by Dragutin HEDL and DANAS TEAM
In the nearby Borovo Selo, the radio-station, which plays the Serb music and is therefore very popular among the Vukovar Serbs, as every other Sunday morning, broadcast greetings from its listeners. The music was jolly, as is appropriate for birthday greetings, good wishes for weddings, or other sorts of family celebrations.
The Croatian Radio Vukovar broadcast solemn, classical music.
The image of a deeply divided town was even more obvious than usually. A day before the local Croats were to commemorate victims fallen in the town, Serbs held a mass for their dead at the old cemetery in the center of the town. The Serb victims are buried at the small cemetery in the center of the town. Croats are buried on the outskirts of the town, at the place that has in the meantime been named "The Memorial Cemetery for Victims from The Homeland War".
Thus, the dead are divided, just like the living.
During that time, in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, media were mostly silent. There was no glorification, warrior boasting, and noisy justification of the destruction of Vukovar. There were no moving testimonials of the expelled residents, soldiers mobilized by force, volunteers, regrets of participants... Instead, absolutely nothing. Only consistent Women in Black commemorated the tenth anniversary of the fall of Vukovar by a peace action in Kragujevac. Kragujevac was not randomly chosen for this action.
"We recall when the tanks of the Yugoslav People's Army set off towards Vukovar, and when citizens of Belgrade saw them off with flowers. We recall that ignominious act of collective responsibility for war and war events. Years, months, days of forced mobilization, night time raids, and taking of forcefully mobilized soldiers to the war," their statement says.
As research by Danas and IWPR indicates, the conspicuous silence in the media hides painful awakening and realization of the magnitude of the Vukovar tragedy. All interviewed participants in the "operation Vukovar" in 1991 are today convinced that it was a tragic mistake.
That realization has not yet attained the form of an official Serb admission, although the public, both in Serbia and abroad, has been waiting for it since the overthrow of Milosevic's regime.
However, the memory of Vukovar cannot be easily suppressed.
As Zoran Jevtic (47), from Kragujevac, a worker at Zastava car factory and a participant in the final operations in Vukovar says:
"I'd like to erase that episode; so many people died there for nothing. And that was a beautiful town! Even then they knew that Vukovar would never be a Serb town, because it had never been that before. Perhaps, that is why it was destroyed so mercilessly."
The strongest, unsuccessful attempt by the Yugoslav People's Army units and paramilitary forces to enter Vukovar took place on September 14. Fighting went on until September 20.
After that defeat, the Serb forces daily bombed the surrounded town, turning it into ruins.
"Operation Vukovar" started on September 30, 1991, with a forceful offensive of the YPA, with participation of armored units, air force, territorial defense units and paramilitary formations. Starting with September 30, until November 18, the town was destroyed, until it was razed to the ground. Thus, it became a symbol of the Croat-Serb war, a victim, "Croat Stalindgrad". That day is commemorated by Croats as the fall of Vukovar, while Milosevic's supporters celebrated it as the liberation of the town.
Reservists of the YPA from central Serbia, Sumadija, participated in the siege and capture of Vukovar, some willingly, some against their will. Most of them either did not manage to or did not dare flee the front line. Some of them really believed in patriotic rhetoric of Milosevic's regime and Radio TV Serbia.
Ten years later, many among the "liberators" would prefer to forget everything they experienced and saw there.
Zoran Jevtic explains that his unit arrived in Vukovar in late October.
"We were on the outskirts of the town for 28 days. Vukovar was already then a deserted and destroyed town. Volunteers went in front of us and created tunnels in the walls of semi-destroyed houses with bombs."
Jevtic claims that the unit of Zastava's Territorial Defense went behind the volunteers, without realizing where they were at the time.
"We split, on our own, into teams, 7-8 men per team. We entered deserted houses on our own. People were edgy. Some of them kept shooting for no reason... I recall one night. It was raining hard. A friend of mine and I were alone on a deserted road. At one moment we heard noise from the road. I asked him: 'Can you hear that?' He says: 'Yes I can'. I say: 'I'm going to shoot'. And he says: 'Go ahead, shoot'. Before I had a chance to squeeze the trigger, I heard a machine gun. I was confused until I realized that my friend was shooting. I asked him: 'What's up with you?' He said: 'I have no idea'," Jevic says.
He is today filled with remorse regarding the events in Vukovar.
