Difficult Commemoration: What Really Happened When Croatia Was Liberated?

For a quarter of a century, large commemorations have been held in Croatia every year at the beginning of August.

In the first year, of course, it was not a commemoration, but war: In “Operation Storm” between August 4 and 7, 1995, the Croatian army succeeded in liberating most of the Croatian territory that had been occupied by the Serbs since 1991.

Since then, the center of the commemoration dedicated to this campaign has been the town of Knin, not far from the Croatian border with Bosnia.

That will be the case this time too.

President Zoran Milanović, as an opinionated social democrat, is not exactly popular with many of the Croatian veterans, who are often positioned far to the right, wants to come to Knin and hand out medals.

Knin was the capital of the "Republic of Serbian Krajina",

Michael Martens

Correspondent for Southeast European countries based in Vienna.

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But this year, too, one question will hover over the celebrations on the "Day of Victory and Gratitude of the Homeland", to which there is only one differentiated answer: What exactly happened 25 years ago in the Dalmatian hinterland?

It is undisputed, apart from nationalist circles in Serbia, that Croatia naturally had the right to liberate its own territory and to territorially consolidate the state independence it declared in 1991 with great bloodshed.

In Croatia, on the other hand, people like to deny that the liberation was accompanied by crimes against the Serbian civilian population, which were not just regrettable isolated cases, as politicians in Zagreb often claim.

The looting was comparatively harmless.

A United Nations spokesman said at the time that UN monitors had "clear evidence" that Croatian fighters were looting homes in the area's fleeing abandoned Serb villages: "Soldiers don't usually go into battle with VCRs, TVs and radios."

Serbian civilians fled

Things were less benign in hamlets like Grubori, where six old villagers, unwilling to leave their homes, were slaughtered by undetected assassins long after the campaign was over.

Such incursions were not limited to Grubori.

Fearing just such a thing, most of the Serbs fled when the Croatian troops approached.

They did not believe the calls by Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, who had said at the beginning of the attacks that nobody had any intention of expelling the Serbs.

Up to 200,000 Serb civilians fled.

Only four years later, in Kosovo, did more people flee - but then Albanians from the Serbian soldiers.

The Swiss book author and Balkan expert Cyrill Stieger, at that time in the service of the "Neue Zürcher Zeitung", was in 1995 the day after the end of "Operation Storm" in the Krajina and reported from a deserted place where cups and beer bottles were still in the cafés on the table was written: “Some glasses hadn't even been drunk yet - a sign that people had fled head over heels ... In one restaurant the table was still set, leftovers of meat, bits of bread that had been bitten off were lying around.

... Lights were still on in many rooms, in a bakery the freshly baked croissants lay on the tray.

The residents had apparently left the village in a great hurry during the night or early in the morning.

Here you could also see houses and shops that had been set on fire and looted.”

It is certainly true that among the Serbs there were also those who had good reason to flee because they had previously committed war crimes against their Croatian neighbors.

It just doesn't undo the crimes of some liberators.

At that time, according to general estimates, several hundred Serbs were killed and thousands of houses were set on fire.

Croatian liberators on par with Serbian mass murderers

A few years later, the then Chief Prosecutor of the Hague War Crimes Tribunal, Carla Del Ponte, tried to implicate the Croatian General Ante Gotovina in these crimes.

Even politically moderate Croats were outraged at the time that Gotovina was being placed on the same level as Serbian mass murderers such as the Bosnian Serb war criminals Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić, who were also indicted by the Hague tribunal.

They were satisfied that Gotovina, unlike the two Serbs, was acquitted in the appeals process, since he was not directly responsible for the crimes.

Of course, this also meant that the crimes committed at that time, which the tribunal did not doubt, have not been atoned for to this day.

Some storm damage has proven beyond repair.

For many "Krajina Serbs" a centuries-old settlement history came to an end in 1995.

They were descendants of refugees from the Ottoman Empire who had been settled by the Habsburgs as fortified farmers on the border of the monarchy.

Those who later wanted to return were not only faced with administrative obstacles.

The International Committee of the Red Cross reported in 1996 that even a year after the end of the war there was an atmosphere of lawlessness in the liberated areas, which was causing great fear to the remaining Serbs.

Almost 100 Serbian houses were still destroyed in 1996, threats, looting and abuse continued.

Abandoned Serb houses are mined to deter potential returnees.

At least that's in the past.

But the consequences are permanent.

Before the war, Serbs made up 12 percent of Croatia's population, today there are barely four.