Tuesday, 25 October 2011 18:59 Written by Mishka Gora
The war may be over, and Vukovar may have started to rebuild, but the battle for the truth about what really happened in Croatia during the war is only just beginning.Twenty years ago, in the middle of Europe, a beautiful cosmopolitan city was pounded into rubble, men were herded into concentration camps, and hospital patients were taken to a cattle farm where they were slaughtered.
Whatever lessons we had learnt from the Nazi Holocaust, we forgot them as we watched Vukovar’s destruction on our television screens and did nothing. Instead of sending soldiers to protect defenceless civilians against the world’s fifth largest army, we sent Red Cross officials to streamline the ethnic cleansing. Vukovar was martyred in front of our eyes, and the best we could do was to belatedly send in ‘the smurfs’ – blue-bereted peacekeeping troops with a mandate so spineless that they might as well have painted targets on the side of their armoured vehicles instead of the black letters ‘UN’. In the 1930s, ‘premature anti-fascists’ walked over the Pyrenées into Spain and joined the International Brigades to fight the good fight; in the 1990s, war had become ambiguous and ignoble. Most of us didn’t know the difference between a Serb, a Croat, and a Muslim - most of us still don’t – and it seemed the only country that really meant it when they said ‘never again’ was Germany. So, instead of taking sides, instead of risking ‘another Vietnam’, we launched a humanitarian relief effort… and that’s how I ended up in Vukovar.
Any expectations I had that the presence of UNPROFOR (the United Nations Protection Force) might have significantly altered the situation in UNPA East proved quite without foundation. I was somewhat relieved, because I wanted to see the war with my own eyes, but I also felt guilty because I fervently believed that the welfare of the people left in the area was more important than my eyewitness experience. The sense of opprobrium was heightened when a Croatian friend cut me off for what she considered assisting the enemy. Ironically, she wasn’t from Vukovar, and those who were exhorted me to go regardless of the cost. They remembered the friends and family left behind, thousands of non-Serbs struggling to survive under Serb occupation, and they took the attitude that even if some of the aid went astray it would be warranted, if only to set eyes upon the home they’d lost: Vukovar. They uttered the name with reverence, and I felt like I was going a medieval pilgrimage to assuage my sins.
The process of getting to Vukovar only increased my sense of a penitential journey. As we waited for our UN flight to Zagreb in the brasserie of the airport in Split – the supermarket shelves were always bereft of food, but we never had any trouble finding alcohol – we observed two young blond Norwegian pilots make a bee-line for the bar and grimly skull some vodka shots, as if to calm their nerves. Someone commented that they had probably just flown in from Sarajevo, and I felt a surge of compassion for the two men who had braved Serb anti-aircraft guns to deliver food and medicine to the people of the beleaguered Bosnian capital. Soon afterwards, we crossed the tarmac to the UNHCR Beechcraft, weaving in between the files of teenage French soldiers headed for Sarajevo on a neighbouring aeroplane, and stowed our own baggage before finding a seat in the ten-seater aircraft. We didn’t have to wait long before the two Norwegian pilots joined us, clambered into the cockpit, and started rifling through what appeared to be a thick instruction manual before flicking various switches overhead and mercifully closing the curtain.Despite this unpromising start, we arrived at the UNPROFOR base in Zagreb safely and were collected by a UNHCR vehicle for the three-hour trip into Eastern Slavonia along the now-deserted Highway of Brotherhood and Unity. Approximately halfway, we had to traverse UNPA West, where the Serbs had re-militarised a substantial part of the theoretically demilitarised protected area, which entailed crossing the confrontation line twice, each time through a series of three checkpoints, the Croatian and Serb ones separated by the UNPROFOR one in the middle. In UNPAs North and South, the Serb military aggression had gone beyond even the borders of the UNPAs, creating so-called ‘pink zones’ from which they continued to wage war against Croatia despite the presence of UN troops, albeit at a slightly reduced intensity. UNPA East, on the other hand, was the only UNPA where the self-declared ‘Serb Republic of the Krajina’ and the UNPA were identical. The Croatian field worker who had so far acted as our guide couldn’t accompany us into the sector (even though the UN presence should have ensured his safety), and the black-shirted paramilitary group Arkan’s Tigers (headed by the notorious war criminal Zeljko ‘Arkan’ Ražnatovic) roamed about terrorising the local population when they were back at their headquarters while on leave from dubious operations in Bosnia.
