Category Archives: Travel

Who was to blame for the tragedy of Yugoslavia?

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Extremism, Hate, Pluralism

 

It is not hard to find people in the Balkans worthy of blame for the mess of the Yugoslav wars. It is much more difficult to find the blameless. As Tony Judt said, “There was certainly enough responsibility to go around.” The UN at first showed little concern about what was happening in Yugoslavia.

 

The UN Secretary-General at the time, Boutros Boutros-Ghali dismissed Bosnia as “a rich man’s war.”  When the UN finally arrived, it spent most of its time blocking the victims from defending themselves while the brutal aggressors were given a free hand to practice their lethal butchery. France not only was very reluctant to get involved, but also reluctant to even blame Serbia. Frequently it chose to blame the victims instead. It also took the Americans an awful long time to get engaged, but when they did it led the way against Milošević and his thugs. Their initiatives finally drove the allies towards intervention. Yet the US also dragged its feet while innocents were being slaughtered, because after Somalia in particular it was loath to take any risks at all, even though it had the most powerful armed forces in the world, because it felt, as James Baker the former Secretary of State had crudely said, “we’ve got no dog in this fight.”

 

The whole problem of humanitarian intervention in domestic wars or aggressions is truly, as another American Secretary of State, Warren Christopher had said, is “a problem from hell.”  Samantha Power wrote a brilliant book with that title. And in hell there are no easy solutions.  That does not mean we are justified on that basis alone from not doing what we can do to save innocent lives. It just means that the job will be enormously difficult and we must be ready for the task, or stay home and permit the exploitation of innocents. We must proceed with humility, but that is no excuse for inaction. After all the case for humanitarian intervention is always at best, an uneasy one. We must have a great deal of confidence to send our young soldiers into harm’s way in order to set the world right. It takes inordinate hubris, outright foolishness, or, perhaps, profound compassion.

 

The Yugoslavs themselves are also not without blame. As Tony Judt said, “no one emerges with honour.”  The Serbs held primary responsibility for the disaster, but the Croats and Slovenes were by no means lily white. Bosnian Muslims had minimal opportunities to commit atrocities so they at least committed few war crimes. They might have if they had claws. It is not clear what they would have done had they enjoyed more opportunities to wreak havoc too. They were largely on the receiving end.  And as Paul Thorne the American singer/song said so wisely, “I’d rather be a hammer than a nail.”

 

The losses of lives and homes were staggering.  The losses of civilization were appalling. For example, Sarajevo, one of the most beautiful, most cosmopolitan, and most civilized cities in Europe was left in ruins.  As Judt said, “it can be rebuilt but it can never recover.” The same happened to Vukovar and others.

The Croats were responsible for innumerable acts of violence against civilians.  This was directed by their political leaders in Zagreb. For example, in Mostar, a city that I visited that first time I was in this region,  a town in western Bosnia with an unusually high percentage of interfaith marriages, Croat extremists deliberately set about expelling Muslims and mixed families from the western half of the city and replaced them with Croat peasants. They paid back the ethnic cleansers by engaging in it as well. Then they set siege to the eastern districts of Mostar and in 1993 systematically destroyed the sixteenth century Ottoman bridge across the Neretva river even though it had been a symbol of the town’s integrated and ecumenical past.  It would have been like the fascists destroying the Ponte Vecchio in Florence.

In fact, as Judt said,

“The Croats then, had little to boast of—and of all the post-Communist leaders who emerged from the rubble, Franjo Tudjman was one of the more egregiously unattractive.  More than anyone else he made it a personal project to erase the Yugoslav past from his fellow citizen’s memory:  by March 1993 the very word ‘Yugoslavia’ had been removed from textbooks, readers, encyclopedias, book titles and maps published in the new Croatia.”

 

Needless to say, this did not help bring unity or pluralism. Only after he died did Croatia attain semblances of the old civilization. However, as Judt concluded,

“But in the end the primary responsibility for the Yugoslav catastrophe must rest with the Serbs and their elected leader Slobodan Milošević.  It was Milošević whose bid for power drove the other republics to leave.  It was Milošević who then encouraged his fellow Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia to carve out territorial enclaves and who backed them with his army.  And it was Milošević who authorized and directed the sustained assault on Yugoslavia’s Albanian population that led to the war in Kosovo.

