The Danube (31 page)

In 2001, ten years after the Serb–Croat war, I found the whole museum collection from Vukovar in the basement of the Petrovaradin museum. From shards of Neolithic pots to elegant turn-of-the-century oil paintings from the Bauer collection, they became the subject of a bitter dispute between the two countries. The Serbs said the collection had been removed for safekeeping after the siege. The Croats said the items had been looted by Serb soldiers and irregulars when they captured the town and shot the remaining population. Eventually the items were returned.

The Petrovaradin fortress has many treasures of its own: the ossified remains of a wooden Danube long-boat; ancient maps of the Danube which show the wriggling course of the river, rich in islands, before regulation straightened its back and disciplined its elbows in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each successive map seems to have less islands. Evocative names such as ‘war island’ and ‘snail island’ fade from the maps, and from memory. There's an etching of Suleiman the Magnificent in
1526, on his way to victory at the battle of Mohács, and a black-and-white photograph of the
Baross
paddle steamer.

The twentieth-century history that the new generation wanted to shrug off was particularly heavy in Novi Sad. In January 1942, Hungarian soldiers and police carried out their worst atrocity of the Second World War. In an attempt to discourage partisan activity and scare the local population, several thousand Jews, Serbs and some left-wing Hungarians were rounded up and taken down to the Danube and shot. Their bodies were dumped through holes cut into the ice. When the partisans captured Novi Sad in 1944, they wrought a terrible revenge on the Hungarian population of the city and the surrounding countryside, rounding up and killing several times as many Hungarian civilians. The sad story of both massacres is told in two novels by the Hungarian author Tibor Cseres, both published in the 1960s.
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In June 2013 the presidents of both countries met in the village of Čurug, and apologised for the autrocities of their own countrymen.

The Danube reopened fully to shipping only in 2005, six years after the bridges were destroyed.

Just to the west of Sremski Karlovci, and to the south and west of Novi Sad, the Fruška Gora hills stretch in a thin, sandy-soiled line along the Danube. In any other landscape they might draw little attention, as the highest peaks reach only five hundred metres. But in the broad plains of Vojvodina, Fruška Gora rises like Table Mountain, visible from all directions. I remember crossing the border from Hungary by car, on my way to report on the war in Bosnia, and the relief to the eyes of those hills. A host of monasteries were built here from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, initially with the blessing of the Turks, then with their indifference as they lost more and more of their Balkan possessions. Since Serbia lost Kosovo, with its far more ancient and imposing monasteries, the importance of Fruška Gora as the main, accessible stronghold of the Serbian Orthodox Church has increased.

At Grgeteg monastery, I buy thick, dark honey from hives kept by the monks, and walk into the morning service. A choir of nuns sing like angels, like the young nuns I have heard at Gračanica monastery in Kosovo, and Trebinje in Hercegovina, both places scarred by war. After the morning service, I sit under the cloisters to talk to the aptly named Father
Gregor – Grgeteg is from the Serbian form of his name. The church was blessed, he says, in communist times by the relatively benign attitude of the authorities. The monastery nearby, at Vučedol, was used as a prison camp by the Nazis in the Second World War, which helped anchor the church on the side of the anti-fascists, unlike in most other countries of eastern Europe. The Croatian archbishop of Zagreb, Alojzije Stepinac, initially supported the coming to power of the Ustashe, the Croatian fascists, and offered only muted criticism of their crimes during the war.
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He was eventually tried by the communist authorities and sentenced to sixteen years imprisonment. The Vatican responded by making him a cardinal, to Tito's fury. Gregor describes the loss of Kosovo in 2008 as ‘temporary’ – as impossible to bear for the Serbs as the loss of London might be for the English. I drive away from his peaceful oasis of Christian love through fields of tall sunflowers.

