Article translated from the Croatian daily Slobodna Dalmacija to accompany interesting testimony on the contribution of Croatian Serbs to Croatia's defence against Serbian aggression in 1991-5.

[Following a recent outburst of anti-Serb chauvinism by the current mayor of Split Željko Kerum, interesting testimony about the contribution of Croatian Serbs to Croatia’s defence against Serbian aggression in 1991-5 was published in the Split daily Slobodna Dalmacija on 26 September 2009. According to Živko Juzbašić, the author of Srpsko pitanje i hrvatska politika [The Serb question and Croatian politics] (Zagreb 2009) and a former member of the government of national unity formed in 1991 with the aim of organising the country’s defence, he had proposed at that time to Croatian president Franjo Tuđman the establishment within the Croatian army of a specifically Serb brigade, to be named after Nikola Tesla. ‘Tuđman at first accepted this, but in the end rejected it. Many Serbs [around 10,000] fought in the Croatian army. Had Tuđman’s policy been different, i.e. more intelligent, many more Serbs would have joined in, because it was a common struggle’, Juzbašić told Slobodna Dalmacija. Zoran Š angut, who fought at Vukovar, told the paper that Serbs made up some six per cent of the Vukovar defence force of 1,800 men. ‘We had complete confidence in them. They defended Vukovar alongside us. Those who ended up together with me in the Serbian camps at Stajićevo and Sremska Mitrovica were singled out for brutal treatment, because the guards treated them as traitors to the Serb cause.’ According to Slobodna Dalmacija author Damir Pilić, the first victim of the Serbian attack on Croatia was not as officially maintained Josip Jović, an ethnic Croat policeman killed at Plitvice on 1 April 1991, but another policeman, Goran Alavanja, who was a Serb.] 

On the cold night of 22-23 November 1990, a twenty-seven-year-old Croatian policeman Goran Alavanja was sitting in a police car on the road above Obrovac, at the centre of the area of Serb rebellion, together with inspector Stevan Bukarica and another policeman called Jovan Graovac [all three were ethnic Serbs]. The storm raging around them must have prevented them from noticing a group of masked terrorists approaching the front of the car at around two in the morning, who fired point blank at them from their machine guns. Alavanja was hit seven times, and died soon after.

But Alavanja was not the only Serb who fought in the war on the Croatian side. Thousands of Serbs fought for Croatia against other Serbs. There is, for example, Svetozar Jovanović known as Sveto Panker, whose flat in Split was seized by armed Croatian soldiers at a time when he was fighting on the front in the Croatian army’s 4^th Guard Brigade. Jovanović spent the next thirteen years homeless, patiently waiting for the return of his flat, and refusing the offers of his wartime colleagues to regain his flat for him by force. There is the well-known case in Š ibenik of Željko Baltić, the JNA commander of an artillery unit stationed on the nearby island of Žirje, who at the crucial moment defected to the Croatian side with his whole battery, which he promptly turned against the JNA ships stationed nearby. There are also the brothers Predrag and Nenad Gagić from Vukovar, who from the start joined the town’s defence. When told of their intention to fight for Croatia, their father Vukašin replied: ‘For whom else? Your country has been attacked, go and defend it.’ Vukašin Grgić was an Orthodox priest. This story illustrates the fact that not all Croatian Serbs rose against Croatia in the name of Great Serbia, and that not all Orthodox priests incited their congregations against their Catholic neighbours. There is also the well-known case of Aleksandar Jevtić, a Serb from Vukovar who was imprisoned in the Serbian camp of Stajićevo after the city’s fall. He was recognised there by his former JNA commander, who, surprised to see a Serb among the prisoners, offered to move him and other captured Serbs to another part of the camp, where they would be better treated. Jevtić then pointed out several dozen Croats, pretending that they too were Serbs and thus probably saving their lives. Thanks to the testimony of several surviving Vukovar defenders, voiced during the Croatian television programme Latinica, Jevtić was recently given a medal by Croatian president Stipe Mesić. The same programme featured an interview with Boško Kršić, a Bosnian Serb who used to work and live in Croatia, but who in 1979 went off to work in western Europe. On hearing about Croatia being attacked, he promptly returned there and volunteered for service in the Croatian army. Krešić’s words illuminate the dominant experience among many Serbs living in Croatia who in 1991 sided with their Croat friends against tanks and aircraft driven by other Serbs. ‘I returned to Croatia because I had spent my youth there. I love this country. I came here as a peasant child, made myself at home, acquired friends. I lived and worked here, grew old here, and will die here.’

However much some would wish to deny it, the fact remains that thousands and thousands of Croatian Serbs resisted the call of their ethnic kin, or rather of an extreme, fascistic political elite, and responded instead to the call of their endangered homeland. If only for this reason we [Croats] should be ashamed of the Split mayor’s words.

A retired soldier of the 4^th Guard Brigade, who preferred to remain anonymous, told the following story to a Slobodna Dalmacija journalist [here abridged]: ‘How long was I in the 4^th Guard Brigade? From the beginning to the end, with the exception of the action at Maslenica. I was in the 3^rd Battalion. Why did I join the Guards? For money, naturally. I am being cynical here, of course, but I really cannot bear all those stories about how we went to war only for money. At that moment, at the start of the war, we set off to fight not knowing whether we’d ever come back. When I went to war, I had no idea whether we’d be paid or not. It is true, though, that all kind of rabble now pretend to be war veterans...What was it like to be a Serb in 1991 in Split? I’ll tell you: I never had a problem with being a Serb in the war. Especially in the Guards - I never felt I was under suspicion. There were people one got on with and people one did not, of course, but this had nothing to do with it. The boys were quite correct. I only remember one instance when a friend of mine, N., met up with some of my neighbours, and after a while they came to talk about me too. When N. told them we were in the same unit, they asked him if he feared me. He went quite berserk, saying he felt safer with me than with them... Why did I join the Guards? My reply remains the same: Is it better to sweep the rubbish away from your door or to wait for it to get into the house? I was born in Split, grew up here, my whole mentality was formed here, all my habits... You refer perhaps to the fact that those on the other side were Serbs? It is irrelevant to me who was on the other side - what mattered to me was what was on this side. Do I remember Tuđman thanking God because his wife was neither a Jew nor a Serb? Of course. I think it all started with Tuđman, and not only that - also the theft, the crime, the [manner of] privatisation. Did Kerum’s statement [that he would not have a Serb in his family] remind me of Tuđman’s own words? I’ll tell you what: they are alike to me. One can say about both of them that their moral principles are immoral. I cannot understand people saying all Serbs are like this or all Croats like that. For I recall when we were near Trebinje, some time in April or May 1992, and listened on our radio to exchanges between Montenegrin radio amateurs. The vast majority of them condemned the attack on Dubrovnik. I remember one Montenegrin telling another that it is a sin to throw a single stone at Dubrovnik, let alone drop bombs. But Kerum and Tuđman are not the only ones. What about Bishop Š tambuk’s declaration that the Croatian president should be a Catholic? You keep asking me about Kerum. But what more can I tell you? He represents a degradation of all my efforts, struggle, wishes and hopes that Croatia would be what I had fought for.’

Translated and edited from Slobodna Dalmacija, 20 September 2009

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