Fearing that a dangerous little spark of conflict, such as the beating of water polo team members in Zagreb, could ignite a new flame of war in the Balkans, war veterans from ex-Yugoslavia who met last week in Daruvar sent a quiet message to loud politicians to stop manipulating the basest drives of individuals on all sides in the interest of winning votes and remaining in power.
It took a long time to make this type of visit possible, because of pressures, tensions, resistance to dialogue with former enemies. And then, in the midst of the election campaign in Croatia and harsh words exchanged between government representatives of Serbia and Croatia, war veterans from Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia met in Daruvar and visited memorials to Serb and Croat victims from the last war. To the politicians they sent a message that they would do everything in their power to halt the reigniting of a new vicious circle of hatred.
There was nervousness among both hosts and guests. Apart from Serbs and Croats, Bosniaks were also present, thanks to the organisation of the Centre for Nonviolent Action. It was a powerful experience, there was apprehension about what would happen, whether someone would accuse them, insult them as they passed by the police station in Pakrac, which is where the war of the 1990s started. The 40 war veterans from Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, RS visited the memorial to Serb and then to Croat victims, saying their military honour had been defiled by numerous war crimes and that they were not personally responsible for the start or the end of the war, and that the warmongering of the politicians, 20 years after the bloodbath in the countries of the former Yugoslavia, was unacceptable. They sent a message to politicians on all sides to curb their selfishness in their attempts to remain in power. To stop stoking the flames of hatred in order to conceal their inability to economically revive their countries and halt the epidemic of increasing numbers of young people leaving the region.
Serbian veteran Veroljub Smiljković from Kruševac was wounded in Kosovo as a member of the Yugoslav Army (VJ) in 1998. He was 21 when they were ambushed. A serious injury. A spinal lesion, a broken hip, injuries to the stomach. A two-year recovery period, 13 operations. “When I was 22, I got an artificial hip. I can’t feel my leg from the knee down. For some, political talk may just be a matter of getting more votes, but it’s enough to incite others to attack the junior water polo team in the middle of Zagreb, and then we see the consequences of irresponsible politicians. I’d like to see those warmongering politicians in our situation, I’m sure they would not be so quick to evoke the atmosphere of new clashes, when it’s hardly been 20 years since the last war. We would like to send a message to young people to love their homeland and respect others, because when you respect yourself and the other, then you are a patriot,” he says.
The gathered war veterans, former enemies in the trenches, convinced that political posturing will not create a better future, want to be seen standing together to defend peace in the region. “The young guns wanting to get killed, itching for new clashes and fights in the streets, should look at us with experience of war and the severe consequences of what we have lived through. The damage is irreparable. Every state stands to lose with even a single victims, whether someone left dead in the street or someone who leaves the country forever. We don’t want anyone to have to feel what it’s like to be transformed within a fraction of a second from a young man full of life into someone helpless and bedridden,” said Smiljković.
“Oh, the first time I stood on my own two legs after being bedridden for two years. When you’re a kid, you think, a month or five, it’ll be over before you know it. Everyone tries to encourage you, but five months go by and nothing, then there are the complications, the infections. I had to put myself back together block by block, both psychologically and physically before I could get up on my crutches. And today, when I see Vulin uttering warmongering statements, I don’t want to hear silence in response from the people. The masses are silent. No one is saying, we don’t want conflict. And if I had an opportunity to speak to him face to face, I’d ask him, why all the victims on all sides just 20 years ago. ‘Explain it to me,’ I’d say, ‘are we still a strong state, now that we’re losing citizens each day, the disappearing, the braindrain, all the youth are leaving. Do we still have enough people, descendants of those who have survived since the Balkan wars, when all our best and brightest are disappearing. Don’t you politicians understand that losing a single citizen, whether in a traffic accident, a fight in the street or because they leave the country, this is a tragedy for the whole state, because there are few enough of us and we are weak enough as it is.’ I would ask the people, too, whether they want in power those who will do everything to avoid the worse or those who keep rattling sabres. We, war veterans from the region, know only too well what malicious provocation and inflammatory speech brings and how easy it is to ignite the spark of evil,” he said.
When the war started, Željko Špelić from Pakrac, Croatia was 28 years old. Today, he thinks the same he thought then. That it’s wrong for those who have never been there to incite others to war. “We tasted the bitterness. And we understand each other well. Perfectly, in fact. Because, we shot at each other. And we meet here, we who were on the same battlefields, at the same time, looking at each other through cross-hairs.
“We didn’t start or end the war. That was the work of the politicians. I didn’t go to war, the war came to my home. My house was being shelled and my family was in danger. And I defended it. And the politicians on all sides were somewhere safe, far away from these events,” he said.
He does not feel comfortable remembering the war. And he does not want his children to go through what he went through. He is even wary of street fighting and that is why he insists we talk about the veterans’ attempt to sustain peace, to convey their messages to young people not to fall for the provocations of politicians and enter conflicts. “We will not save the world, but we will talk and show people that things can be done differently. The politicians maybe already understand. But they are ambitious, egocentric. They only care about the now. If the warmongering will get them just one more vote, they’ll go for it. None of them care about people staying alive, they just care about staying in power. They are irresponsible and, of course, they only care about themselves. They are now our common enemy, you could say. Even if they do understand, it’s obvious they don’t care what will happen. They think the world begins with them and will end with them. Disastrous Balkan politics. Of course. They crop up all the time, especially around elections,” said Špelić.