We spent our first night within sight of UNPA East on the Croatian side of the front line in the pockmarked Hotel Osijek overlooking the River Drava. The other side of the river, once a zoo, was now no man’s land, and the proximity of the war was emphasised when John, the UNHCR Head of Office, bade us goodnight and left for his house in Serbia proper where (he so kindly reminded us) he wouldn’t get shelled. Looking out my seventh floor hotel room window across to a shell-scarred wall – some of the lower floors were still being renovated after the entire hotel had been reduced to a burnt-out skeleton - and remembering that no night ever passed without a ceasefire violation, I went downstairs to fortify myself with a couple more vermouths before retiring to my bed.
Our first foray across the confrontation line at Nemetin wasn’t the ordeal for which our sardonic liaison officer in Split had prepared me. An ICRC prisoner exchange and an aid convoy proved far more interesting than a tiny delegation of aid workers, so we flashed our UN blue cards and passed through with very little hassle in record time. I hadn’t even had to resort to the most basic currency of bribery and pull out my pack of Marlboro cigarettes (which I carried everywhere even though I didn’t smoke). On the Croatian side, the gaunt jaded soldiers with their short-cropped hair were creating obligatory delays for the Norwegian convoy. On the Serb side, the unkempt long-haired soldiers with Chetnik caps looked like they’d stepped out of the Middle Ages. In the middle of no man’s land, staring down the barrels of three Serb T-34 tanks, the UN peacekeepers supervised the prisoner exchange uneasily and waved us through with barely a glance at our blue cards.
Nothing could have prepared us for Vukovar itself. Sandy and Teresa had just spent a year in Somalia where they’d stepped over scores of dead bodies just to get to work each day. We’d all seen the footage of the civilian exodus from the city in November of 1991 and were well-versed in the relevant facts. Our guide, a UNHCR interpreter, had been there every day for the previous year. Nevertheless, we all fell into a stunned silence as we entered the city. After endless fields of ripe corn and bright sunflowers, it was a brutal change in landscape, and we felt as though we’d been thrust through a time warp into World War II. We’d all seen the ravages of shelling, but never had we seen an entire European city pounded to rubble, let alone one so achingly beautiful. The elegant Baroque façades teetered as though frozen in the act of crumbling into ruin, and the sheer emptiness made the occasional scattered personal effects of past occupants all the more poignant.
As our Nissan Patrol edged through the ghostly streets, our guide assured us that very little had changed. The only things different were that the rubble now lined the sides of the roads instead of blocking the middle of them, there were no longer six-foot-high piles of dead bodies, and the area was now patrolled by Serb police in blue tanks rather than being pulverised by Serb soldiers in green army ones. There were approximately fifteen thousand non-Serbs left behind, people too infirm to join the exodus or who simply thought that a Serb Republic would be little worse than life in the old Yugoslavia, all trying to eke out their existence under a volatile occupation force. As in Croatia, inflation was rife, but whereas the restaurants in Croatia adjusted their prices daily and pencilled in the new figures on their menus each morning, the Krajina Serb restaurants changed their prices by the hour and didn’t bother writing them down. I exchanged one Deutschmark for four fifty-million-dinar notes, and we made sure we paid for lunch in advance in case the price went up by the time we’d eaten it.
It didn’t take much to convince us that the area was in dire need of aid. The head of the Red Cross needed a warehouse facility but didn’t even have a car, and patients at the hospital were required to provide their own anaesthesia and gauze. There were two thousand or so diabetics who had had their insulin supplies thrown into bonfires by invading Serb troops and who were now on a starvation diet so as to keep their blood sugar levels down. Locals couldn’t even telephone their relatives a few miles away in Croatia to tell them they were still alive, let alone how they were faring, as telephone lines were cut between Croatia and Serbia. Even the UNHCR had to rely on radios and the highly restricted use of a satellite code-a-‘phone that scrambled whatever was said from prying ears. When I telephoned a friend at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in Zagreb and said I was calling from the UNCHR’s Erdut Field Office, the receptionist all but dropped the ‘phone in shock – I might as well have been calling from Mars.
