Hubert Butler: Witness to the Future

Hubert Butler was a leading voice in post World War 2 human rights, using insights he had gathered working and writing in Eastern Europe before and after the war. He exposed the scale of the Nazi inspired Croatian genocide and his work focused on the role played by the Christian Churches, in particular the Catholic Church. For this work he was labelled a communist in his home country of Ireland which was exorcised by the imprisonment of the Archbishop of Zagreb Aloysius Stepinac in 1946. As Butler was being silenced at home, Ireland was playing host (perhaps unwittingly) to former Croatian war-time Minister of the Interior Andrija Artukovic. Butler subsequently exposed this. Artukovic was finally put on trial in Zagreb in 1985. Above all, Hubert Butler recognised in the impunity of these war-time atrocities the seeds of future discord in Yugoslavia. Hubert Butler became an overnight publishing success at the age of 85 with publications emerging in Dublin, New York, London and Paris.