Sojourners staff member Elizabeth Holler participated in a 10-person delegation of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian leaders from the United States that visited Croatia December 9-18, 1992. The delegation made several fact-finding visits to camps for refugees, displaced persons, and newly released prisoners of war in the vicinity of Zagreb, as well as meeting with leaders of government, the United Nations, private relief agencies, and religious groups in the country.
- The Editors
Vukovar is dead.
So say the people who used to call it home. The once lovely Croatian city of 45,000, with baroque buildings and thriving ethnic diversity, is a casualty of war.
Rubble overwhelms the streets. Virtually every building was destroyed during the months Vukovar was under attack. Shadows of life and civilization hover on the skyline; stubby, stark tree trunks, some standing, some fallen, appear ready for a giant's game of pick-up sticks.
Like many besieged and fallen cities throughout Serbian-occupied territories in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, Vukovar's people are scattered. Vukovar was the first area of major fighting in the former Yugoslavia; many of its refugees, now in settlement camps in Zagreb, Croatia, vow that it will be the last as well.
"I fought for Vukovar -- for my home," says M., a 26-year-old man recently released from a Serbian prison camp. "Everything would be in vain if we don't return."
He lights a cigarette. This is his first interview after the long fight to defend Vukovar, and an even longer struggle to survive continual torture and beatings during nine months in the camp. His lean, muscular body is deceiving. For now, anyway, he has strong conviction but little fight left.
"My life is ruined, my health is broken," he says. "We are destroyed psychologically and physically. If we do not return, our children will have to go through the same things we did."
Perhaps it is too late. The children have already seen the twisted, bloody face of evil in this war. Some were forced to watch as their parents were killed. Others know the terror of running for their lives in dark forests, the only light flashing from the barrel of a gun or an exploding grenade. During two months in underground shelters, the children of Vukovar felt the Earth tremble as bomb after bomb dropped from the sky.
Eleven-year-old Josip took his first communion in the shelter. His younger brother, Vlatko, sits in his mother's lap and remembers. "I prayed to dear God that we would be able to get out," he says.
"The worst period was September to November 19," the boys' mother, Silvija, recounts. "At times we had more than 2,000 shells fall in a day. We had nothing to eat at the end, so we took the last of the flour and baked it with no yeast and gave it to the children."
Some infants delivered in the shelter were born bleeding from their ears, having suffered massive concussions while still in the womb.
BY THE TIME THESE major offensives against Vukovar had begun, most Serbs had been evacuated. Those who remained either retreated to the shelters or fought alongside their neighbors -- Croatians and others representing more than a dozen nationalities -- who all had lived together in relative peace before the war.
Finally, Serbian troops told the defenders of Vukovar that if they did not surrender, the Serbs would overrun the city and kill all of the women and children. So the city fell.
Serbs who had been in the shelters were put on buses bound for Serbia; all others were imprisoned. Intellectuals and people of wealth were killed almost immediately. The surviving women and men were separated: The men and boys were executed or sent to prison camps; the women and girls were imprisoned, where they were taken during the night and repeatedly raped.
Shocking as it may sound, the women and children of Vukovar were lucky. They were detained for only several days before they were released and transported to Zagreb. Many in similar conditions have been detained and tortured for months.
Groups of as many as a thousand former Vukovar residents were resettled together in refugee camps near Zagreb. Here the former chief of civil defense distributes posters of missing citizens. The former town clerk registers births and deaths.
Silvija and her family are among 750 in the Spanko camp, as are M. and his surviving relatives. They live in eight barracks, each with about 25 rooms. There are three showers and four toilets for the entire camp.
Here, the people wait.
"I used to count the days," says Ante, a 63-year-old farmer. "But what's the worth since everything is burned down? We had two barns, one house, chickens, and pigs. We lost everything."
The people are confined by space and also by time, in a desperate holding pattern. There are too many hours to anguish over the fate of ones lost or missing. Yet, too few hours have passed to sort out what has happened, to understand.