It was clear to me that Vukovar’s war story was still unfolding. The cessation of hostilities couldn’t be considered much more than a hiatus when one-third of Croatia was under occupation and had to be regained if only to secure a regular supply of electricity. The fighting had largely subsided, but it was still a war zone, and the UN’s pitiful mandate meant that it was a fairly dangerous place even for neutral foreigners. I had just packed my bags to return there on special assignment when the UNHCR announced it was closing down its operations in central Bosnia after a series of attacks on internationals. My new boss informed me that things were worsening in UNPA East too, that the UN was getting ready to evacuate to Hungary, troops and all. It wasn’t too late to change my mind.
However, I had the arrogant sense of immortality that is common to twenty year olds and I was fairly impervious to danger after living the sleep-deprived adrenaline-fuelled life of an aid worker. In the course of my first month of aid work, I had transformed myself from a naïve university student doing a spot of volunteering into the acting manager of an international NGO, so successfully that I’d given up trying to convince others that I wasn’t the much older crisis control expert that so many assumed me to be. As impressed as my new boss must have been to take me on, John was a canny Scotsman with more than two decades of experience in the British Army, and he greeted me on my first morning with a brutally-barked expletive-filled order to take off my seatbelt. It was a harsh but necessary reminder that the business of helping people and saving lives could be a deadly one, and after I recovered from my initial civilian shock I calmly took off my seatbelt. John meanwhile explained apologetically that if I were shot I wouldn’t be able to escape subsequent bullets, whereas without the seatbelt there was the chance that the first shot wouldn’t kill me, I’d be able to duck the remainder, and the local BritMedBat (British Medical Battalion) team would be able to patch me up. It wasn’t exactly a comforting thought, but I recognised that John was exactly the sort of man I’d want by my side if we got into a pickle.
The gravity of the situation was underlined when John informed me that overnight we had gone from green to an orange alert after the stabbing of a Russian peacekeeper. Along with the not-so-spontaneous combustion of an unattended UN vehicle – probably a twelve-year-old Arkan Tiger Cub playing with an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) – and the usual threats at gunpoint, life for internationals in UNPA East was becoming sufficiently uncomfortable for the UN to be considering a vacation in Hungary en masse, via the use of a red alert. There was already heavy fighting in UNPAs North and South, so I was told to keep my bags packed. I was handed a radio, given the call sign one-zero (10), and informed that leaving my radio (even to go to the toilet or have a shower) or allowing the fuel in the car to go below three-quarters of a tank would incur instant dismissal. Every male in the Krajina had been mobilised – while there were few in uniform, everyone was visibly armed – and my first protection case was Serge, a persecuted Macedonian UNHCR field worker for whom the call-up was the last straw. It was one thing to have one’s bedroom window shattered by automatic gunfire in the middle of the night, but it was quite another to be forced to shoot and kill old friends. Instead of wishing I’d gone to Italy for some R&R as I’d originally planned, I was just glad to be finishing my summer vacation in the thick of the action.
The heightened state of alert meant our local staff had to stay at home in the safety of Serbia proper, so we had no drivers and no interpreters for a day that required the crossing of four frontlines plus two international borders, all relying on the slightly improper use of a blue UN identity card as I didn’t have a Serbian visa. We stopped briefly at our field office in UNPA East, where John left me with a stern order to stay in the car until he gave me the all-clear in case of an IED (improvised explosive device). I sat clutching my radio, rather glad that (as a temporary member of staff) I wouldn’t have to take my turn at opening up, and huddled in my seat as Arkan’s Tigers did an intimidating speed-march past the gate, as they did every morning at seven-thirty on the dot.