"Srboljub Vasovic, the then director of 'Zastava' and the mayor of Kragujevac, got us into the whole thing... I know that it was a huge tragedy, chaos. There was a lot of stealing. The whole teams carted away all sorts of stuff, irresponsibility reigned, and military commanders were totally ignored. Volunteers were drunken morons. Everything in Vukovar was a big shame. I only feel good that I did not soil my honor. I did not see a single Croat there, let alone kill one."
D.C.(35), a resident of Belgrade, was mobilized in September 1991, and sent to the front after a brief training.
"We had no idea where we were going, but we could guess. They simply loaded us on trucks and delivered us to the outskirts of Vukovar. We slept on the floor of an abandoned house. A day or two nothing happened. Then Croats attacked us and we were totally lost. A few guys from my unit were killed. They were kids."
He remembers that hardly anyone in his unit was sober, but that no one was bothered by that.
"We were told to shoot at everything that moved. And we did. There was no going back. They leave you to guard a destroyed house. You jump at every sound. As soon as you hear something, you shoot, without looking what it was," D.C. says.
To the question whether he knows if he killed anyone, he responds: "It was a war."
"I saw a man being strangled to death by wire. He did not even wear a uniform. I can still see his eyes and his death throes. We jumped over corpses. The first few days we vomited, but then we got used to it. Then I thought - those who died saved themselves."
He did not participate in the looting. From Vukovar, he only brought back a bullet in his leg and memories.
Thirty-years-old A.S. was a YPA volunteer.
"I was young, wanted adventure. I was prompted by patriotism, the story about danger for the nation. I did not tell my mother that I had volunteered. I simply left and called her from the barracks. I told her that I had been mobilized."
He claims that the YPA soldiers did not participate in looting and killing of civilians. "That was strictly forbidden," he says, and adds that he witnessed torture by volunteers wearing military fatigues.
Miroljub Rankovic (46), from "Zastava's" Territorial defense, says that he joined the military because he wanted to defend his country, Yugoslavia.
"It was such a beautiful country. It was destroyed by the leaders because of their selfish interests. They wanted to keep power at all costs. However, at the time I was not aware of that. Only now I realize that at that time the people fighting on the front line were workers, farmers, their children, and war profiteers, while those who advocated war and their children were nowhere to be seen. I realized then that all of us, Serbs and Croats, who participated in that war were simply considered to be expendable. It gives me creeps to hear Bora Jovic, Stipe Mesic, Vasil Tupurkovski, Milan Kucan, [representatives of Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia, and Slovenia, respectively] and other leaders of the former Yugoslavia when today they wash hands and deny responsibility for the break up of the former Yugoslavia," Rankovic says.
Today, he does not think that war was unavoidable, and that it was necessary to destroy Vukovar.
"I was looking forward to coming back. After the return, I was traumatized. Those who did not go through that cannot imagine what happened there. I saw in Vukovar various volunteers, from Arkan's to Seselj's units, all the way to those looters who joined the attack to steal. I am sorry for all those killed Croats, civilians, and our casualties as well," Rankovic adds.
Jovan Savic (48) also has troubling memories from the fighting near Vukovar. He mostly feels unease and shame. As soon as he was mobilized in Kragujevac and sent from the center in Valjevo with his unit to Tovarnik, next to Vukovar, in September 1991, his unit joined the fighting. They were ambushed.
"They shot at us from a machine gun nest set up on the church belfry. A lot of our soldiers died there, as well as a truck driver from my unit and my lieutenant Savicevic, I don't recall his name anymore," Savic says.
His unit was moved to the village of Oriolik, from where, for weeks to come, Vukovar was bombed daily.
"We targeted Vukovar from 'Oganj' [blaze], a multiple rocket launcher, heavy mortars and large caliber cannons. We bombed almost non-stop, because that was the order."
He feels the worst regarding the fate of people in whose house he was staying.
"My host, an ethnic Hungarian, whose wife was a Croat, and their daughter, treated me as a friend. I felt horrible when, towards the end of the siege, they were expelled from their house. They told them to take their personal belongings, some clothing and money. They cried when they drove them away. Actually, then they collected all Croats and Hungarians from Oriolik and told them that they were taking them to Bosnia. I don't know where they were actually taken..."
He is convinced that the war was not necessary. It was totally senseless.