Belgrade’s actions were a disaster for Serbs everywhere.  They lost their land in the Krajina region of Croatia; they were forced to accept an independent Bosnia and abandon plans to carve out from it a sovereign Serb state; they were defeated in Kosovo, from which most of the Serb population has since fled in justified fear of Albanian retribution; and in the rump state of Yugoslavia (from which even Montenegro has sought to secede) their standard of living has fallen to historic lows. This course of events has further exacerbated a longstanding Serb propensity for collective self-pity at the injustice of history and it is true that in the long run the Serbs may be the greatest losers in the Yugoslav wars.  It says something about the condition of their country that today even Bulgaria and Romania rank above Serbia in present living standards and future prospects.

But this irony should not blind us to Serb responsibility.  The appalling ferocity and sadism of the Croat and Bosnian wars—the serial abuse, degradation, torture and rape and murder of hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens—was the work of Serb men, most young, aroused to paroxysm of casual hatred and indifference to suffering by propaganda and leadership from local chieftains whose ultimate direction and power came from Belgrade.  What followed was no so unusual: it had happened in Europe just a few decades before, when—all across the continent and under the warrant of war—ordinary people committed quite extraordinary crimes.

There is no doubt that in Bosnia especially there was a history upon which Serb propaganda could call—a history of past suffering that lay buried just beneath the misleadingly placid surface of post-war Yugoslav life.  But the decision to arouse that memory, to manipulate and exploit it for political ends, was made by men: one man in particular.  As Slobodan Milošević disingenuously conceded to a journalist during the Dayton talks, he never expected the wars in his country to last so long.  That is doubtless true.  But those wars did not just break out form spontaneous ethnic combustion.  Yugoslavia did not fall: it was pushed.  It did not die: it was killed.”

 

 

And primarily blame fell at the initiative of the Serbs led by Slobodan Milošević who took advantage of deeply burning resentments. Resentment is rarely a good motive for anything, as Friedrich Nietzsche showed us.

I would merely add, that it was the people of Serbia who voluntarily turned their country over to extremists who were also at fault as well. When extremists take over, it is not just their fault. The people should not let that happen, at least if they have a choice. Just as the people don’t get off in Gaza, or Israel, or the United States, or Canada.

The history of the Balkans is not over.    Yet it appears, that Serbia has at least temporarily lost its teeth.  We will have to watch with interest what happens.  Hopefully it will be peaceful.  History however, would suggest otherwise. History would suggest that violence will return and domination from some power, perhaps foreign will prevail.

Hopefully history will not repeat itself. Again. But sadly, those old resentments can always flair up again, as Ukraine and so many other countries have discovered.

Krajina: A Village War

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Extremism, Serbia

I was sitting on the top of our river boat, in great comfort, probably with a drink in hand, when I saw this on the Danube River and it made me think of Krajina and the battle for Vukovar. I was very lucky.  Others were not.

Michael Ignatieff described a battle he witnessed near Krajina, where he said, “Everywhere in Krajina, the democracy of violence rules.” The Serbs who lived there wanted Vukovar to be part of their country. The Croats resists.

 

The war was everywhere and everyone was involved. This was an inclusive war. DEI not necessary. It was a village war, where people who lived together fought a brutal war against their former neighbours with whom they not so long ago shared drinks. Now they shared blows, bullets, and brutality instead. The front line sometimes ran right through two backyard gardens.  As he said, “This is a war where enemies went to school together, worked in the same haulage company, and now talk on the CB every night laughing, taunting, telling jokes. Then they hang up and try to line each other up in their gunsights.”

 

 

The battle for Vukovar was battle for Yugoslavia. It was battle of an idea.  What would happen after fall of Tito?  Serbians were the largest group. Could they rule the country? Somehow, pluralist options like living together were not available. Why?

 

Yugoslavia was a complex society.  A complex of several states or societies.  What was at issue in Yugoslavia was the fairness of the deal that everyone got within the federation.  Unfair states will not hold. After 1945 Yugoslavia would probably not have been re-constituted were it not for the Communist Party.  They were the only ones who developed significance during war and seized power after the war.

