A Yugoslav Ship in the Port of Vukovar

Aim Zagreb, June 4, 2000

In the grotesque Vukovar reality when one day the entire Government, with the Prime Minister and the whole Cabinet, pays a visit to the town, and the next day arrives Ante Djapic with his rabble-rousers in a caravan of some forty buses, openly threatening the local Serbs - even a Yugoslav ship, flying the Croatian flag on its mast, anchored in the local Danube port, doesn't seem unreal. A scene that could until recently only be seen in a movie, has now become a reality here. The Yugoslav ship are transporting wheat from the Croatian silos, destined for the Ukrainian bakeries, by a roundabout route, through the Danube - Tisa - Danube Canal, from the port of Vukovar to Ismail in Ukraine, because of the demolished bridges in the Yugoslav part of this largest European river which are blocking a much shorter direct route. With large cranes dock workers are loading the wheat onto the Yugoslav ships, and until now the Yugoslav crew did not step ashore, because that requires a special procedure. However, dock workers bring them anything they need while the ship is being loaded. There are no quarrels and business is flourishing.

Tomislav Latinac, port manager of Vukovar, the largest river port of the former state until the war and before the disintegration of former Yugoslavia, is pleased that things have started moving and says that he hopes that the wheat for Ukraine will slightly open the doors that were tightly closed till now. Zoran Zecevic, Commercial Director in the Yugoslav River Shipping Industry in Belgrade, speaks about new deals

• soon the transportation of phosphates should start from Prahovo to Vukovar, and negotiations are underway for the transportation of corn. Grotesque Vukovar pictures are a never ending story: the town which was most severely damaged during the war that raged in Yugoslavia and because of which the Croatian-Yugoslav relations reached a freezing point, is now an essential link in their normalisation.

Vukovar badly needs economic activity; the unemployment rate is over 40 percent and if something somehow starts moving, like the symbolic production of shoes in the former giant "Borovo", someone in the Croatian Power Generation & Distribution Industry cuts off their electricity because of debts from the times of peaceful reintegration so that even those facilities that could have made some money are idle. When you ask dock workers how they feel loading a Yugoslav ship, they just dismiss you with a hand wave saying: "We do not care whose it is, as long as we have work!" However, it seems that these words cannot find their way to Ante Djapic and his rabble-rousers who have picked none other town but this, from which they fled when it was bleeding, to pursue justice and show spite. On the National Day, on the plateau in front of the Vukovar Hotel "Dunav", Djapic assembled two thousand rabble-rousers, mostly dressed in black, who loudly threatened not only Racan and Mesic, but local common people, naturally its Serbian part. Djapic put it most plainly: "And let all Serbs of Vukovar know: both previous authorities and the present ones can adopt thousand laws on pardon and another hundred on reconstruction, but sooner or later we shall come to power and then: -Beware!

The number of people gathered at Djapic's rally exactly matched the number of people that came packed in buses parked in front of the hotel. With some exceptions, the local Croats did not show much interest in Djapic's "truth rally". They know full well that such caravans come and go, but that those who stay behind have to carry on with their lives the best they can. Djapic and his men are not preoccupied with such thoughts, as neither are those people who on the doors of the Vukovar's monastery wrote "This is Serbia" or who pulled out cypresses planted in memory of the Croatian policemen killed in 1991 in Borovo Selo.

Cafes in Vukovar are already divided into Serbian and Croatian, in schools the Croatian children are separated from the Serbian and pick friends from their surroundings; this impoverished town has two radio stations – a Serbian and Croatian one; everything here is either Croatian or Serbian. Only the problems are common - both Serbian and Croatian.

Racan's Government rented several station wagons and came to the town in order to, at least symbolically, demonstrate that it was thinking of the ways of helping it. President of Parliament, Tomic, and after him President of the state Mesic visited Vukovar after January elections. They all promised to help. With the help of SDP deputy to Parliament, Branislav Tusek, Mayor Vladimir Stengl, managed to finalise a draft law on Vukovar which should reach Parliament in June and will be adopted in September. What is highly unusual for Croatian circumstances is that two parties have supported the law, and even more unusual for Vukovar is that two strongest and almost always opposed political forces in this town - HDZ and the Independent Democratic Serbian Party - easily agreed on it without much complications.

In short and without tedious legalese, the Law on Vukovar should represent general Croatian solidarity which would provide resources the town badly needs to get things moving. The old, HDZ authorities, didn't even try to activate any economic activities. The recently disclosed shorthand notes from the Presidential Palace of the talks held between late President Tudjman and his Minister of Reconstruction Jure Radic, reveal that their interest was to have as many Serbs as possible leave Vukovar and bring Croats from Bosnia in their place. The Law on Vukovar should restart the production and provide jobs for the people, and once they have jobs, such as ones in the Vukovar port on the Danube, they will care less who is a Serb and who is a Croat. But, the Law on Vukovar has already caused strife in local communes, which are of the opinion that a law on the reconstruction of the entire Danube river valley is more needed.

Naturally, those outside Podunavlje, who have also been affected by the ravages of war, consider this to be discrimination.

Recently, Ivo Sanader, a new HDZ President, also visited Vukovar in order to cool tempers of its members. The clash within the local HDZ branch is no less serious than the one that broke out in other communities, but this is where the scandal boiled over! The Prefect Kenig, Vladimir Seks' best man, lost his battle with Dragan Papac, President of the local HDZ branch, who is Pasalic's man. No matter how much Sanader boasted that the battle was over, praising the unity and accord in the party ranks that are without precedent in its history, the battle within HDZ ranks continues and the party is breaking at the same seams at which it broke at the top. It has only been transferred to the grassroots. Obviously, Vukovar will have to fight that battle too.

No matter how gloomy and depressing Vukovar might seem today, two and a half years after the conclusion of peaceful reintegration, no matter how frustrating and hopeless sound the figures about a negligible number of returnees, enormous unemployment and symbolic number of people who receive wages, life goes on. The fields surrounding Vukovar, in one of the most fertile parts of Europe, sawn with wheat, turnip and corn, look promising. In the former state, these parts, especially Vukovar, were among the most developed ones. When wheat and corn start flowing from these fields towards the Vukovar port and then further on up and down the Danube river, that will be a sign that the law has been put into effect. Not the one Racan's Government is proposing to Parliament, but the law of nature, which was once in force here.

Drago Hedl