"It was difficult for us to accept that most of this was done by people who lived and worked with us in Vukovar," Silvija says. "They [Serbian townspeople] pointed their fingers and said 'this is the one' and then that person would be killed. We celebrated Christmas together -- Catholic [Croatians] and Orthodox [Serbians] -- I cannot understand how there is so much hatred in someone that he can kill a child in cold blood."
SILVIJA'S QUESTION will never be answered adequately. And whatever answers come will not alter the course of the Serbian process of "ethnic cleansing." Already Vukovar has been resettled by 15,000 Serbs. They live in the shells of buildings, fighting the cold and their fears of the day when the people who were driven out will return to reclaim the land.
And they will come back.
Vukovar has become perhaps the single most powerful symbol of Croatian nationalism. "Vukovar" is emblazoned on posters and billboards, ash trays and bumper stickers--stark reminders of unfinished business. Each object commemorates the bloodletting and carries an implicit promise that Croatia's suffering will not go unanswered. Vindication, many say, will come only when Vukovar is free of Serbian control.
The feeling is the same for people from towns and villages in Serbian-occupied areas all across Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Their stories echo the accounts from Vukovar.
The only difference might be that the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina have been imprisoned longer, both women in rape camps and men in prison camps. Winter and starvation are killing those who have eluded the guns thus far.
"I was [imprisoned] in relatively good conditions," M. says, "and I am ruined. The people who are still somewhere in camps with worse treatment--you can imagine how they feel. Each day [we delay], we take a person's life. The more time we lose, the more invalid and psychologically killed we have."
This, too, echoes the urgent pleas of so many people we spoke with, whether from Vukovar or Banja Luka, Osijek or Sarajevo, who said that the world must do whatever it takes to end the killing. For those on all sides of this devastating war, Vukovar is a tragic paradigm of the betrayal, the suffering, the loss, and the long road ahead.
"If the politicians cannot talk the common people into returning to Vukovar to live together as they used to, the problems will not be solved," M. says.
"There were 21 nationalities who made up Vukovar. For Serbs to leave and Croats to return is not an answer. The world must persuade people of all nationalities to live together. It would be very, very hard. Maybe impossible."
WE DRIVE OUT of Zagreb, Croatia, on a cold, gray day. During the hour-long trip to the small town of Karlovac, the image of a way station keeps coming to my mind. We are going to a camp where men released from Serbian prison camps are reunited with their families and then move on.
A stone building, our destination, materializes out of dense fog. Hundreds of people are milling around outside while others fight their way through the crowds to get in. On one side of the muddy yard is a bombed Orthodox church.
The day before our visit to Karlovac camp, 1,009 men had arrived on buses from Bosnia. The day after, a thousand more are scheduled to arrive. The anxiety of those who wait is indescribable. Just the week before, a group of 560 men had been released from the Manjaca prison camp but never arrived. There is little hope that they are alive.
I realize during our visit that my images of this place were wrong. Karlovac is not a way station at all.
This point on the map, obscure to so many, is the end of the world, the only place on Earth. The expectation of reunion, of physically touching those who have been lost, is carried on every particle of the air. So, too, is the fear that reunion will never come.
A young woman with a child in tow peers into the crowd of men, searching. Suddenly she finds the one she was looking for. Her body begins to shake and the color drains from her face. A man comes to her from the left, running, his arms held wide. The woman does not move, only opens her arms to him. They embrace with the power of all the universe.
My attention is drawn away by a choked cry, a scream, not human, not animal. A man buckles under the weight of his grief. Anguish contorts his face.
His son is dead. In agony and disbelief he pulls from his wallet a worn photograph of a young man with eyes similar to his own. It is all that he has left, besides memories of the child who became a man who is now gone.
Another man at Karlovac is one of only two survivors of a mass execution by the Serbs. Two hundred and sixty detainees were told they would be exchanged unharmed for Serbian prisoners. All were crowded onto a bus and told to keep their heads down. Then, three by three -- you, you, and you -- they were pulled off the bus. Those left could hear machine-gun fire, screams, and the sound of falling bodies.