 

Later, the greatest discovery of Milošević was that Tito had died. It opened the door for a top predator like him.  By 1991 a large Serbian army gathered at Vukovar and serious shelling began.  Many people fled Vukovar.  Patriots stayed behind to defend the city in a hopeless cause.

 

 

The war for Vukovar has been called “a holocaust of betrayal”.  People turned against neighbours. War fronts divided neighbourhoods.  A new word entered the English language “Srebrenica.”  And a new expression, “ethnic cleansing.”

 

After the war it was very hard to live in town.  Someone pointed out, “Every day one meets people who were butchers.” I remember listening to a CBC radio program about how the women faced men who had raped them and there were no consequences for those men.  The men continued to be respected. The women not so much. Of course, the consequences for the women were permanent. How can people live there?  They forget, that’s how.  Or at least they try. As best they can.

 

 

After the war, Serbia declared the city of Vukovar  part of the self-proclaimed Republic of Serbian Krajina and in fact its eastern headquarters. This until then was part of the newly formed country of Croatia, which it defied, and where many Serbians in Croatia lived. The Republic was an unrecognized geopolitical entity but rather a self-proclaimed state that created many problems for Croatia. It was active during the Croatian War of Independence fought between Croatia and Serbia, from 1991 to 1995 when Serbs tried to get their independence from the Croats as the Croats had tried to get their independence from Serbia. A Serbian state in Croatia was never recognized internationally and eventually was part of Croatia, but only after many soldiers died in fruitless war. In the end, after all the incredible destruction and desolation, this little piece of land was given back to Croatia. There was only one question left: what was it all about?

 

After the war for Vukovar was over, and Serbia had “won,” again, if it can be called that, the Serbians placed a banner over one of the streets in the crushed city. Almost every building was ruined. Ignatieff described the scene this way,

 

In the town square, a banner had been stretched over the road from one pulverized house to another. It reads: “Welcome to Vukovar, Year One.”  But eighteen months after entering the town, the Serbs have done nothing to rebuild it. It should be left as it is. UNESCO could fence it off and declare it a European heritage site. What could be more European, after all, than our tradition of senseless nationalist warfare?

 

Is this different than the current war between Ukraine and Russia. We think Russia is clearly the aggressor.

 

In the evening back on the boat, we had a great happy hour with old friends and new friends. We forgot about war. We could do that. Ukrainians find that difficult now. They are not so lucky. Neither were the people of Vukovar.

 

Vukovar: Hell is Empty; The devils are all Here

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Extremism, Hate, Modern History

 

When I went on our guided walk through a part of Vukovar, I realized I was wearing a Belgrade, Serbia, baseball cap, which my sister-in-law bought me as a souvenir.   I asked our guide, Marda if that bothered her. I had been thoughtless to wear it. Marda said it was not a problem. It happened before my time. She was really too young. It was 30 years ago. To me a short time ago. To her a lifetime ago.  I was happy that she held no resentments against the Serbs.  If there is anything the wars of Serbia teach us it is, as Nietzsche pointed out, resentment is a sterile feeling that helps no one.

 

Places like Vukovar make clear the language of nationalism.  It turns the world into one of black and white. Us against Them.  The Good against the Bad.  Dostoevsky said that ‘if God is dead then all is permitted.’  Though profound I believe that he did not quite get it right. Rather I would say that if you reduce the other to an object, to an it, then all is permitted. Then it is not just possible, but honorable, to destroy towns in order to free them. Like Vukovar had been completely destroyed. Then it is possible to make rape an instrument of warfare.  Rape as national policy.  Then there is nothing wrong with shooting hostages. Or your neighbours.  Then heroes commit mass murders. It does not matter if young boys are included. All is permitted in the holy cause.  All is permitted when the other side is reduced to things.  They are no longer people.  They are objects of our wrath. It has nothing to do with the death of God.  All is permitted when the world is transformed into a world of Us against Them.

