Exhumation at the Knin Cemetery

AIM Zagreb, April 28, 2001

Hague tribunal investigators, hand in hand with Croatian police investigators, have become the most hated people in Knin: they arrived some 10 days ago and despite loud disapproval and protests from local Croats, raised their tents at the local cemetery and began searching for victims of the Croatian army's bloody campaign, code-named Storm, which was launched at the beginning of August, 1995. The onslaught of raging Croatian soldiers that scorching August left destroyed and burnt homes, previously thoroughly looted, villages engulfed in flames to glorify the magnificent victory of Croatian arms, corpses of powerless old men killed at the entrances to their homes, and a bitter taste in the mouths of those who saw this for what it was. Statistics shows that most of the Serbs who decided to listen to what Franjo Tudjman said and stayed in their homes and on their land, ended up by being buried on it. Several hundred Serbs who naively trusted Tudjman's promises, whose throats were slit by Croatian knives or whose skulls were pierced by Croatian bullets, were later neatly packed in black, plastic bags and laid to rest in Croatian soil. Back then, Tudjman and his subordinates believed that this was how the Serb question in Croatia was going to be resolved: hundreds of thousands of people had left the country, and those several hundred who would not do so were helped to stay there for ever.

Only five years later it became obvious that Tudjman's plan was not going to work, because thousands of Serbs are returning to their homes across the former Krajina, and the Hague investigators are exhuming the remains of old people murdered by Croatian soldiers intoxicated by victory. At the time this article was being written some dozen have been dug up at the Knin cemetery and immediately sent to the Zagreb Institute of Forensic Medicine. According to certain non-government organizations and the United Nations, another 200 to 250 bodies of murdered Serbs have yet to be exhumed. The discovery of crimes committed by Croatian troops in the so-called Krajina, however, could not pass without protests by various organizations protecting the dignity of the War for the Fatherland, although this dignity also required that the old, infirm women from Varivode, Padjen and Civljan, riddled with bullets, be protected. These organizations were not the only ones to rise to their feet; all those in the country who think they are the sole true defenders of Croatia -- political parties whose platforms are to professionally deal with Croatian issues, independent lunatics whom pro-Ustasha newspapers enable to freely fan ethnic hatred, Miroslav Tudjman, the son of the late dictator, the retired generals who act like unacknowledged heroes...

The day the exhumation at the Knin cemetery started, about two hundred former Croatian soldiers organized a laying of wreaths on the tombs of Knin Croats, regardless of the odor of death that was coming from the local cemetery and engulfing the entire town in which in the past decade nothing happened except riots. Retired colonel Mirko Condic, the head of the Organization for the Defense of the Dignity of the War for the Fatherland, and his cronies did not mind the stench of death spreading from the rotting corpses of people killed for nothing, except for crossing themselves in a different way.

"I don't mind them digging here, but why didn't they first exhume all our Croats, why didn't they discover who is responsible for the killing of Croats in Vukovar, Vocin, Skabrnja..." says a man who moved to Knin from Gunja, and who was in the Croatian army for several years. This is what the majority of the about eight thousand Knin Croats will say. Of them seven thousands are settlers from Bosnia and Herzegovina, who came here as part of the Tudjman plan for ethnic cleansing. Whatever you happen to ask a typical Knin Croat, he will incessantly cite an alleged international conspiracy against the Croats, that Croatia is ruled by the KOS (former Yugoslavia's military intelligence service), the UDBA (former Yugoslavia's secret service), the red gangsters (communists) and the Yugoslavs. He will add that the situation will not change unless Croatian soldiers rise to arms again. If asked whom he intends to fight, the typical Knin Croat will recite a long list composed of eight thousand Serb returnees to this town, the KOS, the UDBA, and the Yugoslavs, who are in power and forcing Croatia into a new Yugoslavia. He will not make even the slightest effort to back his claims with any arguments: to him, his claims are maxims impressed into his head by local Franciscans and 12 retired Croatian army generals who are honorary citizens of Knin. The military activities of some of these generals, who secured for themselves large apartments and considerable wealth and now exhibit concern for the Knin paupers, are the chief reason why the Hague investigators and forensic experts are currently in Knin.