Senses are the man's enemy now. He hears and smells and touches the death that was all around. His niece, a beautiful child of about 8, perceives his distress. She leans against him, holds his hand and gently rubs it. Her caress combined with his memories overwhelm him. A deep shadow of pain crosses his face. A tear parts the shadow and trails off of his chin.
"They [Serbians] killed everyone," he says. "We have been living with them for years but we were not aware what they are like. Tomorrow I will go to England to meet my wife and son." He does not believe he will ever return to the land of his birth.
THE WOMEN AND CHILDREN who come to be reunited with male family members at Karlovac bring the other side of the stories. They have looked squarely into the face of unimaginable evil and brutality.
Unspeakable acts of sexual violence have been systematically committed against women and female children as a political and military strategy by the Serbs to drive non-Serbs from the region. First-person accounts, documented orally and in writing from refugees, tell of rape camps.
The intimate nature of this abuse makes it difficult to speak directly with the victims. We elected not to press first-person interviews for fear of further victimizing those who have already suffered so much. A Catholic sister who is working with rape survivors spoke with us in Zagreb.
"A young woman of 16 came to us in a horrible psychic state," Sister A. says. "She was suicidal and on the brink of losing her mind because she had been forced to witness the murder of her father, mother, grandfather, and grandmother. She was spared only to be brutally raped many times before being released."
Mothers have been forced to watch as their young children were raped, and the children forced to watch as their mothers were attacked. In the rape camps and elsewhere, accounts indicate that some women were raped 15 to 20 times each day. Those who resisted were killed in front of other women; many were destroyed by the physical and psychological violence and died. Survivors report having spent four and five months being tortured in this way.
"Our women are martyrs," the sister says. "They are martyrs because there is no crime to compare with rape -- it is worse than to kill someone. One of the young girls once said to me, 'I am not afraid of dogs, but I am afraid of people because they torture me.'"
It is expected that thousands of the women will give birth to children conceived as a result of rape. One woman reported that this was an explicit purpose of the abuse. She said that once pregnant, they were held in the camps until abortion was not an option. Then they were put onto buses and sent out to areas not occupied by the Serbs. On one bus, the woman said, the Serb fighters wrote "Croatia, we are sending you little Chetniks."
KARLOVAC IS A tragic testimony to human brutality and to a world that has been so numbed to violence that it simply has not responded. Karlovac is also a humbling testimony to the strength of the human spirit and the will to survive. For people of faith, connecting with the people now in Karlovac and throughout the former Yugoslavia is as essential to our survival and salvation as our awakening is to theirs.
After only one week of hearing the stories and meeting the people who have been devastated by this war, I was overwhelmed by the sorrow and suffering; it is vast and deep and incomprehensible. It seems impossible that time and again, we human beings are capable of such brutality, devoid of mercy.
For the first time in my life, I am truly aware of the tremendous suffering of God. God, who knows each soul in its very depths, must weep a heartbroken wail with every act of violence. The people of God need to pray for and comfort God. We need to share that burden, as well as that of human suffering and misery.
Our response to the suffering in the former Yugoslavia can be one of courage and creativity, engaging with people where they are. Mourning their pain or the injustice of their situation is not enough. If we define people only by their suffering, we strip them of the spirit of a hopeful, loving God who dwells within each one of us.
Though evil predominates in this moment, many people in the former Yugoslavia are carrying on with tremendous courage, faith, and love despite their situations. They are living proof of God's promise always to be present with us. They are refusing an eye for an eye, and instead are choosing the way of the cross.
OUR DELEGATION left for Croatia during a lunar eclipse. As the Earth's shadow crept across the face of the full moon, a new darkness fell upon the Earth. This darkness revealed stars that I had never seen before--stars that have been there but whose light now shone in a new way to me.
If I had not been watching all along and had looked at the sky only after the moon was fully covered, I probably would have been shocked and afraid of the darkness. And if I had not lived those moments of fear, then surely I would never have seen the new light revealed.