In such a world, as Ignatieff said, in his book Blood and Belonging,

 

“It was in Vukovar that I began to see how nationalism works as a moral vocabulary of self-exoneration. No one is responsible for anything but the other side… The pistol toting hoodlums, holed up in the ruins of the Hotel Dunav, who came out and threatened to kill my translator simply because he was Hungarian; the Krajinan Minster who had no information that was not a lie; the mayor of Vukovar, who went around the Vukovar hospital handing out Serbian flags to men whose legs ended at a bandaged stump—not one of these creatures ever expressed the slightest shame, regret, or puzzlement that the insensate prosecution of their cause had led to the ruination of their own city.  For all of them, the responsibility was solely Croat.

That is what happens in the world of Us v Them.  Bob Dylan put it well when he said, “you don’t count the dead with God on your side.” Or as our guide for the day, Marda said, “We’ve been to hell and back.”

 

When fighting subsided in Croatia a 14,000-person UN force was installed to keep Croats and Serbs apart. Croats had obtained an independent State and Milošević suffered the second of his string of ignominious defeats. Defeats that never gave him pause to consider the wisdom, or lack thereof, of his approach. Brutes like him rarely seem to reflect on their lives. At least I have seen few records of such reflections. That’s too bad. They might be able to offer some insights.

Shakespeare wrote, “Hell is Empty, the devils are all here. After walking through Vukovar I think I think I know what he meant.

 

The Water Tower: A Symbol of Resistance

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Decline of the west, Extremism, Hate, Modern History, Polarization, Political Violence

Our guide Marda led us on a fascinating walk through the town of Vukovar in Croatia. This town in 1991 was at the time the sight of the largest siege since the Second World War. Frankly, I expected to see more war-ravaged buildings, but most of them had been cleaned up. I don’t blame them for cleaning it up. Nobody wants to walk through devastation permanently (except me). And it has been more than 30 years since the war ended.

 

The first building we saw, from a distance, was the water tower which had become the symbol of the resistance of brave Croatians to the 3-month Serbian siege. The Croatians see it as symbol of their glorious resistance, defiance, and, they think, invincibility.  I consider such ideas hubris. After the war, it was one of the very few buildings (some say only one) left standing.  And that was truly remarkable since it had been subjected to barrage from the 1st day of the siege to the last, 87 days later.

There are images of the tower that can be purchased in gift shops for tourists. Souvenirs of the war. Go figure.

The Water Tower as a symbol of the defence of Vukovar was officially adopted on 30 October 2020, and is illuminated in the colours of the Croatian flag, with the lyrics of the Croatian anthem.

From day 1 of the siege , each and every day of the siege, the Serbians tried to demolish the tower with gunfire, and amazingly, if not miraculously as the locals think, it stood. It was hit with bullets but never collapsed. In fact, it was hit 640 times in 87 days. The people of the town took its durability as a message of their own durability and that of their town. They thought, that as long as the tower was there the Town would stand.

 

There is another amazing element to this story. Each day 2 young men, Ivica Ivanika and his friend Hrvoje Džalto took it upon themselves, to climb to the top of the tower,  at night in the dark without flashlights, to avoid getting shot. They climbed up the tower in order place  a new undamaged and sacred flag of Croatia to replace the one filled with Serbian bullet holes. The two men were scared every time they climbed up, thinking they might be shot. But every night they succeeded. It took about an hour and half to climb up and back down again, but they did it every day, religiously.

 

The stairs were not in perfect condition.  Entire rows of stairs were missing. No one had asked them to do this. They just did it. Sometimes they climbed in the middle of fierce fighting. They usually started around midnight. And every day the Serbs shot the flag down, and every night the two young men replaced the destroyed flag. Soldiers said that everyday their spirits were boosted as a result.

 

Unfortunately, Ivica Ivanika lost his life shortly before the town fell to the Serbs. After the fall of the city, Hrvoje Džalto was taken prisoner and much later exchanged, but he died before the opening of the renovated Tower. They are the heroes of the town.

 

Today, the tower has been converted into a museum with a restaurant. Traces of the war are still evident. And they are leaving those marks as a reminder. I appreciated that.

 

I think it is important to remember what happened there. It was a place where brothers turned murderous.

 

Sadly that can happen. It can happen anywhere. That is what we must remember.