The following day, I turn on the radio to discover that the last of the Serbian war criminals on the run, the bearded Goran Hadžić, wanted for his role in the killings in Vukovar, was discovered, hiding just five kilometres from where we sat talking, near the monastery of Krušedol. Hadžić is accused of taking part in the cold-blooded murder of 261 patients and staff from the hospital in Vukovar, who survived the autumn 1991 siege.
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We stop in Ilok for coffee, to reconnect with the green waters of the river. At a café right on the shore, I befriend a young German-Croatian couple, Christian and Daria, who are cycling downriver from Vienna to Belgrade. They have the same bicycle map as mine, and assume we are cyclists too. We compare notes, and in no time my friend and companion on this stretch of the journey Lola (whose real name is Milorad Batinić) persuades them to leave the Danube at Novi Sad, put their bikes in the back of his car, and drive with him to the Adriatic coast. The two cyclists are so happy, so much in love, that they cannot keep their secret for long. A few hours earlier, on the shore of the river, Christian had proposed to Daria. She said yes.

A left turn off the main road to Vukovar, five kilometres before the city, leads past tall trees and outbuildings to Ovčara farm. The farm seems to be prospering. The sheds are packed with grain and the lower buildings filled with pigs. There are vines basking in the heat, and sunflowers and maize growing tall. This is where those taken from Vukovar hospital were killed. Many were patients from the hospital. They included a radio journalist,
Siniša Glavašević, whose reports from Vukovar chronicled the siege.
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Some were bludgeoned to death in the hangars; the rest were taken out to a ditch by the road and shot on 20 November 1991. One of the Serb commanding officers, Viktor Šljivančanin, was sentenced to five years in prison by the War Crimes Tribunal. Goran Hadžić was a simple farm worker, accused of taking part in the killings. The white marble sculpture that stands in front of the farm building shows a jumble of body parts and bones. Inside, the floor is made of bullet cases. Photographs of the victims are displayed along the walls in the dark, with lights coming on suddenly to show their faces. There are personal items too – glasses, cigarettes, identity papers. In the centre of the room their names are projected in green light, spiralling downwards, out of sight.

The water tower of Vukovar sprouts over the town, like a tubular mushroom, growing wider at the top. It is my first water tower since Sulina, and while the one serves as the reminder of the kindness of strangers, this one is a symbol of the cruelty of neighbours. And like an old mushroom, bits are falling off it. The tower provided target practice for Serbian gunners besieging the city. It was so large, it was hard not to miss, but their guns and mortars proved incapable of anything more than chewing away at the masonry. The building has been left as a war monument, of a very different kind to the carefully crafted, pinpointed memories of Ovčara farm. It is a monument to the sheer stupidity of war. The door is locked and bolted, but, as I listen at the base, I can hear all the sounds of Vukovar – the passing buses, a child crying, boys playing football, a door slamming. The tower is an echo chamber. Then I distinguish another sound: pigeons cooing, and the sudden beat and flurry of their wings as they circle the dark interior. The doves of peace have taken over Vukovar's war monument.

The city hospital still functions as a hospital, but in the basement there is a museum devoted to its work during the siege. There are bunk beds made up, wax models of nurses, and Siniša Glavašević's young, nervous voice broadcasting the day's news. Screens have been set up with short films about the siege. There is also a hall of mirrors, with glass cases in which candles burn continually. Twelve candles become twelve hundred. My face distorts horribly in the mirror. The effect is powerful, and disturbing. But there is a flavour of war propaganda. I want to know what the Serb soldiers felt, bombing this town. I want to know if they felt any
remorse. Who they were, where they went to school, if they knew the people they were attacking. And what they are doing now.

When I hear of Hadžić's arrest, I ring Kristijan Drobina, the man in charge of the memorial site at Ovčara farm. ‘Probably the Serbian government felt it was the right moment to arrest him – there must be a political reason, to do so now,’ he says. ‘I'm pleased but I don't know how this will end. Šljivančanin was released on good behaviour after three years. That means he served just eight days in prison for each person who was killed here. They constantly try to minimise what happened at Vukovar, to turn it into a local dispute. But what happened there was ordered by the Serbian government …’