UNPA East was cut in half thanks to the destruction of all the bridges over the Drava. So, in order to visit the northern sub-sector, called the Baranja, we had to go via either Serbia or Croatia. Normally, Serbia was the preferred route, even though the direct route ran through Osijek, a small pocket of Croatian territory jutting into the sector. It was safer to be behind the lines of the aggressor, and we could take one of our own interpreters instead of begging one from the Osijek office. However, the retaliatory Croatian offensive in other parts of the Krajina (Operation Medak Pocket) suggested that, for once, the route via Croatia might be safer. Once we’d crossed the front lines into Baranja, John relaxed and put on the cassette-player, and I found myself in the rather queer situation of speeding dangerously down a road bordered by land mines and ruined buildings, without a seatbelt, to the background music of a Highland pipe band. If it hadn’t been for my own Scottish blood and unerring sense of reality, I might have fancied myself kidnapped by a madman.
At the Belgian UNPROFOR base, where I was besieged by young officers offering to show me the inside of their tanks, we headed to the hospital to visit a patient who had recently recovered consciousness, an old woman whom John had rescued from the civilian medical facility at Beli Manastir. The victim of a land mine, she had lost the lower half of one of her legs, and the local Serb doctors had decided that, being a non-Serb, she didn’t need the fresh bandages, antibiotics, and morphine that the UNHCR had given them for her treatment. So John had found her barely alive, delirious with fever, her amputated limb festering in urine- and faeces-soaked bandages. In disgust, he’d plucked the frail woman from her bed and driven her to the Belgians, who had mastered the art of officially adhering to the letter of the law (as prescribed by the UNPROFOR mandate) but cleverly violating it in order to fulfil the humane spirit of international intervention.
In the hospital, which was theoretically populated by up to ten accident-prone Belgian soldiers at any one time, we found a profusely grateful old woman who seemed to take inordinate pleasure in merely holding our hands. Through a series of charades, we eventually established that she was a semi-literate Hungarian peasant born in 1896. We were all somewhat awed to be in the presence of someone who’d lived the first twenty-two years of her life under the Hapsburgs and survived two world wars, but she seemed quite oblivious to the rich history she had experienced. As for her injuries, she just shrugged her shoulders in a remarkable display of stoicism, and we wondered whether she even knew who was fighting whom. It wasn’t the first time the Baranja had been declared a breakaway republic, but we doubted she remembered the six days in 1921 when it had been its own state and not divided between Hungary and what came to be known as Yugoslavia.
Next door, the Belgian major in charge of the hospital proudly showed us his ‘pharmacy’, a large store room filled to the brim with expired medicine that pharmacies in Belgium couldn’t legally sell and had donated to his cause. Outside, the gallant Flemish colonel who commanded the battalion politely excused himself with an explanation that he needed to “look the other way”, and literally turned his back on an ambulance filled with thousands of eggs that was on its way to conduct a “training exercise” – in actual fact, a training exercise in preventative medicine by way of keeping the local population from starving. The major later explained that the colonel was unofficially aware of his soldiers’ activities and proudly defended their bizarre record of accidental injuries, inexplicable ailments, and gluttony.
The remainder of the day was fairly typical. We usually worked at least fourteen hours without a proper break, often without eating, and most of the day would be taken up by exasperating meetings in the hope of achieving one small victory for human decency. On this day, we were focussed on a thirty-eight year old doctor who had had a brain haemorrhage and needed to be evacuated to Ljubljana. In any other circumstances, we might have thrown up our hands in despair, but there was always someone who needed our help and even the most vexing situations could be borne as long as we didn’t lose sight of the good we were doing. We all had our moments, of course. Even John, who had seen the killing fields of Cambodia firsthand and fought his way through five different conflicts, said that ‘Bosnia’ – our shorthand for the wider conflict in the former Yugoslavia – was different. Likewise, veteran aid workers found that the usual coping mechanisms didn’t work. Stress took on a new meaning.
Ironically, it was usually something quite minor that proved to be the last straw. When someone’s life was at stake, our determination (accompanied by a hefty dose of adrenaline) would keep us going. An inconvenient delay, like having to attempt a three-point turn on a narrow road without touching the verge (that might be mined) after getting lost during a troop mobilisation without an interpreter, was the sort of thing that could make any of us boil over. When that delay meant sitting on a front line for almost an hour, staring down the barrels of three Soviet-era tanks that were primed and ready to fire, desperately wanting to go to the toilet, I too found my composure severely tested. I knew that the fields of no man’s land were heavily mined, so squatting behind some sunflowers definitely wasn’t an option, but the Croatian checkpoint was sure to have a latrine and I was becoming rather desperate after a few too many Turkish coffees.