The Brutes of War

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Authoritarianism, Croatia, Extremism

 

Serbs were often painted as brutes. But as usual the story is more complicated than that. Name calling is just another example of polarization. Rarely, do simple stories tell the whole story.

 

“In Yugoslavia, they [Serbs] were a protected constitutional nation. In independent Croatia, they were reduced to a national minority in a state with a genocidal past. Without a state of their own, the Serbs repeat over and over, they face extermination again. The Serbian war in Bosnia is designed to give them such a state by providing a unified corridor from Serbia proper, connecting up the Serbian lands in western, central, and southern Croatia. Without such a corridor, the Central Serbs know they will not survive, and until such a corridor is secure they live from day to day in a state of armed paranoia.”

 

Serbians always thought they were getting a bad rap from others. They did what every other country does, they claimed, and they were punished for it. They felt they have been scapegoats and misidentified. They felt they were not worse than any other country and yet the world castigated them as brutes and war criminals, while letting their enemies go free. Life really was more nuanced than that.

 

Yet life was in shambles after the war. It was chaos. Disorder on steroids. Or maybe cocaine.  Rule of law was now a chimera, or even less.

 

Michael Ignatieff put it this way:

 

The war zones of eastern Slavonia, and Vukovar in particular leave behind an unforgettable impression of historical retrogression. Graveyards where Jews and Ruthenes, German, Croats, and Serbs once were buried together now lie desecrated by bombs of both sides. …There is little gasoline, so the villages have returned to the era before the motorcar.  Everyone goes about on foot. Old peasant women forage for fuel in the woods, because there is no heating oil. Food is scarce, because the men are too busy fighting to tend the field. In the desolate wastes in front of the bombed-out-high rise flats, survivors dig at the ground with hoes. Everyman goes armed. No one ventures beyond the village. No one trusts anyone they have not known all their lives. Late twentieth-century nationalism has delivered part of the European continent back to the time before nation-state, to the chaos of late feudal civil war.

A week spent in Servian Krajina is a week spent inside a nationalist paranoia so total that when you finally cross the last Serbian checkpoint and turn on the radio, and find an aria from Puccini playing, and look out of your window and see wet fields in the rain, you find yourself uncoiling like a tightly wound spring absurdly surprised to discover that a world of innocent beauty still exists.”

 

 

Then guess what happened after the bloody war, with the corpses, mutilated bodies, raped women, and shell-shocked soldiers?  The land so bitterly fought over is given back to Croatia in the peace treaty! What was it all for? Absolutely nothing of course.

 

In his travels in Serbia after the war, Ignatieff was struck by the Serbians whining about unfair treatment from the west. This was a persistent and relentless theme. At first when they saw he was a writer they refused to talk. They always refused to talk. As they say,

 

“This, I learn, is part of the ritual style of Serbian nationalism itself.  The dance has its opening  quadrille: we won’t talk, the West never understands; we despise you; you tell nothing but lies; then they start talking and never stop.  Ask anybody a simple question and you get that telltale phrase: ‘You have to understand our history…” Twenty minutes later and you are still hearing about King Lazar, the Turks, and the Battle of Kosovo. This deep conviction that no one understands them, coupled with the fervent, unstoppable desire to explain and justify themselves, seemed to define the style of every conversation I had in Belgrade.”

 

The stories go back hundreds of years. That repeated itself over and over again in Serbia:

 

“…the same rituals repeat themselves. People violently and vehemently refuse to talk, only to start into a stream of Serbian self-justification that begins with their immemorial struggle against the Turks [hundreds of years ago] and concludes with their defense of Serbian Bosnia against the Muslim fundamentalists [in the 1990s]. Along the way, the invective sweeps up anti-Serbian crimes of Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and Tito into rhetorical flow as muddy as a spring torrent.”

 

No one owns up to what they have done. The reckless slaughter and supporting demagogues. No someone else is always at fault in post war Serbia. After all someone must have brought the deluge upon their heads. It can’t be them or their heroes.  As Ignatieff said, after the Serbs had to line up at stores and banks because they were suffering under inflation of 200 per cent per month. Many of the complainers were weary pensioners and other hapless souls who picked the losing side in the war. Not that there were any winning sides of course.

