-Caveat Lector-
> Britain's Secret Shame
>
>
> Foreign Affairs Editorial Opinion (Published) Keywords: OPERATION
> KEELHAUL, REFUGEES, NATO, WWII Source: Toronto Sun/Edmonton Sun
> Published: 7/25/99 Author: Peter Worthington Posted on 07/29/1999
> 20:24:31 PDT by Antiwar Republican
>
>
>
> The Edmonton Sun
>
> Copyright © 1999, Sun Media Corporation
>
> BRITAIN'S SECRET SHAME
>
> OPERATION KEELHAUL SAW ESCAPEES FROM COMMUNISM FORCED BACK TO THE
> SOVIET UNION
>
> Sunday, July 25, 1999
>
>
>
> BY PETER WORTHINGTON, TORONTO SUN
>
> Dateline: TORONTO
>
> The chilling word of our times ethnic cleansing has different
> meanings to different people, but at its most benign it is
> forcing people to become refugees, as happened in Kosovo and,
> before that, in Bosnia.
>
> Britain and NATO have said it was Yugoslav President Slobodan
> Milosevic's alleged plan to "ethnically cleanse" Kosovo of its
> Albanian population that ostensibly caused the NATO air strikes.
>
> NATO's daily press briefings during the 78 days of air strikes,
> via the ubiquitous working class accent of Britain's Jamie Shea,
> seldom failed to mention the horrors of "ethnic cleansing."
>
> A cynic might have noted that it was Britain itself, after the
> Second World War, which escalated "ethnic cleansing" into state
> policy only in those days it was called "forced repatriation."
>
> Immediately after the Second World War tens of thousands of
> refugees, possibly hundreds of thousands prisoners of war,
> escapees from communism were forcibly sent back to Stalin's
> Soviet Union and Tito's Yugoslavia and certain death.
>
> Britain instigated the policy, which the U.S. echoed, giving it
> the cynical code name Operation Keelhaul. This shameful policy
> has been dubbed by Alexander Solzhenitsyn as the "last secret" of
> the Second World War, in violation of every tenet of decency and
> justice.
>
> British troops forced men, women and children into boxcars headed
> for the U.S.S.R. and Yugoslavia, using rifle butts as prods. One
> British regiment, the London Irish, refused, saying their duty
> was to fight German soldiers, not club refugee women and
> children.
>
> American soldiers were more inclined to open the gates of refugee
> camps and look the other way as they fled.
>
> Forced repatriation was a humanitarian and political abomination
> a war crime every bit as much as the ethnic cleansing by Serbs of
> Albanian Kosovars.
>
> No one has worked harder or done more to expose Britain's
> shameful secret than British historian Count Nikolai Tolstoy. For
> some 25 years, he's dedicated himself first to exposing the
> policy for the world to see, second to perhaps identify those
> responsible.
>
> He's succeeded admirably in the first, failed wretchedly in the
> second and suffered accordingly.
>
> Tolstoy is the great grand nephew of Russia's great novelist (War
> and Peace) and humanitarian, Count Leo Tolstoy, who repeatedly
> put his body on the line against injustice. Nikolai has written
> three books on forced repatriation, each more revealing than the
> previous one, as more suppressed information came to light.
> Britain has embargoed files pertaining to the policy.
>
> In 1977 his Victims of Yalta was published, followed by Stalin's
> Secret War in 1981, and then his most controversial book, The
> Minister and the Massacres, 1986, in which he named names, was
> sued, and lost a libel case that I consider a travesty and which
> has been condemned by the Human Rights Court at Strasbourg,
> France.
>
> Periodically, Tolstoy visits Toronto, usually to be feted by
> grateful Slovenes, Serbs, Croats, Russians, Cossacks, etc., whose
> relatives and countrymen died by the tens of thousands when the
> British forced them back to Stalin and Tito and death.
>
> Britain's Lord Aldington, formerly Brig. Toby Low, successfully
> sued when Tolstoy identified him as a key figure in implementing
> the policy.