John, however, told me I wasn’t to get out of the car, even if ordered to at gunpoint. The way he saw it, the Croatian soldiers were tense and on edge, understandably frustrated at being in sight of their homes that had been occupied by the enemy for almost two years. Most of them hadn’t enjoyed the company of a woman for at least three months, and John quite seriously thought that my getting out of the car would start World War III. If they tried to rape me, John explained, he would intervene and get himself shot in the process, we’d probably both end up dead, and both our governments would respond in force. I thought he was overestimating our worth to our respective countries, but I got the point.
Although the UN was exempt from searches, all sides liked to throw their weight around and insist on the right to search any vehicle at their checkpoints. The Croatians were no exception. That summer, however, some British aid workers had vindicated their mistrust by going native and smuggling weapons for the Bosnian Muslims. Despite this, we were obliged to withhold permission and did so stubbornly, so that we would not set a precedent and undermine our inviolability. The Croatian soldiers did not hesitate to express their disdain. They couldn’t understand why we wouldn’t let them search the vehicle if we weren’t carrying weapons, which of course we weren’t, and the principle of neutrality was entirely lost on men who had witnessed the violation of just about every human right possible and lost their homes after three months of waiting vainly for international relief.
If John had a poor opinion of the discipline of Croatian soldiers, his assessment of the Serb ones at the other side of no man’s land, was considerably worse. He didn’t even turn off the engine, and while the half-drunk Serb soldiers debated whether to let us through, he discreetly edged the car onto the wrong side of the road so that his way wasn’t blocked by a hedgehog (anti-tank barricade). If he decided to make a run for it, he reminded me, I was to curl up in the cavity in front of my seat and stay down until he said it was safe to come out. Thankfully, an officer waved us through before John’s fuse ran out, but my next assignment was hardly any less nerve-wracking. While John went to an important meeting, he wanted me to collect ten thousand US dollars in cash from UNPROFOR Headquarters, transport it to our office with no more security than a cash box, and then count out all the staff’s wages in our unguarded office that was only fifty metres down the road from Arkan’s base.
I collected the money without incident, with Serge acting as my driver and accessory. The money had to be counted by two staff members for security and verification purposes, at least one of whom had to be an international, and Serge had been exempted from the ban on local staff during the alert because it was deemed the safest place for him to avoid being press-ganged. Just as we reached a t-intersection, we saw the first truck in a long army convoy rumble past. Headed by Arkan’s black-shirted Tigers, flying an occasional skull-and-crossbones flag, the trucks were full to the brim with Serb soldiers returning from operations in Bosnia. Serge groaned and said we’d have to squeeze ourselves in as it could go for miles. We counted eighteen trucks of blackshirts, then darted in after the nineteenth, which had brown-shirted regular soldiers crowded onto an open tray. The soldiers were clearly delighted to be on leave from the fighting in Bosnia, and upon seeing me in the car gave me friendly waves and blew kisses. I waved guardedly, trying not to think of what atrocities they’d committed while in Bosnia or the ten thousand dollars we were carrying in cash.
My lunch ended up consisting of some passive cigarette smoke from the doctors and nurses at BritMedBat as we congregated outside the mess after locking up our twice-counted cash in the questionably secure safe. Despite the warnings of the SMEDLO (Senior Medical Liaison Officer) – a wry British major whose chain-smoking indicated to me he was a soldier first and a doctor second – I had ventured into the Russian mess for a meal. After sampling the boiled lump of fat masquerading as bacon and the tasteless slush they called mashed potatoes, I had a mordant understanding of how a British nurse could end up on a drip after fainting from lack of food. The Brits didn’t have the numbers to merit their own catering staff, so they were forced to eat with the Russians, as were we. It made the simple but delicious lunch of stewed venison we’d had at the Belgian base on our first visit seem luxurious.
