”Vukovar looked like all the devils were running wild in it, a distant red-hot spot that was falling apart under thundering and shooting,” wrote Alenka Mirkovic-Nadj in her book describing her last view on the town from corn fields through which she escaped two days before rebel Serbs captured it.
For most Croatians, Vukovar is the symbol of the country’s suffering during the 1991-95 war for independence from the former Yugoslavia.
As the second phase of the former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic trial before the UN war crimes court relating to his role in the 1990s wars in Croatia and Bosnia starts on Thursday, it revives wartime memories of those who survived its three-month brutal siege.
This once wealthy provincial town on the border with Serbia, was conquered on November 18, 1991, after being virtually razed to the ground by rebel Serbs and the former Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) who besieged it.
During the Vukovar siege some 1 100 civilians were killed, 4 000 wounded and around 5 000 were taken prisoner in Serbia.
”It was a very personal war, people whom you knew very well, your neighbours, were looking after you,” said the 37-year-old Mirkovic-Nadj, describing the ”death” of the Danube port.
Mirkovic-Nadj, now living in Zagreb, taught at a Vukovar elementary school, but as ethnic tensions were escalating, in June 1991 joined a local daily as a journalist and later the Croatian radio Vukovar. During the siege the radio did not stop broadcasting, although from a basement as thousands of grenades were falling on the town daily.
”I was afraid all the time,” she said describing how Serbs and the JNA attacked the town ”with all they had: planes, canons, tanks, ships on the Danube, even with napalm bombs.”
Before the war, Vukovar Serbs and Croatians lived together sharing each others lives, she said, stressing that she will never understand ”why would someone sacrifice such a good life for someone like Milosevic.”
Milosevic is being tried by the UN war crimes tribunal for war crimes and genocide in the 1990s wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. The first part of the trial dealing with the 1998-99 Serb crackdown on ethnic Albanians in the Serbian province of Kosovo, ended earlier this month.
Milosevic is charged with 10 counts of crimes against humanity concerning Croatia, including charges relating to Vukovar. According to the indictment, after Serb forces captured the town 255 Croatian and non-Serb patients were taken from the town’s hospital, killed on a remote farm and buried in a mass grave.
Radio Vukovar editor-in-chief Sinisa Glavasevic was among those killed at the Ovcara farm.
In 1997, Mirkovic-Nadj published the book ”91.6 MHZ. A voice against guns,” an emotional description of wartime life in the town.
”When I saw Milosevic on the television in The Hague courtroom my stomach knotted,” she said.
”But, what sentence can you hand down to him to make him pay for everything that happened in Vukovar,” she added, while adding; ”it is nice to see him sweat for a change.”
While Mirkovic-Nadj managed to escape through mined corn fields, Stipe Seremet, a Croatian war veteran, was not that lucky.
A day before the town fell, Seremet decided to flee through corn fields along with his seven fellow-soldiers.
”But, we were discovered and surrounded in a village near Vukovar and we had to surrender,” to the JNA troops, he said. ”Members of Serb paramilitary forces howled: Give them to us to slaughter them,” he added.
Seremet’s group was taken to a detention camp in Serbia where he was kept for nine months.
”The destiny of many of those who were kept there with me is still unknown,” he said adding that his brother is among some 600 people from the Vukovar area still listed as missing.
After the war ended, Vukovar and its region were put under UN administration and reintegrated into Croatia in January 1998. – Sapa-AFP