He is apprehensive that politicians take every inter-ethnic incident as an opportunity to score points. In 1991, he never thought the war could be the result of petty political squabbles. “And when it had already started, I thought: it will stop, people are smart enough, this is not the Middle Ages. And then one morning it showed up on my doorstep and there was nowhere to go,” he says.
His sister was with the children when five or six mortars were fired at the house. He will never forget the faces of the children. The unspeakable fear that would not even let them cry. “That is more horrific to me than the severed bodies of friends, which is in itself unbearable.”
But now he says, “Today, in this walk through Daruvar, I did not see the war veterans from the other sides as enemies, not for a single moment. I know their intention was never to kill someone’s parents or destroy houses. These were people who at the time thought they were defending someone. Just like us. The politicians manipulated us all very skilfully and here we are now.”
He took the visiting war veterans through Pakrac. He showed them the companies that used to employ 1500 people sitting empty today. In the end, everybody lost. It seems this is still not enough for some politicians. “Our great leaders, past and present, are responsible, who else, for how we live now. We’re not simply stagnating. We are sinking. Going backwards. Our people are leaving. That means that those who are in power, don’t deserve to be in power. They are not cut out for the job they took at the elections. When there are no jobs, when you can’t earn a salary, this means they are not doing their job. And they work to create an atmosphere where it’s normal to beat up someone on the street just because they are of a different ethnicity. The politicians can’t offer us something to live on, so they throw us a bone to fight over,” Željko said.
Đoko Pupčević from Šamac, BiH, RS is convinced that from their comfortable positions, politicians can only think about how to stay in power, some of them cannot do it unless they pit people against each other and incite hatred. “All of us war veterans who have been in the trenches on the different sides call on politicians to adopt responsible policies, to not produce new conflicts, new clashes in the streets, because it’s easy to ignite the spark of war. We want our children everywhere in the region to move freely and live freely, and to never be pushed into a war like we were, because you only get one life,” Pupčević said.
He was 24 when the war started. He was a member of VRS and was disabled at 24. He is permanently damaged by the war. And he does not hate anyone. His thigh bone was blasted, his upper leg, his shin.
“Politicians should stop shaking the sabres and sit at a table for peaceful resolution. They raise tensions before the elections, they only care about their campaigns, they’re trying to scare people into voting for them as if they were the only ones that can help us. They create tension in the streets. And some go for the bait, while most just want to see the economic situation improve. We are now all fighting for our lives, on all sides. Just to survive. Minimal incomes have people barely hanging on,” he said. In 1996, a bomb fell into his trench. “They sutured me live, like a pig. When I opened my eyes, I looked to see if both my legs were on the bed. Many didn’t get to see their legs,” he says.
Recently, he was in Zagreb when the tram tracks whistled. The tram car screeching to a halt. “I threw myself to the ground. I thought I heard a shell. The embarrassment. I blushed in shame when I saw the people gathered around me and when I realised I wasn’t in the trenches, but on the street. War is not a simple matter at all, it is so complicated that you can hardly imagine what a psychological burden it becomes. Yes, I suffer from the postwar syndrome.”
His contempt is reserved for the politicians, but he does not feel hatred towards the war veterans from what used to be the other side. During the recent floods, they called him, him a Serb veteran, a former member of the RS Army, the Bosniak war veterans called to ask if there was anything they could do to help. That same day, a whole bus of them travelled 250 kilometres to come and help him clean his house from the mud brought in by the flood. No politician ever came to visit.
Jasmin Osmakić, a former member of the Army of BiH from Bihać, said, “We were pawns to the politicians. To keep their positions, their places, they don’t shy away from warmongering messages even now. As soon as the elections are over, they calm down, but they’re always heating up tensions among the people. And then kids get beaten in the street. They don’t care about that. They care about scoring points, they think about the war and they don’t understand the war has been over for 20 years, that we are now fighting for cooperation and the economy.” He also suffers from the postwar syndrome. Nightmares, war trauma, everything he went through during the war replaying endlessly in his dreams at night. He was 21 years old. He is haunted by the separation from his family. In the forest, near Bihać. There was a bridge there. They ran through the forest for two nights. Some 6800 women, children. The children crying. Sometime in July 1992. A field, wheat, it was night. There were people crying out from the wheat, in the field. No one dared go get them. “Me and a colleague started pulling them out one by one. Whatever you take them by, the arm slips out of the uniform, you can’t take them by anything to drag them out of the wheat. I managed to get one on my back, I grabbed him by the back of his collar, I dared not tug at any body part, for fear of tearing out a limb. They’re all in pieces. I dragged my friend like that for 350 meters. It took 45 minutes. I knew him from before. He was from my neck of the woods. I remembered how we used to play ball, he’d walk by my house, happy, cheerful, nice, polite. I remembered how just before the war we were sitting on the terrace of a cafe in Kulen Vakuf, when we saw lorries, buses with flags going by headed for an election rally. There we were, Bosniaks and Serbs. We all went to school together. One of us says, this is no good. “If the war starts, I’ll run away.” But, there I was in 1992 and I heard him crying out from the wheat. I couldn’t see a wound anywhere. A bullet may have scraped his head a bit. I had no idea. He had internal bleeding, and he was gone.”
Maybe for some kids, patriotism is standing up all bloodied in the stands of a stadium, he says. But for veterans it’s a clear sign that someone is manipulating them, scoring points, because they can’t fight the economic downfall. “There’s fewer and fewer of us, and we have to make the politicians promote peace, otherwise we will all be gone.”
Tanja Nikolić Đaković
NIN, News Weekly
No. 3429, 15 September 2016