If I had not been watching at all, I might never have known.
Elizabeth Holler was coordinator of communications and grant funding development of Sojourners when this article appeared.
A Legacy of History and Hatred
In the area that was called Yugoslavia, every person is a storyteller, steeped in a rich and tumultuous history. Each spinner of the yarn brings color and texture to a tapestry of ethnic identity. The passing on of experiences and traditions is a great strength of the region. But unredeemed, it also perpetuates a cycle of fear and violence.
A West-meets-East conflict, rooted in a history of conquest by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, primarily in the northwestern territories, and by the Ottoman Empire of the Turks in the southeast, has continuing significance in the former Yugoslavia. The clash of cultures along this fault line has been like the tectonic plates of the Earth -- areas of constant tension and friction prone to periodic, violent eruption.
Under the Ottoman Empire, many Slavik people were forced to convert to Islam. These Muslims of Bosnia, Herzegovina, and elsewhere in the region maintain their identity and allegiance with Europeans rather than with the Turks. Religious strife has been more frequent between Orthodox Christians and Catholics in the region than between Christians and Muslims, calling into question the charges by some that the current conflict is a holy war.
Rather, people from the area assert that this is primarily a war of Serbian aggression, which uses religious and ethnic identity to determine the enemy. Unreconciled divisions from recent history also are being manipulated on all sides to fuel the belief by each group -- Croatian, Bosnian, and Serbian -- that creating ethnically pure areas may now be the only option for long-term survival.
The Kingdom of Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia, ruled by a Serbian monarchy, was renamed Yugoslavia, "The Land of Southern Slavs," in 1929. During the Nazi occupation of the country, Croatia was declared an independent state, and a ruthless paramilitary force known as the Ustasha gained power. Ustasha soldiers are held responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of Croatian Serbs, as well as Jews and Gypsies living in Croatia and Bosnia.
The Ustasha and the Germans were ultimately defeated by the partisan army of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) -- commanded by Josip Broz Tito -- and royalist (Serbian) Chetniks, but their brutality left an indelible impression -- particularly on the Serbs. (It is important to note that during this time mass killings were perpetrated by Serbian Chetniks.)
At the close of World War II, Tito and the CPY took firm control of the country. In sequent years the Serbs acquired increasing power in the Communist Party and the army. They also gained control of Yugoslav affairs through channels of diplomacy and public information.
Concurrently, widely differing views of the future governance of the country emerged. On one hand, Slovenia and Croatia desired a republic comprised of relatively autonomous confederative states with decentralized power. Serbia and Montenegro were in favor of centralized rule. Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina took the middle ground.
After Tito's death in 1980, the communist state began to unravel. Ethnic division, an unreconciled past, conflicting visions of the future of Yugoslavia, and resurgent nationalism came together in a firestorm of violence.
In 1991, the Serbs first waged war in Slovenia, then in Croatia, and now the most brutal assault, on the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Although the conflict has the trappings of a civil war, the Serbian practice of systematic terror, mass destruction, rape, and execution for the purpose of ethnic cleansing appears driven by a policy of creating what the Serbian government calls "Greater Serbia." Greater Serbia would incorporate territories in Bosnia and Croatia with sizable Serbian populations.
Painfully juxtaposed with the deep differences among the people in this conflict are powerful ties developed by generations who have intermarried, crossing lines of geography and ethnicity. Neighbors killing neighbors and families irrevocably torn apart intensify both the anguish and venom of the war. The betrayal felt by people whose neighbors of decades turned on them is foreboding for any who hope for peace.
Present-day young and middle-aged adults grew up at the knees of World War II survivors, hearing stories of torture and death, as well as of heroic defense and nationalistic pride. Based on accounts from ex-detainees and refugees from the current conflict, war crimes of the past -- committed by both the Ustasha and the Chetniks -- provide foundational justification for new atrocities.
Today's stories are unfolding as history repeats itself, extending not only the wounds and brokenness of war, but also the hatreds that feed the fear and aggression threatening the entire region. -- Elizabeth Holler
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