 

Ignatieff described the case this way:

 

You might have thought such queues would be full of anti- Slobodan Milošević [leader of Serbia] grumbling. Belgrade however, after all, never voted for him and has always resented its demotion from a world capital of the non-aligned movement, as it was under Tito, to an isolated, embargoed, Balkan provincial capital. Yet again, all the anger that might be directed at the West—at Churchill, at Mrs. Thatcher for having supported the Croats, at the Americans for aiding the Bosnian Muslims, and so on.

 

The populist dictators always manage to deflect blame from themselves to others, no matter how richly they deserve it. All of them from Hitler to Trump have learned this trick well. And their loyal followers are always eager to blame the scapegoat instead of the real villain. Scapegoats such as immigrants.  Or Nazis. Or the neighbour next door. Scapegoats are always the authoritarians best friend.

New Nationalism and Barbarism in Vukovar

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Extremism, Hate, Serbia

 

Michael Ignatieff visited Vukovar shortly after the Croatian War ended and described it in his wonderful book Blood and Belonging, long before he started wasting his time and his talents on being the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and proved himself hopeless as a politician.

He pointed out that the Yugoslavian Army, then controlled by Serbia, lobbed 150,00 shells into the city. Not that the Croatians were entirely innocent either. The Croats dynamited parts of the city so that when the Serbs took over, they would gain nothing but rubble.

All wars are brutal, but particularly wars between brother nations. Civil Wars or Wars of Secession.  They bring out a particularly nasty hatred that brooks no restraint. Instead, in such wars, the hatred spews out like a fountain—a fountain of blood. That is one of the reasons people should resist the voices of extremists who demand a country breaks up. Separatists in Canada and the United States should remember this.

Ignatieff went on his journeys in order to write a book about what he called the new nationalism. What he found was not very pretty. Particularly in Vukovar, Ignatieff learned a lot about nationalism:

“It was in Vukovar that I began to see how nationalism works as a moral vocabulary. No one is responsible for anything, but the other side.  In the moral universe of pure nationalist delusion, all action is compelled by tragic necessity. Towns must be destroyed in “order to liberate them. Hostages must be shot.  Massacres must be undertaken. Why? Because the other side started it first.  Because the other side are beasts and understand no language but violence and reprisal. And so on.  Everyone in a nationalist war speaks in the language of fate, compulsion, and moral abdication.  Nowhere did this reach such a nadir as in Vukovar.  The pistol-toting hoodlums, holed up in the ruins of the Hotel Dunav, who came out and threatened to kill my translator simply because he was Hungarian; the Krajinan Information Minister who had no information that was not a lie; the mayor of Vukovar, who went around the Vukovar handing out Serbian flags to men whose legs ended at a bandaged stump—not one of these creatures ever expressed the slightest sense of shame, regret, or puzzlement that the insensate prosecution of their cause had led to the ruination of their own city. For all of them, the responsibility was solely Croat.”

The only thing new, about the new nationalism, is that it is even more bloody than the old.

Vukovar: The Croatian Stalingrad

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Extremism, Hate

 

 

In Vukovar we went on a walk through town led by Marda a local resident. This is one of the buildings we saw filled with bullet holes.

Among other things, she talked about the war in Vukovar that started when Croatia tried to break away from Yugoslavia.  Serbians who dominated Yugoslavia did not want it to leave. Perhaps like Ontario might feel if Quebec or Alberta would leave.  Or how California might feel if Texas tried to secede from the United States. Such ideas are what sparked the American film Civil War a couple of years ago. As the Wendy Ide of the Guardian explained it, “In that film, near-future US has turned its anger against itself; a new civil war is raging.” [1] In that film a president of the United States, who sounded a lot like the current president, was practicing his speech in front of a mirror.  This is what he said, “Some are already calling it the greatest victory in the history of mankind.” But those brave words were completely removed from reality. And brutal violence followed.  But Vukovar was real. It already happened.

