Ireland cannot go on clinging to the fig leaf of our traditional neutrality, writes FRANK McDONALD
MILAN ROCEN is a Slav, like everyone else in the former Yugoslavia. Charming and slightly roguish, he is now the foreign minister of Montenegro, which achieved independence from Serbia in June 2006, and I met him last June to talk about whether Montenegro takes seriously its constitutional commitment to be an ecological state.
The new state's gold-bordered red flag, with its double-headed eagle emblem in the middle, was placed behind the desk of his commodious office in the foreign ministry building in Podgorica, and Rocen was obviously proud of it. But even he admitted, after I asked, that there was a part of him that mourned the loss of Yugoslavia.
So, indeed, should the rest of Europe. Because what Tito managed to do for nearly four decades after the second World War was to suppress the rabid nationalism of Serbs and Croats and fuse the whole country, from Slovenia in the north to Montenegro in the south, into a non-aligned socialist federal republic.
It was only a decade after his death in 1980 that Yugoslavia began to disintegrate as the old rivalries that flared up during the second World War surfaced once again - and the issue, as journalist and author Misha Glenny put it pithily, boiled down to a single net point: Why should I be a minority in your country when you can be a minority in mine?
We, of all people, can surely see similarities with our own history, from the Plantation of Ulster onwards. For Carson, if Ireland as a whole could not be maintained as part of the United Kingdom, then the fallback position was to carve out as large an area as possible in the northeast of the island that would have a unionist majority.
In Yugoslavia, every state in Tito's federation had ethnic minorities - most notably Croatia, where Serbs accounted for 12 per cent of the population. And with the folk memory of the persecution they suffered at the hands of Croatia's pro-Nazi regime still fresh, they feared the consequences of its declaration of independence in 1990.
In one of his reports from the Balkans, Peter Murtagh defined the Krajina where most of Croatia's Serbs were concentrated as deriving from the Serbo-Croat word kraj, "meaning edge - the edge of Greater Serbia".
However, the edge in question was not of Serbia, but rather the military frontier of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
The Habsburgs had carved out this frontier along the river Sava in the mid-16th century to defend their territory against the Ottoman Empire. Populated largely by Serbs and Vlachs, who had migrated to the Krajina, it was under the direct control of the military authorities in Vienna until it was incorporated into Croatia in 1881. Thus, it was hardly surprising that when Croatia seceded from Yugoslavia in June 1991, Serbs in the region proclaimed their independence, setting up an autonomous region and later the self-styled Republic of Serbian Krajina; in line with Misha Glenny's dictum, they wanted to be the majority in their own country.
There is no doubt, as Murtagh reported, that minority Croatians in this enclave suffered terribly during the early 1990s. But what about Operation Storm, an all-out military assault on the Krajina in August 1995 by the Croat and Bosnian armies - with the backing of the US under president Bill Clinton - and its aftermath?
This was not a liberation of the Krajina, but the capture of its territory, and it resulted in the largest exodus of people in Europe since the Sudeten Germans were thrown out of Czechoslovakia after the second World War. Estimates of the number of Serb refugees vary, but the figure is generally put at about 200,000.
As an election observer in Srbac, north of Banja Luka, during the Bosnian elections of September 1996 (following the US-brokered Dayton agreement), I met some of these refugees - and they told harrowing stories about being forced to flee from their ancestral lands around Knin; most of them have never returned.
Serbs who lived in the Krajina, as their ancestors did for centuries, are displaced persons now. The ethnic cleansing that took place there in 1995 reduced the Serb population of Croatia from 12 per cent to just over 4 per cent, almost at a single stroke, with many of the refugees now resettled in the Serbian province of Vojvodina.
Ante Gotovina, the Croatian general who led the assault, was indicted in 2001 for crimes against humanity and war crimes committed by his troops, which included shooting and stabbing Serb civilians and destroying numerous buildings by arson, to make it impossible for the Krajina's Serb inhabitants to return home.
Gotovina is still regarded as a war hero by many in Croatia, his square-jawed face is featured on posters and he has been the subject of popular songs. But this is hardly surprising in a country where the tomb of Cardinal Stepinac, who was closely associated with the Nazi puppet regime, occupies an honoured place in Zagreb Cathedral.
None of this is intended by me to minimise the barbaric acts perpetrated by Serbs during the Yugoslav wars, particularly in Bosnia. I can well remember standing in front of the roofless hulk of the Bosnian National Library in Sarajevo 12 years ago and feeling ashamed to be a European, because we did nothing to lift the long siege of the city.
I felt almost as ashamed of being Irish going through Fiumicino airport in Rome after the result of our referendum on the Lisbon Treaty had been announced. And I agree with Murtagh that there can be no morality in standing idly by in the face of genocide anywhere in Europe, clinging (as we do) to the fig leaf of our traditional neutrality.
• Garret FitzGerald is on leave