During the research for the article, Danas and IWPR managed to get hold of documentation of the police station in Vukovar, which was captured by the Serb police after capture of Vukovar. Those reports, sent to Zagreb, testify about the days under the siege, between August 25 and September 25.
According to the messages sent to Zagreb, in that period, in the attacks on the town and Borovo Naselje, under control of the Croat authorities, the Croat side suffered 102 casualties, and 441 wounded. Most victims were civilians, 71 dead and 255 wounded. 24 members of the Croatian National Guard, and seven policemen also died, while 140 guard soldiers and 42 policemen were lightly or seriously wounded.
The reports include one by Croat Jozo Ivancic (born in 1930) from Tovarnik, the village near Vukovar which was under control of Croat forces, and was attacked in September by the YPA. Ivancic describes how after the capture of the village by the YPA, based on the orders of four men in military fatigues, he "loaded dead in YPA uniforms and military fatigues in a military truck, together with another three men".
"I do not remember exactly how many dead YPA soldiers were there, but I do recall that the truck was almost full. After that, the truck drove off towards Sid, and the four of us had to collect the dead cattle. When we finished the job, men in YPA uniforms brought the four of us to the courtyard of the [Serb] Orthodox monastery, and one of them ordered us to line up. The same man immediately started shooting and all four of us fell on the ground. Stipo Kovacevic immediately got up, told them that they were beasts, that they should shoot, and that he did not want to live anymore. Then, the same man shot Stipo do death. I pretended to be dead."
"The first thing that comes to mind when I mention Vukovar is the hospital. There were about one hundred corpses in front of the hospital. I remember how news photographers scrambled on top of them, tossed them left and right, trying to get as horrible scene as possible. Some of the corpses wore YPA and Croatian Guard uniforms, others were civilians and women who were obviously raped before being murdered."
During the weeks of the siege military forces took turns in some parts of the town. Victims of both sides were brought to the hospital courtyard, Milivojevic explains the fact, unbelievable for many, that in the Vukovar hell, bodies of the YPA members were found in the hospital. He confirms that the town was full of bodies of dead civilians.
The YPA units and all sorts of Serb paramilitary formations entered the destroyed town on November 18, without meeting resistance. The major credit, of blame, depending on your point of view, for the destruction of Vukovar, goes to the First Guardian Motorized Brigade from the YPA Operation Group South. All sources, from Croatia, Serbia and international observers agree on this point. This unit was at the time under command of then colonel, today retired General Mile Mrksic. His immediate subordinate was then major (YPA), and today Colonel (YA, retired) Veselin Sljivicanin, who had direct command of the units in the town, as well as the battalion of the Guardian Brigade military police. A special infantry unit, under command of Captain Miroslav Radic also had an active role in the siege and capture of Vukovar.
Immediately after the entry of the YPA and paramilitary forces in Vukovar, in the night between November 19 and 20, a crime was committed at the Ovcara farm. The Hague Tribunal for war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia issued indictments against Mrksic, Sljivicanin, and Miroslav Radic, to which the name of Slavko Dokmanovic was added later, for this crime. Dokmanovic, the mayor of "liberated" Vukovar, was arrested on June 27, 1997 and extradited to the Hague Tribunal. The other three defendants are still at large. Dokmanovic pleaded not guilty. On June 28, 1998, Dokmanovic committed suicide in his cell in Scheveningen. The trial was stopped after that.
Cvijetin Milivojevic testifies that, in front of journalists, while Sljivicanin argued with representatives if the International Red Cross, wounded, soldiers and civilians were being taken out through another door.
"We heard that they were taking them to some hangars where they were checking their ethnicity, and military status, who was a soldier and who a civilian," Milivojevic says.
Even the reporter of the patriotic Belgrade daily Vecernje Novosti then recorded that people who were found in the hospital on November 19 1991 were taken away. According to Politika, Tanjug reported that there were "420 wounded and 400 civilians" in the Vukovar hospital.
According to the findings of the Hague Tribunal, about 400 individuals were taken on that day from the hospital and first taken to a nearby barracks, and then to the Ovcara farm. In the barracks they were kept for about two hours in the buses. During that time, based on orders of major Sljivicanin, fifteen men were taken off the buses.