 

What was really appalling about the destruction in Vukovar was that it was necessitated by no military objective.  It was entirely senseless.  As Michael Ignatieff said,

 

“The pulverization of Vukovar made no military sense.  When I asked a Serb tank commander why they had done it, he shrugged his shoulders.  ‘War has many such tragedies… Leningrad… Stalingrad…”  But these were battles with a military objective. In a nationalist war, on the other hand military objectives were driven by a desire to hurt, humiliate, and punish. The JNA (Yugoslav National Army) could have bypassed Vukovar and sent its tank columns down the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity all the way to Zagreb.  Instead, it sat on the other side of the Danube and pounded Vukovar into rubble, as if to say, with each outgoing shell, ‘So you want to be independent, do you?  This is what it will cost you, and what you will have at the end if nothing but ruins.’”

It is hard not to think, as you stand in the shattered graveyards, convents, churches, and homes, that someone derived deep pleasure from all this destruction.  All these ancient walls, all these crucifixes, church towers, ancient slate roofs, were demolished by people whose ideologies ceaselessly repeated that they were fighting to defend the holy and sacred past from desecration. In a way, the artillery expressed the essential nihilism of what people called conviction more honestly than all the nationalist pieties about fighting for the sake of the sacred motherland.

Some uncontrolled adolescent lust was at work here.  The tank and artillery commanders could not have seen what they were hitting. It was all as abstract and as satisfying as playing the machines in video arcade. It didn’t even seem to bother the largely Serb commanders that a significant percentage of the population being bombed, perhaps as many as 20 percent, were ethnic Serbs (maybe as high as 33%). Now many of them lie on the city’s outskirts beneath one of the bare, nameless crosses in a mass grave.”

 

Here is a building that speaks to the violence. It is filled with bullet holes from that conflict. For some reason, the owner chose not to fix it up.

 

They said they wanted to prevent desecration, but how could anyone say that the destruction they inflicted on their own city was anything but desecration?  It reminded me of the American soldier, standing inside a city completely demolished, hardly a building left, thousands killed, many more injured, who said what the coalition forces did in Fallujah was “a great victory”. Calling that a great victory is a great desecration.

 

Vukovar was like that. Almost every building destroyed. The few that remained were pocked with bullet holes and artillery holes, like the one above. And the Flower House that now looks like this:

 

 

The city was defended by 1,800 lightly armed soldiers of the Croatian National Guard together with some civilian volunteers.  They fought against as many as 36,000 JNA soldiers and Serb paramilitaries equipped with heavy armour and artillery. During the battle, shells and rockets were launched into the town at a rate of 12,000 a day. At the time it was the fiercest and most protracted battle seen in Europe since 1945. Sadly, that record was soon exceeded by the siege of Srebrenica during the Bosnia segment of the Yugoslavian Wars. As a result of the 87-day siege of Vukovar it became the first city in Europe to be completely destroyed since the Second World War. 

When Vukovar fell on November 18, 1991, several hundred soldiers and civilians were immediately massacred by the victorious Serbians. There was no reason for the slaughter. They were fellow citizens. The Croatians also discovered a mass grave with more than 900 bodies. More than 3,000 people were killed, and 20,000 civilians had been expelled. This was deep ethnic cleansing of non-Serbians. Of course, many Serbs who lived there were also killed by their fellow Serbs from Serbia. Massacres are rarely neat and tidy.

 

Another interesting phenomenon, considering the extreme bloodiness of the war, was that even though the two sides were often referred to as “Croatian” and “Serbian” or “Yugoslav”, Serbians and Croatians as well as many other of Yugoslavia’s national groups fought on both sides. There was never a pure ethnic division.  What were they fighting for?

After the war, several Serbian leaders were charged with war crimes, including their leader Slobodan Milošević who unfortunately died in prison before the trial concluded. Others survived long enough to be tried and convicted.

Even though Serbia “won” the battle the war exhausted them so completely, that after the war they were unable to continue the war with other belligerents. Not only that but Vukovar only remained in their hands until 1998 when it was peacefully reintegrated into Croatia. Clearly, all those deaths and injuries accomplished nothing!

Many mines were left behind after the fighting died down.  A minefield left as a defence against Serbians.   A million or more mines left in Balkans.  A reminder of war. A deadly reminder that would haunt the area for decades.