It wasn’t until darkness had descended that we retired to the safety of Sombor in Serbia’s semi-autonomous Vojvodina province for supper and a late-night drinking session. Our tongues loosened by the combination of exhaustion and alcohol, we trusted the assurances of some of our local drinking companions that we could safely speak our minds. One of them was on the staff of a prominent Serb politician and had a postgraduate degree from a highly-regarded Californian university. He was charming, eloquent, and intelligent, and he assured us that he wasn’t a “Serb peasant”, that he respected our opinions and genuinely wanted to know what we thought about the war. I wasn’t one to let down my guard completely, even when considerably intoxicated, so I explained that I took the attitude of John Quincy Adams to the Union, that the Yugoslav Federation was like a marriage, but if one of the republics should insist upon a separation it should be granted, as heartbreaking as it might be – for, even if she were in the wrong, no good or sensible husband would use violence against his wife to try to keep their marriage intact. He liked the analogy, especially as it compared the Serbs to the victorious North (who did go to war against the rebels), but he nevertheless remonstrated with me.
He asked me whether I was a Christian. I answered in the affirmative, not liking the direction of the conversation. “Then, as a good Christian, why do you want a Muslim country in the middle of Europe?” he demanded. I decided this wasn’t the time to embark on a lecture about the Judeo-Christian basis for Western democratic values or the fact that the term Muslim is predominantly an ethnic rather than religious identification, so I merely noted that Bosnia is a multi-ethnic country with no state religion and a population of Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs, and Jews in addition to the dwindling Muslims. The way I saw it, Bosnia did not qualify in any way to be called a Muslim country. He then went on a rant about how many Serbs had been killed by the “Turks” in 1389 and by the Croats during World War II, finishing with the not-so-convincing statement of “he’s a good Orthodox Christian, he understands”. “He” was one of my co-workers, a fellow Australian of Greek descent who had no qualms about cheating on his wife. I didn’t think “he” was a very good model of Christian behaviour.
Eventually, I asked him what he proposed as a solution to the ‘problem’ of Muslims in Europe. He replied that they must leave, and be forced to leave if necessary. The urbane academic had suddenly turned into a fervent proponent of ethnic cleansing. Flabbergasted, I retorted that they had nowhere to go, that Bosnia was their home and always had been. They were merely Serbs and Croats who had decided conversion to Islam under Ottoman rule was preferable to being persecuted as Christians. “What if they refuse to leave?” I asked. He shrugged his shoulders as if to indicate I was becoming tedious, and said: “They must be exterminated.”
Such encounters with evil created a momentum that overcame exhaustion and spells of despair. When Arkan’s Tigers trained their cubs (cadets) to kill by putting them in the back of a lorry and getting them to drag a man along the road by a length of barbed wire, it was difficult to be optimistic about the future. But when a posse of men accosted me while I was alone in the office and demanded to know the whereabouts of a mother and her young son – one of my protection cases – my duty to humanity became crystal clear. I didn’t think about my own life as I noted the gun being waved in my face, and I can’t really claim to have made a conscious choice as to my actions. It never occurred to me to betray the terrified woman who so desperately wanted to cross the frontline into Croatia, and whether I lived or died was something I didn’t consider until her husband and his henchmen were long gone. In a place where so many innocent people had been slaughtered for no good reason, I didn’t feel entitled to protest if my time had also come.
The next day, after the Croatian mother and her eight-year-old son had been spirited to safety, the gentle Irish gardaí who worked as the UN Civil Police in our sector arrested her Serb husband and formally interviewed him concerning various charges that included attempted murder. He didn’t deny anything except our authority. When asked why he wanted to kill them, he seemed bemused that we were such simpletons as to not understand the obvious. She was a “Croat whore” and it would be better for his son to be dead than to be brought up by Croats, he explained indignantly. Afterwards, as I stood staring at myself in the bathroom mirror after splashing my face with cold water, the Serb interpreter (whom Arkan retained for the accused along with a lawyer) rushed in and vomited in the bath, before curling up on the floor crying. When I went to her, she clutched my arm and begged me to tell her that I didn’t think she was like them. It was just her job, she sobbed. I reassured her and said I understood, but after my late-night chat about exterminating Muslims I wasn’t entirely sure that I did.