In Ovcara YPA soldiers and members of the Serb paramilitary formations took men and women off the bus and forced them to run between two lines of soldiers who beat them. Soldiers then continued to beat them for several hours inside a building at the farm. At least two men died from the beating. YPA soldiers and members of Serb paramilitary units, with Dokmanovic's assistance, on November 20, in the evening, murdered from firearms and in other ways at least 198 men and two women. The victims were buried with a bulldozer at the same location. Another fifty men taken from the hospital on the same day are still listed as missing.
The remains of the victims were exhumed from the mass grave in Ovcara in 1997.
"We have demolished Vukovar, the worst, strongest Ustashe fortress, thanks to courage and knowledge of the members of the Motorized Guard Unit, the YPA, volunteers, and members of the Territorial Defense," Mile Mrksic, one of the strategists of the "Operation Vukovar" said immediately after the capture of the town.
A return to not so distant past even today brings back the hiss of hate speech from the TV screens of the Serbian state-controlled TV channel, stories of beastly liquidations of Serb civilians in the surrounded town, apocalyptic scenes from the town, which according to the official Belgrade was "liberated".
The Serb media and the regime celebrated a victory, mentioning briefly that it was a costly victory. Those weeks, newspaper columns and prime time TV programs were reserved for "Ustashe crimes" against, as the media kept emphasizing, "unarmed Serb people".
"Our military never prepared for such a war, because it did not believe that someone could use such uncivilized means as in this case," Sljivicanin told a group of about 150 journalists, emphasizing that the Army had found in the town two mass graves with 70 and 140, respectively, bodies of massacred civilians. Sljivicanin's statement was carried by Politika on November 24, with the characteristic remark of its journalist that he "saw several hundreds of corpses with smashed heads, whose internal organs had been harvested for the needs of medical establishments in the West".
Vukovar fell, and hungry and terrified people crept up from the cellars. YPA units systematically sent ethnic Croat residents of Vukovar to exile.
Zoran Jevtic, from Kragujevac, says:
"That night, some Oscar, he was from Vukovar, came and told me that Vukovar had fallen. I did not believe him at first. Later they told us that we were supposed to go on and attack Osijek. We went crazy. 'What are they talking about? What Osijek? What for?' I kept wondering. The following day, however, they told us that we were going home. It was horrible. I did not believe I was going home. I thought I was dreaming. When I arrived home, I had problems. I was haunted by an incident from Vukovar, in which I almost killed an elderly woman."
Jevtic recalls that the elderly woman had been in a cellar for months. When she got out she started wondering the streets.
"We were ordered to shoot at everything that moved. I don't know why I didn't shoot. Later, it turned out that the woman was a Serb. Her son came and told me: 'Thanks for not killing my mother!'"
Besides the hospital and hotel, and the Serb Orthodox Church, the authorities of the then Serb Krajina Republic did not rebuild anything in the town. That indicated that Milosevic even then knew that Vukovar would be returned to Croatia in the end and that any investment in reconstruction was lost in advance.
When an agreement was signed in Dayton in the fall of 1995, the West wanted to also resolve the problem of the Danube region. Croatia had in the meantime, in military actions "Flash" (May 1995) and "Storm" (August 1995), expelled about 200,000 Serbs and regained control of the western Slavonija and Knin Krajina region. The Erdut agreement, signed in November 1995, envisaged a two year transitional period, and peaceful integration was implemented by the American General Jacques Paul Klein. In the fall of 1997, elections were held in the Danube region, and on January 15, 1998, it was fully integrated with the rest of Croatia. Today, in Vukovar, out of pre-war 45,000 inhabitants, only a half remain. With the assistance from the international community, a significant number of houses and apartments has been rebuilt. About 11,500 Croats, out of 22,000 living in the town before the war, have returned to Vukovar. About 12,000 Serbs remain in the town, which means that at least another 12,000 have left, fearing the arrival of the Croat authorities and possible reprisals.
Most of them ended up in Serbia, while some left to Western Europe, Canada, some even as far as new Zealand.
The unemployment rate, which is about 22 percent in Croatia, is twice as high in Vukovar. The current Croat authorities have enacted a Law About Vukovar, which is supposed to stimulate economic activity by giving tax breaks and low interest loans for starting of businesses. Recently Tudman's airplane "Challenger" was sold at an auction for about $10 million and that money was also invested in the reconstruction of the town. In spite of everything, Vukovar, at one time one of the most beautiful towns in Slavonija, still maintains a depressing and abandoned appearance. Numerous ruins, recalling wartime horrors, can still be seen at every step. It's been almost four years since the reintegration of the town with Croatia, and there are almost no inter-ethnic incidents in the town, but its inhabitants live next to each other, almost without any contact.
