LIVING IN A PILLBOX

War and Peace in Eastern Slavonia

When the sixty-five year old combatant Veljko Pravilovic says that Serbia will not give up Eastern Slavonia so easily it sounds more as if he were summoning up his courage. His sixty year old fellow-combatant Milenko Radojicic adds sincerely: "It is all fishy. What will happen depends on the leaders. Theirs, foreign, but also ours. And we have nowhere to go."

AIM, Beograd, October 25, 1995

"Dad, whether I will be able to grow up depends on your resolutness," says a slogan written in large black letters on a white propaganda poster. Below these words are traces of soldier's boots. Another one carries a different message: "Let us follow the steps of our ancestors." Below it a photo of a solider under heavy arms. The ancestors of Serbs always carried only guns and fought - says the creator of these posters - The Information Center of Srem and Baranja stationed in Vukovar - so as to raise the morale of the population of Eastern Slavonia.

Raising the morale of the present inhabitants is not a difficult task. Not because the people here, mostly exiles from Western Slavonia or those who came last August from Knin, are truly eager to be soldiers like "their ancestors". It is because they can hear on Croatian televison and radio daily messages that they will be "reintegrated, either by might or by sleight", while memories of the previous "migration" are still alive.

At the same time they know that only the Sava river is behind them, and geographically the very close, but politically also never more distant, Serbia. No one is fooled any more by the sporadic euphoric messages of Radio Vukovar that Yugoslav military formations have joined the armed population (as broadcast in late August). The behaviour of Serbia during the Knin events as well as the more recent ones in the Banja Luka region, do not leave much space for speculations. So when the sixty-five year old combatant Veljko Pravilovic, with a rifle on his shoulder on the road between Vukovar and Erdut, says that Serbia will not give up Eastern Slavonia so easily, it sounds as if he were summoning up his courage. His sixty year old fellow-combatant Milenko Radojicic adds sincerely: "It is all fishy. What will happen depends on the leaders. Theirs, foreign, but also ours. And we have nowhere to go."

Nowhere to Go

In seems that time is still in the villages of Ilaca and Berko, and in Vukovar or Erdut. Plots are untilled, what for the shortage of fuel and what for the pending war. Today Eastern Slavonia is a large pillbox. In every village, at every twenty meters there is a freshly painted signpost saying "Shelter". Sand sacks or wodden boards on windows and doors show that everything is ready for the new war. Emergency first-aid stations are opened in village cellars. The nurses Milka and Vlasta are on duty constantly for almost a month now in one of these in Borovo Selo and show us a first-aid kit and truckle-beds in one of the cellars. The twenty-four year old Vlasta, who is pregnant, tells us with much fervency that they have no choice but to defend themselves. There is no life with Tudjman.

As a rule, when faced with the dilemma whether to live in Croatia with a Croatian passport and Croatian currency or to go to war, and who survives survives, people still "opt" for the latter.

In Ilaca, once a pure Croatian village, the thirty-five old Branka Veljkovic peeps out of the window. She fled from Slavonska Orahovica back in 1992 with her family and now lives in somebody else's, once a Croatian, house. Her husband has been mobilized and is on duty in Djeletovci, protecting the oil industry complex. She is convinced that there is no way they could live under Tudjman's force. If the Croat Army attacks, they will fight. And what if they lose? Then they will leave. Only, she doesn't know where.

Before the war 60% of the population of the village of Berak were Croats. "We chased them out already in 1991",

• says boyishly boasting a nineteen-year old lad armed to his teeth. He has been in the war for four years now and cannot imagine a life together with the Croats because, as he says, the Zagreb papers named his father a war criminal. His family has nowhere to go, so there is only struggle left
• to the last man. He is a native here so we ask: Did he not go to school with the Croats, did he not have friends among them? All his bragging and blustering suddenly melted away. "I had a friend," he says, "he was my best friend". His father was killed in the village at the beginning of the war. I have heard that he is in Zagreb now and has got married..."

Vukovar is no longer fit for people. These are no longer houses, but stage settings. Ever since 1991 when the Yugoslav Army "liberated" it by razing it to the ground, it seems that till today no one was willing to remove the stone, dust or rubble, to fix the roofs and bring back life to it. Grass is thickly growing in house halls. Young twigs are thrusting out of the wide open, dark windows. In multistory buildings rooms without walls, and some wretched miser drying his laundry above the fallen in staircase. Rebuilt shops and cafes on the ground floors of old-time houses which were once the pride of Vukovar, can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Lifeless holes gape above modest shop windows. Only a few new houses were built in this town. They are the act of optimists, who are often called uniformed pessimists in these areas.