Since the end of the war the town has been rebuilt with few scars of war, but the psychic scars remain. The communities to some extent remain deeply divided. The town has also never regained its former prosperity. Destroying a town to save it, is rarely a good policy.

 

As we walked through Vukovar I was surprised to see how much of the city had been completely restored. The buildings were freshly plastered and painted. Most of the bullet holes were covered up. Some buildings however, laid out their wounds for us to see. I wondered why.

Was it stubborn pride to show us how they had suffered? I don’t know but I think it is important for us to see it and recognize it. And try to avoid a repetition of it.

Vukovar: When a Demon becomes God

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Decline of the west, Extremism, Hate, History, Modern History, Political Violence

 

 

The Flower House

Almost all the buildings in the city of Vukovar in Croatia  were completely destroyed. A few were left riddled with bullet holes.

 

I had read about Vukovar years ago in the two books by Michael Ignatieff and Tony Judt that I have referred to in these posts.  I have often thought about that war between brother states. I wanted to see the city. I thought it was important to understand it. It could happen here in Canada or in the United States.

 

Croatia had not been independent in 1,000 years until it declared its independence from Yugoslavia in1991 and then got tangled up in war with Serbia, also a former Republic of Yugoslavia as was Croatia, really a brother state.

 

An early skirmish in the 5 wars of the former Yugoslavia in what became briefly, Serbia, was the fight for Vukovar that was part of Croatia. Serbia, at great cost, temporarily “won” the war and gained control of Croatia, but that did not last long. It is now again part of Croatia. Why all the killing then? What were all those deaths for? Who knows? Maybe God. Not I.

 

Vukovar was once the Hapsburg episcopal seat. It was located directly on the Danube River and we were fortunate to visit it on this trip through the Balkans. As Michael Ignatieff said in his book Blood and Belonging,

 

“In 1991 it became the Croatian Stalingrad. Throughout the autumn, the Croatian national guard defended it to the last street against the heaviest artillery bombardment seen in Europe since 1945.”

 

They fought valiantly but eventually succumbed to the barrage until November 1991 the Yugoslav National Army (‘JNA’) which was dominated by Serbs, together with Serbian paramilitaries “liberated” the town. The “liberation” was much like the liberation of Fallujah in Iraq by coalition forces led by Americans where crumbled and flattened buildings stood behind the fighters as they drove around the city. Liberation, like beauty, is definitely in the eyes of the beholder. When the City of Vukovar was “liberated” by the Serbs there was, as Ignatieff said, “nothing left to liberate but a devastated ruin.”

 

 

C.S. Lewis, who was a wise man, said this about love of country: “We all know now that this love [nationalism] becomes a demon when it becomes a god.” He was referring to Nazism, but really it has much broader application. It can apply to any form of extreme nationalism, no matter where it is found. It can apply to Serbia, or Croatia, or Nazi Germany, or the United States, or Canada. No one is immune.

 

Lewis made another important point about love of country. And this attitude is becoming more and more common in places like the United States and Canada. This is the attitude that our ancestors were uniquely great. Many of us want to take photoshop to history to eliminate the flaws. Lewis realized that “the actual history of every country is full of shabby and even shameful doings.” No country is purely good. We must never forget that. If we do forget it, we don’t really love our country; we love a mirage. We love fake news. As well, if we forget this obvious fact, we begin to nurture a debilitating sense of superiority that can shred our own decency. We can become what we hate. Lewis also said, with such an attitude, “If our country’s cause is the cause of God, wars must be wars of annihilation. This is what happens when a false transcendence is given to things which are very much of this world.” In particular, we must guard against using this false sense of superiority as an unjustified basis for cruelty or exclusion.

As Bob Dylan, another very wise once said: “You don’t count the dead with god on your side.” That is what we must guard against.

 

In one house, [shown above] which locals referred to as “the flower house,” the holes from bullets and artillery were resplendent. Apparently, the owner had tried to rebuild it but despite repeated efforts to get a building permit and constantly being rebuffed by the local council, he decided to let it be.  All he did was place a large number of flower pots around it, hanging from every window. I guess he was trying to say, ‘Take your permits and shove them.’

Nothing can grow in the Valley of Bones other than hate. And maybe a few potted flowers.