Dismantling Yugoslavia

Your editorial on Yugoslavia (“West Can’t Stand By Silently,” Nov. 22) is a good motto, but the text is misguided. I have been to Yugoslavia for four weeklong trips in the last six months. The civil war, like any war, is deplorable and must be stopped. But disenfranchising Yugoslavia and precipitously dismantling it into ethnic ministates is not the answer.

Your editorials do not call for dismantling Great Britain because it refuses to accede to an Irish withdrawal or of Spain because it puts down attempts at Basque separations.

It takes two to fight. Croatia is the aggressor because it attempts to forcibly secede from the Yugoslavia union. The federal army may be overly aggressive in response. Both are wrong. More subtle is the German and Austrian support for Croatian independence as they seek to reestablish German access to the Adriatic. And that revives the specter of World War II when the Croatians sided with the Nazis and slaughtered the Serbs. That specter is intensified by the current atrocities being committed by Croatians on Serbians and by the Croatian president’s prideful declaration that “there are no Serbs or Jews in my family.”

The United States should join with other responsible world governments and try to mediate toward peace that grants democratic self-determination to the Croats who want out of Yugoslavia, and to the Serbs in Croatia who want no part of Croatian independence, and respects the other legitimate Yugoslavian aspirations.

STEPHEN D. MOSES

Los Angeles