Our work days from dawn to dusk were punctuated by nights of dining out, drinking heavily, and dancing with abandon. Dollars and deutschmarks went a long way in Serbia, and the only effective way to reconcile ourselves to the fact that we’d spent a doctor’s monthly salary on dinner was to continue drinking into the wee hours. Despite international sanctions, Serbian nightlife was breathtakingly sophisticated. One club we favoured had terraced sections on either side of a small stream connected by a romantic footbridge, all the way down to a canal where one could have a floating tête-à-tête in a candle-lit wooden skiff. It was a surreal way to escape the day’s brutality, only marred by occasional visits from the police who needed to be placated with free drinks so that they would look the other way when we paid in hard currency.
Shortly before the end of my assignment, after days of wrangling, we managed to negotiate permission for a non-UNHCR aid convoy to enter the sector. It was a hodgepodge assortment of trucks filled mostly with donated goods from Walsall in the north of England. Although I’d officially been tasked as a protection officer, international staff responded to the exigencies of our work in a war zone as needed, so it wasn’t the first time I’d found myself acting as an assistance officer escorting a convoy across the frontline. This one was different, though. The drivers were volunteers, mostly retirees. One was a WWII veteran, excited to be traipsing through Europe on a special mission. They were ordinary men who cared enough about their fellow human beings to leave the comfort of their homes for no greater reason than that they had watched the evening news and decided something needed to be done. It was a shaft of light that cut through the gloom of mass graves, concentration camps, and bitter hatred.
It was exhilarating seeing the trucks unloaded at the hospital in Vukovar. The hospital staff were so thrilled that they unloaded the trucks themselves, gasping over each item like children opening Christmas presents. I watched on with the soldiers from BritMedBat, quietly chuffed that the pharmacy (which served the entire southern sub-sector) would be functional once more, that we’d finally acquired a year’s supply of insulin. So, we weren’t surprised when one of the nurses took four of us aside to the lunchroom and gushed her thanks. As she served us an unpalatable coffee substitute, she told us how wonderful it was that we were helping them, and that they in turn would be able to “do good”. I wasn’t sure if it was just the contrast with the no-nonsense warmth of the northern Englishmen, but I found myself recoiling with distrust. I was sure she was lying.
Before we left, the nurse made an impassioned presentation of some ‘souvenirs’ of Vukovar. She explained she only had four left, which was why we had been taken aside while the English truck drivers toured the hospital. They were stickers and patch badges celebrating the Krajina Serb army and the first anniversary of what she called the “liberation” of Vukovar. One the British soldiers supressed a grimace while I reeled with nausea. “Don’t you mean destruction?!” I spluttered. “Yes, it’s very sad,” she replied earnestly. “We had to destroy it in order to liberate it.”
I returned to Vukovar Hospital seven years later as an emergency patient after Vukovar’s real liberation, after some of Vukovar’s original residents had returned home. They were still dying as a result of the war, victims of IEDs that hadn’t been cleared, and many of the survivors were shadows of their former selves after months in Serb concentration camps. Contrary to the media’s dissemination of Serb propaganda, Serbs who remained in Croatia after the Krajina’s restoration in 1995 were not discriminated against. In fact, they still controlled Vukovar Hospital. The ambulance paramedic who took me there was one of the few Croats working there, and while I waited for the sole Croatian doctor to tend to me – the Serb ones would not treat me because I had arrived in the company of Croats, one of them a famed ‘defender’ of Vukovar – he explained that I was lucky I hadn’t had a heart attack as his ambulance wasn’t even equipped with a defibrillator.
Twenty years after the fall of Vukovar, the battle is not over. Ante Gotovina, a Croatian General and war hero whose liberation of the Krajina prevented the people of Bihać in north-west Bosnia suffering the same fate as those in Srebrenica, was recently found guilty of the very crime he prevented. Despite his defence lawyers demolishing the prosecution case, Gotovina and his Special Police counterpart, Mladen Markač, may well spend the rest of their lives in gaol. Despite being dead and unable to defend himself, the wartime Croatian President Franjo Tudjman was declared the leader of this so-called “Joint Criminal Enterprise” as part of Gotovina’s judgement, implicating the entire nation. The war may be over, and Vukovar may have started to rebuild, but the battle for the truth about what really happened in Croatia during the war is only just beginning.
Mishka Gora is a writer and photographer based in Tasmania.
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