U.S. British View SOVIET ATTACK ON JUGOSLAVIA IS BELIEVED UNLIKELY

Greymouth Evening Star, 24 August 1949, Page 6

U.S. British View SOVIET ATTACK ON JUGOSLAVIA IS BELIEVED UNLIKELY

, LONDON, August 23. —“In the present conflict between the Soviet Uniol} and Jugoslavia, Marshal Tito must have weighed up the chances of a Soviet attack, and he estimates that Mr Stalin will not move ” says the f)aily Express. “Marshal Tito clearly believes that he can crush any revolt by Moscow sympathisers inside Jugoslavia before they can get* together.” The Times thinks that Russia will directly attack Jugoslavia only in the last resort.

The News Chronicle says that in a choice between Marshal Tito and some Moscovv-trained henchman in Jugoslavia .Marshal Tito is very much the lesser of two evils. '

“For the time being at least, American ■ authorities doubt that hostilities will develop in the Balkans because of Marshal Tito’s differences with the Kremlin,” says the Washington correspondent of the New York Herald Tribune. “The prevalent belief is that the Soviet’s increasingly bitter diplomatic campaign has the same old aim—to overthrow Marshal Tito' from within his own country. The difference is that the Soviet itself is pressing the issue instead of leaving it to satellite Governments. “Russia’s drive is believed to be primarily defensive and aimed at the return of Jugoslavia to Moscow’s control. This would extend the Iron Curtain westward and help to offset such Western gains as the Atlantic Pact and success in Greece and Germany.” Belgrade newspapers, commenting on the Soviet’s two warnings of “effective measures” against Jugoslavia to defend “inhumanly persecuted” Russians in Jugoslavia, said that Russia had no right to consider the present Jugoslav Government an

enemy of the Soviet Union. The Jugoslav Government was, and always would be, a firm friend of the Soviet peoples,, the papers said, but it would depend on the extent to which the Soviet Union renounced its ‘’false foreign policy” whether Jugoslavia would remain an ally of the Soviet Government.