Marking the tenth anniversary of the fall of the 'Republic of Serbian Krajina', an eloquent comment from IWPR's Balkan Crisis Report by a journalist who covered the parastate's four-year existence for The Independent (London)

. Ten years ago I sat in the front room of a house in west London in company with a number of Croats, all eyes glued to the fast-changing footage of the satellite television that was carrying programmes from Croatian state television. ‘Come round,’ my friend had said. ‘Something’s up.’

That ‘something’, it turned out, was the ignominious fall of the Republic of Serbian Krajina (RSK), the Serb entity that had comprised almost a third of Croatia since 1991 and whose collapse marked the apotheosis of the mastermind of Croatian independence, Franjo Tudjman.

As town after town fell to the victorious Croatian army on the screen, and Knin itself, the epicentre of the Serb revolt, was in danger, the mood in the room was reticent.

Partly it was because the scale of the now apparent victory was unexpected. ‘I thought we’d win back a few kilometres or a few towns and villages,’ my hostess mused.

Her elderly mother sat in silence besides me. Hailing from Š ibenik, on Dalmatia’s coast, she had lived with the sound of the Serb shellfire in 1991 and 1992 and now was in Britain on holiday. ‘How do you feel?’ I asked her, as a triumphant-sounding Croatian TV commentator babbled away in the background. ‘Those Serbs,’ she sighed. ‘Belgrade just used them. And now they’ve thrown them away - like an old rag!’

Her measured, limited satisfaction with the course of events matched that which I witnessed later that year among many Croats who had lived on the borders of the RSK. There was not much euphoria on the ground after the soldiers swept through.

In reality, they felt they had lost out and that their principal difference with the Serbs was that in the end, the Serbs had lost out more.

Many Krajina Croats never went back home, for there was little to go home to, their villages, houses and places of worship having been comprehensively trashed during the four-year rule of the RSK.

Later that same summer, I journeyed through the Krajina, unable to recognise parts of the countryside that I had visited before and after the Serb revolt.

In Kostajnica, a quaint riverside town southeast of Zagreb, I found rubble and ruins. On the riverbank that separates Croatia from Bosnia I met an old returnee. He was staring at a group of people staring back at him from the other side of the river.

They were all former neighbours, for that group of people on the other side of the river were Kostajnica Serbs who had fled to Bosnia in the aftermath of Operation Storm. Now they were separated from their old neighbours and in some cases, relatives, by much more than a wall of water.

I searched for the 18th century Catholic church that had looked as if it dated from the reign of Maria Theresa, near which in 1992 I had listened to the then Serb leader, Jovan Rašković, delivering a long and meandering speech to local Serb farmers.

At a dinner held in a barn after the speech, I asked a farmer sitting beside me if he and his fellows wanted to secede from Croatia, for that had been the gist of the speech. ‘Don’t be crazy,’ he said. ‘Zagreb is only a few kilometres away. That’s where we sell all our stuff.’

‘Why can’t we be just like we were before?’ said a Serb family I encountered not far from Kostajnica, on the same trip. ‘Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia….’ The mother reeled off the names of the six Yugoslav republics mechanically.

It had been only four years before, but the land I recalled from that summer – green fields, winding lanes, bucolic villages, orchards laden with fruit - had vanished.

By 1995, the old church in Kostajnica had been blown to pieces under the RSK. I could barely work out where it had even been sited. The big old Franciscan monastery in the town had almost gone the same way.

Everywhere lay signs of devastation, for what the Serbs had not demolished from 1991 to 1995, the avenging Croat soldiers were finishing off now. ‘Hrvatska Kuća – ne diraj’ (Croatian home – don’t touch) was scrawled on the few relatively untouched houses.

It was hard to imagine many Croats thinking of this wrecked landscape as ‘home’, let alone going to back to it if they had another option.

An air of doom and of uncontrolled violence hung over the RSK from the start. By coincidence, I had been there at the very beginning, on holiday in Dalmatia, when news of a ‘disturbance’ in the remote town of Knin sent me driving up the winding road that led to this dusty outpost, whose main significance was as a railway junction.

There I had encountered a sinister, baby-faced local official in a black leather jacket called Milan Babić and his sidekick, a fat policeman called Milan Martić.

The ‘irredentist dentist’ some foreign reporters soon nicknamed Babić, referring to his earlier trade. But there was little comic about either of these two men, soon to emerge as major political players on the stage of the fast collapsing Yugoslav federation. Even then I was struck by the cool fanaticism of the one and the pigheaded arrogance of the other.

‘The Croats won’t find another Pribičević in me,’ Babić informed me coldly, referring to the Croatian Serb leader of the 1920s and 1930s who had ended his political career by backing the Croatian Peasant Party in its quarrels with Belgrade.

I found Martić scoffing beans in a down at heel restaurant in Knin, full of grand plans about how much territory he intended to take. ‘The Croats don’t deserve a town like Zadar or Š ibenik,’ he announced, chomping his beans.

There was nothing nice, brave or noble about the statelet that these two proceeded to erect with the help of the Yugoslav army under Veljko Kadijević, and Slobodan Milošević.

Had they confined their designs to Serb-majority areas they might have emerged with something from the conflict, for in the early days the Croats were far from united in their reaction to the secession of

Search our archives: