Posted on 12/23/2005 2:49:55 PM PST by Hunden
Marking the tenth anniversary of the fall of the 'Republic of Serbian Krajina', an eloquent comment from IWPR's Balkan Crisis Report by a journalist who covered the parastate's four-year existence for The Independent (London)
Ten years ago I sat in the front room of a house in west London in company with a number of Croats, all eyes glued to the fast-changing footage of the satellite television that was carrying programmes from Croatian state television. ‘Come round,’ my friend had said. ‘Something’s up.’
That ‘something’, it turned out, was the ignominious fall of the Republic of Serbian Krajina (RSK), the Serb entity that had comprised almost a third of Croatia since 1991 and whose collapse marked the apotheosis of the mastermind of Croatian independence, Franjo Tudjman.
As town after town fell to the victorious Croatian army on the screen, and Knin itself, the epicentre of the Serb revolt, was in danger, the mood in the room was reticent.
Partly it was because the scale of the now apparent victory was unexpected.
‘— I thought we’d win back a few kilometres or a few towns and villages,’
my hostess mused.
Her elderly mother sat in silence besides me. Hailing from Sibenik, on Dalmatia’s coast, she had lived with the sound of the Serb shellfire in 1991 and 1992 and now was in Britain on holiday. ‘— How do you feel?’ I asked her, as a triumphant-sounding Croatian TV commentator babbled away in the background. ‘Those Serbs,’ she sighed.
‘— Belgrade just used them. And now they’ve thrown them away - like an old rag!’
Her measured, limited satisfaction with the course of events matched that which I witnessed later that year among many Croats who had lived on the borders of the RSK. There was not much euphoria on the ground after the soldiers swept through.
In reality, they felt they had lost out and that their principal difference with the Serbs was that in the end, the Serbs had lost out more.
Many Krajina Croats never went back home, for there was little to go home to, their villages, houses and places of worship having been comprehensively trashed during the four-year rule of the RSK.
Later that same summer, I journeyed through the Krajina, unable to recognise parts of the countryside that I had visited before and after the Serb revolt.
In [Hrvatska]Kostajnica, a quaint riverside town southeast of Zagreb, I found rubble and ruins. On the riverbank that separates Croatia from Bosnia I met an old returnee. He was staring at a group of people staring back at him from the other side of the river.
They were all former neighbours, for that group of people on the other side of the river were Kostajnica Serbs who had fled to Bosnia in the aftermath of Operation Storm. Now they were separated from their old neighbours and in some cases, relatives, by much more than a wall of water.
I searched for the 18th century Catholic church that had looked as if it dated from the reign of Maria Theresa, near which in 1992 I had listened to the then Serb leader, Jovan Raskovic, delivering a long and meandering speech to local Serb farmers.
At a dinner held in a barn after the speech, I asked a farmer sitting beside me if he and his fellows wanted to secede from Croatia, for that had been the gist of the speech.
‘— Don’t be crazy,’ he said. ‘Zagreb is only a few kilometres away. That’s where we sell all our stuff.’
‘— Why can’t we be just like we were before?’ said a Serb family I encountered not far from Kostajnica, on the same trip. ‘Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia….’ The mother reeled off the names of the six Yugoslav republics mechanically.
It had been only four years before, but the land I recalled from that summer – green fields, winding lanes, bucolic villages, orchards laden with fruit — had vanished.
By 1995, the old church in Kostajnica had been blown to pieces under the RSK. I could barely work out where it had even been sited. The big old Franciscan monastery in the town had almost gone the same way.
Everywhere lay signs of devastation, for what the Serbs had not demolished from 1991 to 1995, the avenging Croat soldiers were finishing off now. ‘Hrvatska Kuca – ne diraj’ (Croatian home – don’t touch) was scrawled on the few relatively untouched houses.
It was hard to imagine many Croats thinking of this wrecked landscape as ‘home’, let alone going to back to it if they had another option.
An air of doom and of uncontrolled violence hung over the RSK from the start. By coincidence, I had been there at the very beginning, on holiday in Dalmatia, when news of a ‘disturbance’ in the remote town of Knin [on August 17, 1990] sent me driving up the winding road that led to this dusty outpost, whose main significance was as a railway junction.
There I had encountered a sinister, baby-faced local official in a black leather jacket called Milan Babic and his sidekick, a fat policeman called Milan Martic.
The ‘irredentist dentist’ some foreign reporters soon nicknamed Babic, referring to his earlier trade. But there was little comic about either of these two men, soon to emerge as major political players on the stage of the fast collapsing Yugoslav federation. Even then I was struck by the cool fanaticism of the one and the pigheaded arrogance of the other.
‘— The Croats won’t find another Pribicevic in me,’ Babic informed me coldly, referring to the Croatian Serb leader of the 1920s and 1930s who had ended his political career by backing the Croatian Peasant Party in its quarrels with Belgrade. [and yet Babic ended up testifying against his former accomplices at the Hague tribunal]
I found Martic scoffing beans in a down at heel restaurant in Knin, full of grand plans about how much territory he intended to take. ‘— The Croats don’t deserve a town like Zadar or Sibenik,’ he announced, chomping his beans.
There was nothing nice, brave or noble about the statelet that these two proceeded to erect with the help of the Yugoslav army under Veljko Kadijevic, and Slobodan Milosevic.
Had they confined their designs to Serb-majority areas, they might have emerged with something from the conflict, for in the early days the Croats were far from united in their reaction to the secession of remote towns like Knin.
But this duo was unable to resist their own greed. After Knin (almost 90 per cent Serb) came Benkovac (60 per cent), Petrinja (50 per cent) and then towns like Drnis and Slunj, which were overwhelmingly Croatian but which Babic and Martic wanted in order to link their territories in Dalmatia with those to the north and east in Banija and Slavonia.
A state containing so much potentially hostile territory could only be governed by terror, violence and mass expulsions, which was what happened as more than 200,000 Croats were forced from their homes.
The fate of Kijevo, a tiny Croatian village near Knin was emblematic of the way the RSK proceeded. They could have surrounded it and let it be, for it was too small to pose much of a threat to their plans. Instead, Martic had it mostly flattened.
The RSK was a pioneer in the field of what later came to be called ‘ethnic cleansing’ and boasted of the fact, for RSK officials began floating the idea to foreign journalists that their ethnically pure state was a model that might be usefully applied to the still ethnically muddled Republic of Serbia.
Milosevic, meanwhile, found the RSK’s unswerving loyalty to himself politically convenient at a time when his support was less solid at home.
On and just after March 9, 1991, Milosevic imported gangs of police from Knin to put down a huge opposition demonstration led by Vuk Draskovic, counting quite correctly on their reputation for rough tactics.
Clearly, Milosevic did not trust his own police in Belgrade to disperse the protesters with the same efficiency, for they remained for days, a menacing presence on the streets of the capital and instantly recognisable from the RSK insignia on their uniforms.
The violence that the RSK police employed freely against fellow Serbs was only a shadow of their conduct towards the remaining Croats back home, however.
On a visit to Baranja in 1993, I found the remaining, mainly elderly, Croats being picked off and murdered one by one, usually at night, with the transparent connivance of the local authorities.
The killings were the despair of the local Belgian UN peacekeepers.
‘— We cannot stop it unless we station soldiers on the door of ever remaining Croat,’
their commanding officer told me.
But the RSK authorities in the local town, Beli Manastir, resented the Belgians for even trying to stop this indiscriminate murder. They were ‘worse than the Ustashe’, one of the Beli Manastir bosses told me.
It was not the state of Baranja, abysmal as it was, so much as the first anniversary of the ‘liberation of Vukovar’ in November 1992 that to my mind most accurately reflected the moral bankruptcy at the heart of the RSK.
After the carnage that had followed the capture of Vukovar, when more than 200 patients in Vukovar hospital were tipped out of their beds and shot dead, a day of silent reflection might have an appropriate commemoration.
Instead, the RSK authorities insisted on a full blown festival with flags and victory banners hanging from the streets.
And so it was, in company with many other foreign journalists, that I trudged through the potholed, rubble-strewn streets of this once rather charming baroque riverside town to watch Veselin Sljivancanin, one of the ‘Vukovar trio’ indicted by the Hague tribunal for the hospital massacre, strutting before his admirers.
They were a motley bunch, these admirers, some complete thugs, typical of the ne’er-do-wells who rise to the surface of any civil war, while others were complete crazies who had travelled over from Serbia for the day, spluttering away to anyone who would listen about what they would ‘do to the Ustashe’.
Away from this mob, I chanced across someone more representative of the people who had actually stayed in Vukovar.
An old man wearing plastic shoes, he stood there crying in the freezing rain about his wife and daughter who had left him, because they were now on ‘the other side’, in Croat-held Osijek.
Ten years on, I still wonder what happened to all those people. I wonder if the old man in his plastic shoes ever found his wife in Osijek, or what happened to the burly farmers I met in that barn in Kostajnica, sleepwalking into a conflict whose final dimensions they clearly had not grasped.
I had only one proper friend from the RSK, a sports instructor from Vukovar and he got the hell out, soon after the town fell. His closest friend, a Croat, had already been killed and his other buddy, a Ruthene, had disappeared. He wouldn’t fight for Croatia, as a Serb, but would not attack it, either.
The last time I was saw him he was in Belgrade, begging me to buy his gold watch so that he could get away to Germany, where his uncle lived. Shamed by his new-found poverty, I told him to keep his watch and gave him the few dollars he needed to find a new life.
To me, that whole episode was indicative of the RSK. An indecent construction, it repelled decent people. Its fall was a disaster for the Serbs who lived in it. But so, in a sense, was its rise.
Marcus Tanner covered the Balkan conflict for the London-based Independent newspaper. This comment first appeared in IWPR’s Balkan Crisis Report No 569, 4 August 2005.
This could be a useful reminder of who started those wars and against whom, and what their political purpose was, to those who could be tempted to believe the Serb propagandists' opportunistic claim to be "Christians", and victims of "Islamist aggression" as negotiations begin on the independence of Kosovo.
Aren't the Croats now being held for trial as War Criminals the guys who used genocidal tactics against the Serbs in Krajina?
The infamous Jasenovac concentration camp that the croats ran during WW II embarassed even the nazis wrt their brutality. Jasenovac was located in the Krajina and approximately 1/3 of Krajina Serbs were exterminated in the camp.
Try to look at things in a historical perspective instead of just making conclusions.
Serbians, persecuted for 15 hundred years, have the fight for survival in their genes, God bless them. The fight still remains as the Muslim invaders remain. Maybe someday the Christian Serbs & Croatians can put their bloody past behind them and face the real ememy. The enemy since about he year 600.
They had no sovereign rights on that land, and never had any. They tried to wrest those territories, where they were but an unassimilated minority of immigrants, from the thousand-year-old state to which they belonged.
It was also a war of extermination, since they expelled the majority Croats — a quarter million of them — from their homes, which they plundered and defiled. They also killed 13,000 in the process.
Of course Jasenovac is irrelevant. The Ustashe were just a handful of assassins from Herzegovina and Bosnia, and never represented either political opinion in Croatia or even a significant political tradition there, and in 1990 the Croatian government was led by a number of the former Partisans who had defeated them.
So no one really threatened the Croatian Serbs, and since a majority of them lived outside the territories some of them were trying to steal, that war of conquest launched from Belgrade under the guise of a local "revolt" and the massacres they committed could only put all of them in jeopardy, and that is what happened, with the killings in Glina and other places — like the Zec family in Zagreb.
As President Mesic, whose mother was a Serb and who really cared for them said early on, they stood no chance against the four and a half million Croats. Milosevic's answer, as he testified, was that he didn't give a damn about them.
Babic's reference to Pribicevic, and indeed the remaining Serbs' representatives' parliamentary support for a HDZ government show that the Serbs could have gotten along with the other citizens of an independent Croatia if it hadn't been for Belgrade's Communist leadership.
Why any Christian would want to be in a muslim state is simply beyond me. It has never worked in the history of the world.
Only a Serb, General Radislav Krstic, has been convicted so far for "aiding and abetting genocide" in Srebrenica.
Of course, since the Serbs started the wars and the atrocities, and committed an overwhelming majority of them — four fifths of them in Bosnia-Herzegovina, according to the Bassouini Report of 1995, they are a majority of the indictees at the International Tribunal.
Yet there has been an effort on its part of to indict Croats, Bosniaks and Albanians as well as Serbs. This has often led to acquittals, particularly of Bosniaks.
And if it had been established as a tool of international law rather than as an alibi for Western unwillingness to enforce it, the International Tribunal should only have been competent to judge the proxies of the aggressor states: of the Serbian state against Croatia, and of the Serbian and Croatian states against Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Former Croatian generals have been prosecuted for killings in the Medak pocket, Pakrac and Knin.
130,000 Serbs left the so-called "Krajina" in August 1995 upon orders from their political leaders;
the only attempted "genocide" wich took place in the region concerned some 700 elderly people who had remained there, who were killed in the following months and whose murderers have not been identified.
The ancestors of the Muslim Bosniaks came to the Balkans, at the same time as the Serbs, in the 7th century.
The Albanians are the native inhabitants of Kosovo, and the biggest Christian community there are the Albanian Catholics.
The Serbs were the invaders of Albanian and Bulgarian territories — Kosovo and Macedonia — in 1912, and the oppressors of their neighbours after 1918.
They were the aggressors in the recent wars.
And they are not doing such a great job at surviving now, given that their birth rate is catastrophic.
What are you talking about? This article concerns Catholic Croatia.
Actually, the ancestors of most of Kosovo's Albanians came to Kosovo in the 16-17th Centuries when much of Kosovo's Serb community fled to Hungary and Croatia when a rebellion by them against the Ottoman Turks failed.
Actually, they had just as much right to be on that land as their Croat neighbors, because Austria, which ruled Croatia, invited their ancestors (and the Vlachs) to settle their to help defend Austrian territories against Turkish enroachments.
