.

The federation was created by the Washington Agreement of March 1994, which brought about the end of the Muslim-Croat war and allowed the two sides to join up and concentrate on the Serbs. Politicians now admit that the state of the Muslim Croat Federation, now fairly shaky, is the key to a peaceful solution in the Balkans.

"The biggest threat to the Federation is peace", said a Western diplomatic sources. "At the moment it is delivering a military advantage but that would collapse if there was peace. Unless the Bosnian army is made as strong as the Croats".

Bosnian Vice-President Ganic said: "A balance of power inside Bosnia is needed for a peaceful solution. So our army has to be better equipped".

And so the arming of the Bosnians must continue. If peace is signed, then America can come into the open. If not, the skulduggery continues.

American intervention in the Balkans has been far subtler than other such operations.

A mixture of overt and covert action has helped peace efforts. The U.S. relied on diplomacy to create the federation, on the politicians to refuse to police the embargo and to put pressure on the U.N. to finally allow the NATO air campaign. Training the Croats and covert arming and training of the Muslims, has produced a mixture much less obvious than the United States involvement in Vietnam or Nicaragua.

"They've changed a lot", said former Croatian Defence Minister Martin Spegelj. "In Vietnam they made mistakes. They learnt their lesson. Now they are doing it slower but safer. America has grown up". ("The Observer", London, November 5, 1995)