>
> Aldington acknowledged signing the repatriation orders, along
> with others, but said there was no way he could have known the
> refugees would be killed, and that if he had known, they would
> not have been sent back. "We were told that international law
> would be obeyed," he said at the time.
>
> A jury found against Tolstoy and awarded Lord Aldington nearly $3
> million in damages in 1990.
>
> Tolstoy, who declared bankruptcy, was denied the right to appeal.
> He was in Toronto this spring and is anything but subdued. He
> says he hasn't paid anything, won't pay, can't pay, and has a
> book in the works about his trial.
>
> So far, there's been no serious attempt to collect damages and he
> feels the courts are embarrassed by the whole process.
>
> Forced repatriation was such an appalling policy that even
> Winston Churchill omitted any reference to it out of his Nobel
> Prize winning history of the Second World War.
>
> While muted, the issue is far from dead. The European Commission
> on Human Rights in Strasbourg has supported Tolstoy. A semi
> retired American lawyer, Charles O'Neall, living in Switzerland,
> was so offended at the trial that he offered to represent him,
> pro bono, at the prestigious Strasbourg Human Rights Court. The
> mystique of British justice has been mauled.
>
> Also named in the The Minister and the Massacres along with
> Aldington were the late British prime minister Harold MacMillan
> and the late Thomas (later Lord) Brimelow.
>
> Soldiers, the likes of Field Marshall Alexander and Gen.
> Keightley opposed the policy, but obeyed orders.
>
> Some of the displaced people being sent back to communism
> committed suicide by sawing their throats with barbed wire. Some
> mothers threw their babies from trains into the river. Panic
> reigned.
>
> After Tolstoy's trial his Minister and the Massacres book was
> banned from British libraries and universities. "Interestingly,"
> Tolstoy told me, "it's begun to re appear on library shelves." To
> him "the policy was a war crime that fits the definition of war
> crimes at Nuremberg."
>
> A couple of Canadian officers attached to the British army at the
> time did their best to short circuit the policy. Maj. Herb
> McFarland of Toronto refused to obey the forced repatriation
> orders and risked court martial, while Maj. P.H. Barre of the
> Royal Montreal Regiment worked tirelessly to save the victims.
>
> Because Tolstoy was broke after the libel verdict, Britain's High
> Court ruled that he had no right to appeal unless he came up with
> about $250,000 in advance to cover Aldington's legal expenses.
> The court denied Tolstoy access to a defence fund set up in his
> name. Although the British government would like to silence
> Tolstoy and any reference to forced repatriation, the Internet
> has proved an invaluable outlet.
>
> Anyone interested can go to Yahoo on the Internet and search
> "Tolstoy, Nikolai" and see an account of events that is chilling
> to those who think British justice is pure and fair.
>
> After the trial, the BBC ran an excellent TV documentary on
> forced repatriation, which explored why and how Britain could be
> involved in such a policy especially when Churchill expressly
> forbade sending unwilling people back to Stalin.
>
> There's even evidence that British officers attached to Tito
> participated in the execution of these Serb, Croat and Slovene
> victims.
>
> Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, President Boris Yeltsin
> has ordered that Tolstoy be given access to Russian files.
>
> Tolstoy says he's amassed hitherto unknown details that will
> appear in his next book.
>
> I've periodically written about forced repatriation ever since
> being based in Moscow over 30 years ago when I heard tales of the
> policy which, frankly, I doubted.
>
> Before Tolstoy's experience, I wouldn't have believed an appeal
> would be denied anyone in Britain, or that a British trial could
> be as bizarre as Tolstoy's was. Some people thrive in adversity
> that is, their character sustains them in crises or when times
> are tough. Nikolai and Georgina Tolstoy and their three grown
> daughters and son could be called adversity's children. And they
> stand defiant.
>
> Others stand with them. The school of one daughter suspended
> fees, and others came forward to help financially.
>
> Just as Tolstoy has stood up for the victims of Stalin and Tito
> when no one else did, so survivors and their kin now stand up for
> him.
>From New Republic
A<>E<>R
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