Stjepan, a Croat, a 70-years-old retiree, who worked for the Borovo shoes factory before the war, as most of residents of Vukovar, says:
"I know that Serbs who now live here are not to be blamed for what happened, but my relations with them are not the same as before the war".
Stjepan was a refugee between 1991 and late 2000, wasting time in refugee camps and hotels on the Adriatic shore. His son died defending Vukovar. He is officially listed as missing, as his body has not been found.
The divisions are omnipresent in Vukovar. Croats shop in Croat owned stores, Serbs in Serb owned stores. Cafes, the places where most young residents spend time, are also divided into Serb and Croat cafes. After high school graduation, young Croats usually continue studies at the University in Osijek or in Zagreb, while Serbs go to Novi Sad or Belgrade.
In Serbia, however, there is no prevailing view that "Operation Vukovar", similarly to all other war adventures through which Serbia went in the last decade of the twentieth century, was a big, ignominious, and irreparable mistake. Even though almost all DOS leaders admit off the record as much, so far no official statement has backed up the tacit admission.
"The heroic defense of Serb women and children from bloodthirsty Ustashe", as the invasion of Vukovar was officially described in Serbian warmongering machinery, even today, ten years later, provokes controversy. Thus, these days it has been announced that Yugoslav Foreign Affairs Minister Goran Svilanovic, an experienced anti-war activist, will apologize to Croatia on the anniversary of the "liberation" on November 18, for victims and destruction of Vukovar. The news, which heartened a significant number of people in Serbia, was denied by the Federal Information Bureau with the press release, which stated that "claims of certain media about the visit of the Federal Foreign Affairs Minister to Vukovar are simply not true."
Such unsynchronized behavior hides the true problem facing the Serbian authorities. They are obliged to fully cooperate with the Hague Tribunal, on which financial assistance to the country depends, and the "Vukovar three" are among the first defendants on the list of individuals wanted by the Hague Tribunal.
The real dilemma and nightmare for the Serbian authorities is - how to extradite individuals charged with war crimes committed in Vukovar without admitting to the local public that a crime has been committed in the first place. Moreover, the individuals sought by the Hague, especially Veselin Sljivicanin, in the Serbian public, bombarded for ten years by disinformation, still have the aura of heroes, defenders of the endangered Serb nation.
On November 18 Serbia was silent. Media, both "liberated" (on October 5, 2000) and those who did not need liberation, did not find it necessary to remind their readers and viewers of the tragic fate of Vukovar and its residents. Two days later, when in Ovcara a wreath was laid commemorating the victims, in Serbia no one said anything.
The official Belgrade, obviously does not intend to stir the ghosts of the past unless forced to do so.
Political amnesia has been turning into a general epidemic with every passing year, an epidemic that threatens to shroud in silence both Vukovar and its victims, both in Serbia and Croatia. Yugoslavia and Serbia do not want to admit how many innocents they've sent to death trying to conquer what could not be conquered, how much blood was spilt for the sake of the adventure known as Greater Serbia with "historical borders" Karlovac-Karlobag-Virovitica. Vukovar, was only a brief stop on the way to the final destination.
After the finished operation in Vukovar Veselin Sljivicanin was promoted to the rank of colonel and became a commander of the YA brigade stationed in Podgorica. He was retired a month ago, supposedly after angering the highest military authorities in the FR Yugoslavia by making an appearance at a promotion of a book about himself in Kikinda. By the way, ever since the Hague indictment he has been seen relatively frequently, even photographed, all over Yugoslavia.
After Vukovar, Miroslav Radic left the army and became a businessman. According to some reports, not necessarily reliable, he currently lives in Kragujevac and his business hasn't been doing all that well. Allegedly, he was seen last year at the Kragujevac flea market, selling goods.
"We hope that representatives of the competent state institutions as well as historians dealing with this particular period of recent history, will be able to provide an objective assessment of the Vukovar operation, ten years after the events".
Tens of thousands of Serb reservists and volunteers, both fighting with the YPA and paramilitary formations, participated in the "liberation" of Vukovar. Although the Yugoslav military leadership is still unwilling to reveal the correct number of mobilized soldiers, our sources in the YA claim that 80,000 reservists were mobilized only in Vojvodina [northern Serbia] by the YPA.