"No matter how painful, the truth will be out, and as long as it is not discovered, there will be no normal life here. This is why I welcome the exhumation at the Knin cemetery, and I would like to say to all those who are opposed to this and who see weapons as the only solution, to these dogs of war, to leave and find some other war elsewhere, and leave the people who want to live in peace alone. There are many more of them than those professional Croats and Serbs who can only survive in conditions of unrest," says the head of the Social Democratic Party Knin chapter, Anto Marjanovic. His party colleague, Serb Dmitar Gojko adds that most Knin inhabitants undoubtedly want to live together, but that those who do not, are louder and more dangerous. And it is indeed so: in cafes patronized by Croats there is always someone telling stories, agitating against the Serbs and the "Chetnik" government in Zagreb, calling for an armed showdown with returnees, yet the crowd watches this fool as if he were a prophet. The same, although less frequently, happens in cafes frequented by Serbs: in them another prophet tells stories of the Ustasha cutthroats who are still in power and who can hardly wait to get hold of their knives again. Among those who view these fools as prophets are certainly some normal people, but they stay silent and drink their drinks, because being normal in Knin has always been lethal.

"Instigators deliberately sent here from Split and Zagreb to sow hatred and convince the locals that they cannot live with their neighbors are the problem," says Dmitar Gojko.

As many as 95 percent of the Bosnian Croats who moved to Knin as part of the Tudjman "humane resettlement" project in the wake of Operation Storm do not even want to hear about their homes in Banjaluka, Posavina or central Bosnia. They want to live in Knin, in other people's homes and on other people's land...

"There is no life for us in Bosnia any more," says Jozo Kolak, from Gornji Vakuf, who works as a legal expert for the Knin city administration. Every single settler from Bosnia will recite the same story word by word, but not one will be willing to back his statement with any explanation: they will only keep reiterating that Bosnia is no longer Croatian country and that the Bosnian Croats can no longer live with the Bosnian Serbs or the Bosniaks. "Ethnic relations here aren't that bad. There are minor incidents and provocations, but it's not bad at all."

"Of course, there are no close relations between Croats and Serbs. They do not mix, they have their own cafes, and there are no Serbs and Croats dating girls or boys from the other group," says Kolak, according to whom the main problem is finding apartments for all who need them and unemployment (of 15,000 inhabitants of Knin, only 2,000 are employed, mostly as civil servants, and among them is a negligible number of Serbs). Kolak openly says that Tudjman's government tricked the Bosnian Croats by settling them in Serb homes: they promised them wealth, homes and jobs, but they were tricked and abandoned to their fate. The same happened to local Serbs: the Belgrade government promised them everything only to let them rot in cold and stinking refugee centers, and then to return to their homes with their heads bowed and in fear that someone might knock at their door at some ungodly hour.

"My dear friend, no one arrived here on a whim, but because of great misfortune," says Kolak, and somehow one has to trust him, although it is not quite clear what sort of misfortune can force a man to reject his own home and his entire life in Bosnia, the country both Kolak and all the other settlers are doing their best to forget. But, try as they may, the job of forgetting is not that easy: when dusk descends on the town, and when the stony slopes around the town begin to cool off, from one direction or another the words of a slow, sad Bosnian song are heard: "Is there anything more sorrowful than the coming of dusk..." And it immediately becomes clear that there is nothing sadder than to be born in Gornji Vakuf and live in someone else's home in Knin, and call dusk "aksam," Bosnian fashion, to stroll up and down a town with the stench of death in one's nostrils, coming from the bodies of innocent old Serbs thrown into a mass grave at the Knin cemetery.

Ivica Djikic

(AIM)