Michael Foot, the editor of Evening Standard and Tribune,

a member of the british Parliament, a speaker of the Labour party;

He published many books and in the book The uncollected essays old and new 1953-2003, the wide ranging collection cover the people who have most influenced and emthralled him – natural choices such as Bevan, and Bevin, Churchil and Gorbacchev, Indira Gandi and Willy Brandt -         and the places – Hampstead, Wales, Venice, Dubrovnik- which have remained chosest to his heart.

We are presenting a part from the mentioned book

related to H. Kacic's book Serving my country.

«.....Kathy Wilkes' voice was heard first in ungorgettable circumstances on the telephone in my House of Commons, room one early October morning in the year 1991. We had never met before, but the place from which she was speaking I knew well enough. It was the studio of Đuro Pulitika, the Dubrovnik painter, in which Jill and I had had many happy meetings, but which, since the siege of Dubrovnik had started a few weeks before, had been converted into and emergency press office.... Just a few months before, in mid September 1991, Jill and I were completing our annual holyday in Dubrovnik. Rumors of war had been heard in Belgrad: indeed some professors at their university had been preaching a doctrine which sounded more like Hitler's fascism  than any natural product of Yugoslavia. Serbia must have the right to  rule wherever the Serbs lived: the first time I heard the phrase «ethnic cleansing». But even as late as September in that fateful year, the general scene was not clear. We had to make our way home via Montenegro and Belgrad itself instead of direct flight.

            The new book on the subject which Kathy Wilkes introduces has had the same combined experience of the subject as Hrvoje Kacic. His knowledge of the old Dubrovnik and the new Croatia, the country he has sought to serve, according to his title, is one with deepest roots but with a quite modern flowering. Croatia was not supposed to exist at all;  according to the most wretched Serbian gibe, it was just a German invention. And in the chancelleries of Europe where such nonsence was accepted, why should not old Dubrovnik be wiped off the map altogether? Fortunately for us, all the men, woman and children of Dubrovnik had different idea. Kacic has a special insight into that story and a special obligation to tell it......

            It was a terrible insult when the assailants of Dubrovnik sought to brand  the defenders as fascists or Ustase, the friends of the fascists. It was worse still when they sought to use the example of Vukovar to intimidate the defenders of Dubrovnik. Worse still again, they started to apply the same methods in the villages round Dubrovnik or when allied forces from Montenegro seized the neighborhood township of Cavtat. All these threats and incursions could have produced the surrender, which the people in charge in Belgrade certainly expected. But there was no wavering inside old Dubrovnik, as Kathy Wilkes was so eager to tell the world. And there had also been a properly directed military defence. Higher up on one mountain above those seized by the JNA, a handful of defenders were there to ensure that if the victors of Vukovar sought to repeat their final tactics in Dubrovnik, they would pay a terrible price for it. Month after month, defenders of Dubrovnik – men, women and children, as Kacic emphasizes – held their own.....»

  Hrvati AMAC