There were optimists at the beginning of the war too. "This is a Serbian house", says a message on the one remaining wall of a house, whose owner obviously believed that it would divert a grenade from his threshold.

Ljubinko Stojanovic, Director of the Information Center of Srem and Baranja and of Radio Vukovar smoothly, without a wink, explains how the whole world is misled. He goes on to say that Vukovar was not destroyed by the Yugoslav and Serbian Armies, but by the Croat generals in that army, who had orders to plant a cuckoo in the Serbian nest!

Forty year old Milena, a book-keeper, born in Vukovar, has not been living in her house for four years now. Her house was "liberated" too by the Yugoslav Army at the beginning of the war, so that she now lives in Borovo Selo. She doesn't feel like talking about those times, but rather about today. Salaries are low, there is food, but it is expensive. She doesn't have a clue of what will happen tomorrow. She has nowhere to go, and the uncertainty is killing her.

Near the barracks at the river bank, in the center, boys are playing on the ruins. Mirko and Dejan, ten-year olds, put up a tin sheet, as a shelter, covered it with green rags, "masked" their hide-out and collected stones for the war against the heros from the next street. They jump in and out of the hole that used to be a window, on the ground floor, moving piles of bricks.

Only the hospital is new. If it resembles a hospital at all. It is covered with layers of sand sacks from top to bottom. A soldier assures us that it is a monster from another planet, fully impenetrable so that no bullet nor shells can harm it.

Whose Campaign is More Important?

Towards Erdut, at every ten meters, both on the left and the right side of the road lies a soldier of Arkan's Serbian Voluntary Guard with his gun prepared to fire. While the "boss" is in Banja Luka they obediently drill since the "first degree of alert" is in force. It is impossible to check on the spot where are those who have been forcibly mobilized in Serbia and taken away to Erdut for "rehabilitation". The only thing left is to believe the armed "special trooper" that there are no such men in Erdut and that no one came with handcuffs. His headquarters is surrounded by sand sacks. The "tigers" are not a para-military army in Eastern Slavonia, they claim, but the XIth Special Brigade of the Slavonia-Baranja Corps.

At the UNPROFOR (Sector North) Headquarters Kirsten Haupt in charge of the press, cannot hide her concern.

• "Absolutely the same scenes can be seen on the Croatian side in Osijek, for example. Sand sacks, wood plates on the windows and doors. We can expect anything as there is enough force on both sides," - says she.

Indeed, both sides are amassing troops on both banks of the river Danube. According to the latest estimates of military experts, Zagreb has about 45,000 soldiers, 200 tanks, professional brigades. And the motivation. These are the same soldiers who left Eastern Slavonia in 1991. The Serbian side (XIth Slavonia-Baranja Corps of the Army of Serbian Krajina) has mobilized about 25,000 men with 150 tanks. The maneuvers of the Army of Yugoslavia in the region of Backa and Srem, just before the announced withdrawal of the blue helmets from this territory, have the role of "deterring" the Croatian side. And Arkan's troops are returning to Eastern Slavonia after more than a month of fighting in Bosanska Krajina and Zeljko Raznjatovic Arkan says for "Telegraf" that the Croatian attack can be expected any moment.

Milosevic is certainly not willing to fight. He has just won over for peace-making the leaders of Srem and Baranja who are vieing in loyality and have stopped shouting "never again to Croatia". After the meeting in Osijek, the Serbian side now insists on a five-year UN Protectorate, without mentioning either a transitional period or a possible plebiscite of the Serbs after that. Milosevic's main aim is to buy time, get to Ohio and have the sanctions lifted, and "settle" the problem of Eastern Slavonia later, at his leisure, in a peaceful manner. He thinks that five years would be enough to shape the mood of the Serbs through propaganda to his liking and "prepare" them to remain in Croatia.

However, Croatia has reason to hurry. Hrvoje Sarinic, Head of the Croatian negotiating team, says that the reintegration must begin by the end of November and that an international Protectorate cannot last more than 18 months. In that race with time it would, actually, suit Croatia to "take over" Eastern Slavonia immediately, by military means, before the meeting in Ohio and before the sanctions against Yugoslavia are lifted. In an interview to today's "New York Times" Franjo Tudjman claims that his army is able to establish control over Eastern Slavonia within two days, despite the risk of the Army of Yugoslavia joining the war.

Nevertheless, the possibilities (although they exist), for something like that to happen these days, are small. Now it is up to a higher will, America's. In the same interview Tudjman admits that he promised Richard Holbrooke, the American negotiator, that he would not disrupt the peace negotiations, nor undertake any miliatry actions before and during them. Namely, Bill Clinton would not find such an "interference" to his liking and his election campaign is probably more important than Franjo Tudjman's is.

Gordana Igric