Choosing Balkan charm over sense NEXT TO baseball umpires and retired army generals, nobody has a harder time admitting to error than a newspaperman. We're foolish to be that way. The public doesn’t really believe we are infallible. Infallible! Why even the Pope admitted recently that the Roman Catholic Church was wrong in claiming that the sun went around the Earth. If he can do it, why not the people of the press? Somehow, we don’t seem to be constructed that way. The old newspaper motto is ‘‘Never retract. Never apologize.”’ Taking my lead from the Pope, 1 am going to describe here in some detail how wrong | was in a series of articles written years ago from Yugoslavia. I went there as a guest of Bor- ba, the Communist party’s main newspaper, equivalent to the Pravda of the Soviet Union. 1 visited all the states of that republic and met same wonderful people, whom I still remember fondly. In fact, all my memories of the Balkans are warm ones, | made One return visit a few years later, and I plan to make more, when the fighting stops, if it ever docs. Cruel as they are to one another, all the southern Slavs ! met, except one Ione secret police officer, were warm, witty, vivacious, friendly and outspoken. The memories crowd in. An old Montenegrin soldier, who had helped build the St. Alice Hotel in North Vancouver and went dack to fight for his homeland in the First World War. A Croatian poet in Rijeka. A Slovenian newspaperman in Ljubljana with whom | got gloriously drunk. He knew mere political jokes, most of them denigrating his own government, than any other man I have ever met. : I remember Bosnia-Herzegovina and her Moslems, one of whom sold me bracelets of darkened silver that seerned to have been aging since the reign of Constant- ine. We drove from the Adriatic on crooked little mountain roads, our driver cheerfully ready to-sacrifice all our lives for style. Going into tight corners he would turn his back to the road and say to us in the back seat, **Two weeks a driver. Very good. Very good for two weeks, yes?” He took us through the wine country of the Vale of Mostar, which lives up to its lovely, melo- dious name. So far, | have admitted no er- rors, unless you count getting drunk with a man who had been imprisoned and tortured in the regime of Rankovic or choosing charm over sense in hiring chauf- feurs. What I did report from Yugoslavia during that trip does not read badly even today. { expected to get the party line from party people and could squeeze the Marxist rhetoric from wee AL. Paul St. Pierre | PAULITICS & PERSPECTIVE it. In fact, most of those I met were Communists in name only. The country was launched on a system of ownership of factories by their employees rather than by the State. Generalissimo Tito was in power. I didn’t meet him then but did later in Ottawa. He had the coldest blue eyes ] have ever encountered in a human being, but then, as today, I never doubted his courage or his deter- mination. He had broken with the Soviet Union at that time and stood alone in the world, his country neither within the fron Curtain nor outside it. My immense ard grievous fault was what I did not report, in fact did not cven-so much as comment upon — the old, ethnic hatreds of the Balkans. We all knew that in the Second World War these people had slaughtered each other as eagerly and as cruelly as the Germans did. Croats, Serbs, Macedonians, SJovenians, Hungarians, Atba- nians and a host of minorities — they swam in each other’s blood. Yet after two trips to Yugoslavia, after talking with Yugoslavs who were in the gov- ernment and who were against the government, I never saw the im- placable hatreds that remained firmly rooted in the people of those mountains. 1 was not sure they would win their contest with the Russian giant. I was not sure their cob- bled-up Marxist-capitalist economy was going to work. But of one central fact 1 re- mained certain: President Tito had finally brought unity to the Southern Siavs. The old fires of hatred and ri- valry had guttered out. The Balkan people might quarrel, most family members do, but blood wouldn’t run any more. How could | inave been so fool- ish? Anger, hatred, a lust to avenge wrongs real and imagined, they were there, separated from my sight by the thinnest veneer of peace, order and strong govern- ment. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Surely a news- Paperman should. | should have, and didn’t. Reform party appoints NV man director Long Haired Rabbit Coats Beautiful Assorted Colours Long Haired Rabbit Jackets Se Fabulous! Assorted Colours Blue Fox Jackets Tres Chic Friday, December 4, 1992 - North Shore News - @ NORTH VANCOUVER | tesi- dent Douglas Howe has been appointed as the regional direc- tor of the Lower Mainland north region for the Reform Party of B.C. He replaces Gerry Rehwald, who is moving to Nelson to become the regional director for the Kootenay region. Howe ‘has assisted in the de- velopment of the Foundation for Reform, the party's con- sUtution, principles, bylaws 2nd policy direction. Microfibre Rain Jackets Silky, Rabbit Lined Microfibre Rain Coats Stylish, Rabbit Lined Mink Jackets Sensationai Mink Coats LUXUTIOUS! 000.0... teeeeeteeseeeeenseee Sheared Beaver Jackets Simply Elegant Mink Coats 4 with Gorgeous Silver Fox trim... 5 Grosvenor Russian Squirrel Swing 7/8 Strollers Blush Fox Coats . Meticulously Hand crafted Sheared Muskrat Parkas wath Fox Trim, Assorted Colours, Splendid! .. Prairie Wolf Coats Fashionable Peart Mink Coats Fully Let Out Skins, Exciting! .... Natural Sable Jackets Stunning Female Mink Coats Exquisite, Blackglama Lynx Coats World's Finest Quality Swakara Evening Coats Grosvenor, Lavish Black Montana Lynx Cat Coat Beautiful Assorted Colours ....... Female Mink Coats Unsurpassed... 1098 1998 £298 288