BTW, when an invading enemy drives the civilian population before him, that's considered genocide irrespective of the number of people killed. Folks who justify such behavior because the victims ran rather than be killed will, of course, be dealt with in the lower regions of Hell. The perpetrators get a higher ring.
Given that this sort of behavior can be expected in just about every war of any kind at any time in history, this makes a very good case for Universal Military Training, and the parallel organization of civil society as a militia equipped with the biggest and the best of weapons.
Most political elites, unfortunately, fear their people too much to do that, e.g. the Commies who ran Yugoslavia ~ cowards to the bone.
They have been conquered, absorbed or destroyed by more advanced invaders until there are only two tribes left, mostly in Albania, but also in F.Y.R.
You are a liar.
The Serbs there were a constituent nation and the constitution granted to them the right to self-determination.
Educate yourself before you start lying here:
http://www.arhiv.sv.gov.yu/a100008g.htm
"Socialist Republic of Croatia is a national state of Croatian people, state of the Serb people in Croatia, and the state of nationalities residing therein."
.
.
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Paragraph 3 "The Socialist Republic of Croatia is within the composition of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia."
Article 3 of the SFRY constitution
"That the socialist republic is a state based on the sovereignty of the nations and on the rule of the working classes and all working people and the socialist self-management democratic immunity of working people and citizens and equal nations and nationalities."
The Zec family was killed because Tomislav Mercep gave the orders to kill Serbs in Pakracka Poljana. This same man was the one who INITIATED the killings of Serbs in Vukovar - before there was any "revolt". The Croat police were arresting prominent Serbs and also some at random, torturing them and killing them to produce fear and ethnic cleansing.
The Zec family were only 3 out of an estimated 280 Serbs killed in Pakracka Poljana. That estimate was given by Miro Bajramovic, who was part of the unit which killed them. Further he said: "It is my firm belief that if it hadn't been for the Zec family, nothing would have been known about Pakracka Poljana. It was the main key and the main reason why the unit has been looked at from this angle, and there were many Pakracka Poljanas in Croatia." (Confession of Miro Bajramovic)
For some reason the murder of the family made the news, but if it hadn't those Serbs would have been quietly snuffed out as happened in "many" places in Croatia.
The one who shot the Zec daughter, a 12-year-old, was a Munib Suljic, a MUSLIM in the Croat unit. According to Bajramovic, to enjoy harrassing the tortured and dying Serbs the Croats imprisoned. Boy could those Croats really torture!
This evil Muslim and all the other killers and those who gave the orders, such as Tomislav Mercep, are free today in Croatia.
This is what she told me:
As for the military serving in the Mission -- the ones I knew did sympathise with the plight of the Serbs (even if they first came to Mission thinking the Serbs were the bad guys) and were horrified and frustrated that the media twisted everything so. When they went home to England or Holland or wherever on leave and tried to tell people how things REALLY were, no one would believe them. It was truly frustrating for all of us. We had only each other to talk to, really.…
The Croats threw bodies in the river, incinerated them, or disolved them with lime and other chemicals. After "Op Storm" they also buried them in established cemeteries on top of bodies properly buried years before, and even made two "show graveyards" containing over 100 bodies each (one in Knin, one in Dvor) which were technically not a "mass graves" as the bodies were buried so many inches apart and marked with numbers. No horrifying headline-grabbing "mass graves" to be found!
To me, such methodical attention to avoiding bad PR is indicative of high-level coordination and orders from the top, whereas "mass graves" could be the work of out-of-control paramilitaries, or even, in some cases, villagers.
…
As far as camps the Croats put Serbs in before hostilities officially began, the only one I have personal knowledge of is the ZNG-run death camp in Sisak… I'm sure there must have been others…
At that same time, Croats also began flattening Serb villages around former Sector West and erasing them from maps as though they never existed. Somehow, no one seems to know about that, either. The majority of ordinary Croats have no idea all this happened. In one happens to find out, he/she is totally shocked!
It was always so sad when a displaced family from one of the "flattened villages" came to me when I was a Return Officer in the UNTAES Mission -- how can you return someone to a village which no longer exists?
After "Op Flash," what went on in Bjelovar Prison was not pretty. Croats denied Red Cross, UN and OSCE access to the prison, which for some reason also did not make it into the press. In July 1995, I interviewed a young man (16 years old) who had no kidneys (and very little mind) left after Bjelovar. I helped him get to relatives who had already relocated in Banja Luka. I still pray for him now and then.
Reisen in das Land der Kriege. Erlebnisse eines Fremden in Jugoslawien.
And you are a well-known Soros fluffer linking to websites owned and operated by him.
Americans know better than to trust Soros.
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