In January 1999 I came to Vukovar on a trip arranged by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). The OSCE were trying to help implement the terms of the Treaty of Erdut, which confirmed Croatian control over the whole region of Eastern Slavonia, seized by the Serbs in 1991. A key provision of Erdut, as with the accords which ended the Bosnian war in 1995, was that everyone had the right to return to their homes – Croats who had fled in 1991, and Serbs who had occupied those houses. The atmosphere was very tense – the remaining Serbs feared they would all be treated as war criminals.
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Jovan Njegić was collecting waste paper to sell. He earnt about eighty-seven dinars – twenty-five Deutschmarks a month – just enough to live on. He used to have a house and two shops. ‘Before the war, we didn't know who was a Serb, who was a Croat here. Fifty per cent of the marriages were mixed.’ He was living with his eighty-nine-year-old mother. He wept as he described taking her down into the cellar to escape the shelling. His wife and daughter went to Zagreb. All he wanted was for them to come back. He took me for a walk down the road, to see his old house. ‘That was it,’ he says, pointing to a gutted ruin, overgrown with bushes. ‘They brought petrol and set fire to it. Look up there – you can see the bathroom! I had a shoe shop here, and a bakery. All built from good materials – just look at these bricks.’ Another man wandered over to where we stood, on the edge of an open air market. It was a man with a beard, which suggested he was a Serb. ‘This is the last Serb territory in Croatia – where shall we go now?’ A Croat in a nearby village, Ivan Prilavić, said he stayed through the war because he couldn't bear to leave his house. What does he think of the
Serbs now, I asked. ‘Some were human beings, some were not.’ Wasn't he afraid for his life? ‘The bullet which is meant for me hasn't been made yet,’ he laughed.

Vladimir Stanimirović was the elected leader of the local Serbs in 1999. He was anxious to underline that the Croats started the war, with their mistreatment of his people. ‘At the beginning of 1991, the Serbs here were arrested, maltreated and some disappeared and their homes were blown up. Serbian officials were fired on the basis of decrees passed in Zagreb. I was a psychiatrist in a hospital, and I was arrested too, and only released when decent Croats intervened. My only crime was to be Serb … We recognise that there were war criminals on both sides. And we support the idea of arresting them. We support the work of the Hague Tribunal.’

Jacques Klein, an American General with a French-German name who acted as governor of the region under the UNTAES (United Nations Transitional Administration for Eastern Slavonia) administration, is a big man with a big voice. He speaks in very short sentences, like a military telegram. ‘Our role as the UN mission is the peaceful reintegration of the region into Croatia. Our aim is to keep the multi-ethnic character of the region. To create an atmosphere of confidence. To allow the return of refugees.’ He described what happened when the phone lines were restored after the war. ‘In the first 48 hours, 25,000 calls were made. The dialogue was re-established. There were also hate-calls. That's to be expected … People come back in buses we lay on, to see their old homes. If the situation is calm, they get off the bus, and chat with their old neighbours. Quite often what you hear is the question, “How did this happen to us? We didn't start the war. How can we have turned on each other?” An amnesty is the key. You cannot demilitarise a region without psychologically demilitarising the people. If people don't return, we're going to have a big game reserve in the centre of Europe. The mothers here deserve it. There are women walking round here with pictures of their missing sons. I want closure on this issue. We have no alternative but to help them … We have to stop playing the game that this is some other place. This is Croatia. These are your choices now. Negotiate with the Croatian government. Get the best possible package you can.’ To finish, he gave an example from the American Civil War. ‘It went on for five years. There were 600,000 casualties. At the end Lincoln said “It's over”. And he was killed for it. But fortunately his
policies held. Did it end the war? It didn't. But it changed the venue to an academic war, which is still fought today – the media, the flag, Alabama, Dixie … but its not being fought with guns. That's what they have to do here. Get over the killing part of it. Then you can keep arguing.’

Vukovar is much improved since that visit. Many houses have been repaired; you can even walk down some streets and forget there was a war here. In one of the houses near the shore, still in ruins, purple flowers burst from the frame of an upstairs window. Just after the end of hostilities, down on the Danube shore, I saw the Croatian chequerboard flag disintegrating, strand by strand in a strong wind, beating against its own flagpole. Now the Croatian flag droops beside the flags of other nations, unstirred by any patriotic wind. I sit at the table of a smart restaurant on the shore to write my report on the Hadžić arrest. Waiters scurry to and fro with a spring in their step. Yugoslav waiters could once be found all over the world – as ubiquitous and as good at their work as Albanian bakers. The style and elegance, the speed of service, and the dignity with which even the smallest tip is received, go back generations. The cranes stand blue and yellow in Vukovar port. The church towers have been repaired. Vukovar, the castle of a man known as
vuk
, meaning ‘wolf’, has come out of the tunnel of war. Jacques Klein's recipe for peace is being tried out in the kitchens.