,,Черна ръка над Европа" Анри Пози за страданията на хърватите под сръбска власт

[Monarh]

Както се оказва, популярният френски журналист е написал и книга за Хърватия в Кралство Югославия, в която ясно е показано тежкото положение на хърватския етнос в тази изкуствена държава.

BLACK HAND OVER EUROPE
by Henri Pozzi

I. The Peril
II.The opinion of a Chief
III.What the man-in-the-streets thinks

I. THE PERIL

War is coming again to Europe! The storm will come from the Balkans - that historic tinder box of the world

which has now been made even more inflammable by the incorporation into Serbia of Croatian, Macedonian, Hungarian, Slovakian and Dalmatian* territories, under the name of Yugoslavia. (* Dalmatia was an autonomous Croatian region under Austrian administrative rule within the Habsburg Monarchy. For this reason, the author mentions Dalmatia as separate from Croatia)

I have made many friends in Serbia, but since July and December 1923 I have been unable to hide even from them my fears of a coming conflagration.

Yugoslavia was born out of the chaos of the Great War in a flurry of acclaim, but alas, none of the aspirations and ambitions for which Serbia went to war are likely to be realised: she is slipping irresistibly towards an unknown abyss, and we French are bound to her by bands of steel.

Even going back ten years it was easy to see something gripping Yugoslavia by the throat. But in the years since then the grip has been tightened, and tightened in my opinion by the dictatorship established by King Alexander Karageorgevitch. This dictatorship, however much it may claim a temporary success, must inevitably have the effect of poisoning all the Yugoslav organism. Whether the poisoning is incurable or not is the question for which I have sought an answer during two months in Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and central Europe.

Belgrade says: "The difficulties through which we are passing are nothing more than a simple growing pain. They will disappear of their own accord when we have suppressed their causes, that is to say, finished the material and moral unification of our country and definitely reduced our internal and external adversaries to a state of impotence".

Opponents of the dictatorship say: "There is no remedy: those who have seized power in Yugoslavia to-day, and who maintain that power by inhuman violence are leading her, and Europe with her, to a bloody catastrophe".

Between the men who proclaim these two points of view lies a gulf that every day widens, and all the men in Europe who are in touch with affairs know it. The man in the street does not know, for the Press is kept out of the inner circles.

Oh, yes! The Press has made "special investigations" of Yugoslav conditions; but what have they amounted to? What "special representative" has drawn attention to the occupation of one half of Yugoslavia by troops and police recruited from the other half; troops that are not even able to speak the language of their "compatriots" in the occupied zones?

In what European newspaper has it been stated that in all the cities of Croatia (even at Zagreb, the seat of the government in Croatia) all the Croat-owned coffee-houses had to be closed to the troops because of the terrible fights that continually broke out between the Croats and the Serbs?

Not one!

And yet, if Europe only knew, its every corner is tied up with the financial and political unity of Yugoslavia.

I know that I am in danger of being accused of exaggeration by those few special correspondents who have passed an agreeable day or two in the company of Serbian local government agents; who have been taken among the middle-aged women and gigolos at Sarajevo or across the aged stone of a Dalmatian quay?

How I should like to believe that they are right!

But the peril towards which Europe is heading by way of Yugoslavia is a mortal peril. Everything that strikes or menaces Yugoslavia strikes or menaces France; because militarily and politically since 1918 France's destiny has been bound to that of Belgrade.

There can be no catastrophe in the Balkans that will not sweep into France and thence through Europe; and there can be nothing else but catastrophe in the Balkans!

This fact must not be forgotten.

I passed over the Yugoslav frontier in the dark hours which precede the dawn, and it is significant that the first person I saw once I had passed the frontier was a soldier, half- hidden though he was behind a clump of trees, which his hands crossed upon his rifle. He was one of a group of men who were guarding the railways, bridges, switches, tunnels and stations. I saw thousands of these patrols from Susak to Ljubljana, from Zagreb to Sarajevo: entire regiments of them fully equipped for the field; rifles loaded, cartridge belts filled.

Literally they infested the international train. They questioned, verified, rummaged and searched. We were forbidden to leave our compartments. We might have been criminals. Soldiers with fixed bayonets made a minute inspection of the train from end to the other. Valises, sacks, hat-boxes, provision baskets, benches, cushions, partitions, roofs, floors, and springs, even to the linings of clothing, all were scrutinised, turned upside down and sounded. All foreign newspapers were confiscated.

"What are they hunting for?" I asked the guard. "Bombs!" he replied simply.

At Zagreb soon afterwards I was told that malcontents had been more active and more audacious than ever. In less than a week more than twenty-two railroad coaches had been demolished by bombs on Slovene lines, and fourteen on Croat. In one month more than fifty bombs had been discovered under the coal of locomotives or in the casing of cars. Not only property but lives had suffered. Three gendarmeries had been dynamited! One of the bombs currently used by the terrorists was given to me for inspection in a little Zagreb coffee house. It was not made by Communists, but by Croat and Slovene revolutionaries in Austria. It was about the same size and shape as a cigarette packet - charged with a terribly powerful new explosive, cheap and easy to handle.

I was given the exact formula of its ingredients and an agent of the Croat railroad even told me how to use it. It would not be in the public interest to publish these details here.

And these Slovene lands, where bayonets bristle and the war- dogs strain, what are they like? To the north, the mauve mountains, vegetation of a tremendous richness and variety, splendid forests and innumerable torrents, make a land of pure enchantment. To the south, sunshine makes them almost incredible.

But as one penetrates into Croatia, the landscape changes little by little, the wild rugged scenery of the north is left behind, and gives place to sober country, which though beautiful, takes on an ordered, civilised air.

The forests are less expansive; great plains roll into the distance, peopled, fruitful and entirely given over to agricultural exploitation; the magnificent and savage crags which everywhere penetrated the Slovene woodlands and prairies now disappear. Divided by little clusters and green hedges, the meadow-lands, where glossy cattle and great bands of horses graze, remind one of the richness of the French Normandy farms. Interminable vineyards, interspersed with thousands of fruit trees, cover rounding hillocks of red soil. Expansive villages press their comfortable, violet-tiled houses around low churches with high, tapering belfries. Among the immense fields of maize and sunflowers, of sugar beet and grain already in sheaves, great farms are hidden in the verdure of opulent orchards. In all directions, over roofs and fields, a network of electric wires gleams in the sunshine. Wide macadamised roads, leading across news steel bridges abound everywhere, and the whole scene is one of strength, of richness, of industry and of ordered civilisation ...

Източник : http://www.hic.hr/books/blackhand/problem.htm

Редактирано Октомври 13, 2013 от Петър Петров