What will we do with the facts?
At the beginning of August, 31 years will have passed since the end of Operation Storm, the military-police operation known in Croatian as Oluja. More than three decades later, it remains one of the most sensitive and symbolically significant events in the collective memory of Croatia and Serbia, as well as across the broader post-Yugoslav region. Numerous unresolved questions, disputes, and conflicting interpretations persist in different arenas – from state policies and national narratives to everyday public debate, the media landscape, and political instrumentalization.
In Croatian society today, there is no longer any serious dispute over what Operation Storm meant for the Republic of Croatia. During 1991 and 1992, most of the Croatian and other non-Serb population was expelled from the occupied territories of the so-called Republic of Serbian Krajina, while those who remained were subjected almost daily to violence, looting, intimidation, verbal and physical abuse, sexual violence, forced removals, and killings.
Numerous crimes were committed against Croatian civilians in those areas, but also against citizens of Serbian ethnicity who refused to support a policy of violence and tried to protect their Croatian neighbors. Among the gravest crimes were those committed in Škabrnja, Nadin, Promina, Saborsko, Lipovača, Vuković, Poljanak, the hamlet of Gornji Marinovići in the village of Bruška near Benkovac, as well as many others in which large numbers of civilians were killed. After years of war and failed attempts to reach a political solution, Operation Storm constituted a legitimate military-police operation through which the territorial integrity and constitutional and legal order of the Republic of Croatia were restored. At the same time, during and after the operation, individual members of Croatian units committed war crimes against some of the Serb civilians who remained, despite public guarantees of their safety issued at the highest levels of government.
For many of those crimes, justice remains out of reach even more than three decades later, particularly when it comes to the criminal prosecution of those responsible and public acknowledgment of the victims’ suffering. Part of the reason lies in the mistaken belief that continues to burden public discourse: that acknowledging these crimes necessarily means criminalizing the operation itself or calling its significance into question. The opposite is true. The ability to draw a clear distinction between legitimate military objectives and war crimes is one of the fundamental characteristics of a democratic state founded on the rule of law. A mature and democratic society does not choose between these two facts; it is capable of accepting both at the same time.
Across Croatia, during those scorching days of August, people celebrate the military victory and the end of the war. Not far away, in Serbia and Republika Srpska in Bosnia and Herzegovina, commemorations are held at almost the same time to mark a national tragedy, with Operation Storm most often described in official political discourse as “the largest ethnic cleansing in Europe since World War II.” Between these two completely different forms of remembrance are civilian victims whose fates have increasingly become the subject of political interpretation over the years.
Their personal tragedies are turned into a means of shaping national identities while sustaining political divisions. In Serbia, the victims of Operation Storm are often placed in the service of day-to-day politics and a narrative of collective national victimhood that frequently takes on the characteristics of mythologized victimology. In such an approach, individual human destinies often remain overshadowed by political messaging, while questions concerning missing persons, the individual circumstances of people’s deaths, or the realization of the rights of surviving family members remain insufficiently visible. Among them are those who continue to fight today for recognition as civilian victims under the Law on Civilian Victims of the Homeland War (NN 84/21) as well as those who are still waiting for answers about the fate of their loved ones. On the other hand, in Croatia there is an almost complete absence of public and institutional recognition of Serb civilian victims who were killed during and after Operation Storm.
Over time, this silence has become an integral part of official commemorative practices. Their suffering is treated as less worthy of public remembrance, or it is left unspoken so as not to disturb a pre-established image of the past. At the same time, numerous war crimes committed during and after Operation Storm still have not received an adequate judicial resolution, despite the Republic of Croatia’s obligation to investigate and prosecute them effectively. Particularly troubling is the fact that the acquittal of Croatian generals Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markač continues to be wrongly interpreted by parts of the public as confirmation that no war crimes were committed during or after Operation Storm.
The Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia reached no such conclusion. On the contrary, the judgment clearly distinguishes between the question of whether crimes were committed and the question of the individual criminal responsibility of the Croatian generals. In other words, the Appeals Chamber did not conclude that no crimes had occurred, but rather that it had not been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markač were criminally responsible for them in the manner alleged by the Prosecution. The acquittal therefore did not erase the crimes that were committed, nor did it absolve their direct perpetrators of responsibility. Precisely because the responsibility of the highest-ranking commanders was not established, it is all the more important for the state to effectively investigate, prosecute, and publicly acknowledge the individual crimes committed against civilians during and after Operation Storm. There is no place for these victims at official commemorations, as though their suffering did not belong to the collective memory of the Republic of Croatia.
Bearing in mind the diametrically opposed ways in which Operation Storm is commemorated in Croatia and Serbia, the question arises whether we can realistically expect the process of mutual recognition of suffering to continue, along with the development of an inclusive culture of remembrance and the building of trust and sustainable peace.
That question takes on particular significance if we consider that, only a few years ago, there was a political moment in which great hopes were invested. The participation of Deputy Prime Minister Boris Milošević in the 2020 commemoration of Operation Storm in Knin, as well as the commemoration in Grubori attended jointly by victims’ family members, representatives of the Serb community, President Zoran Milanović, and Minister of Croatian Veterans Tomo Medved, represented an important step forward toward a policy of mutual recognition of suffering. We also remember Prime Minister Andrej Plenković’s visit to Varivode together with Boris Milošević and Milorad Pupovac, as well as the tribute paid to Croatian victims in Škabrnja by representatives of the Serb community. It is worth recalling that in Varivode, where elderly Serb civilians were killed on September 28, 1995, a month and a half after Operation Storm, Prime Minister Plenković said at the 2020 commemoration: “As Prime Minister of Croatia, I deeply regret what happened and, on behalf of the Government, I offer my condolences here to the members of your families whose lives the Croatian state unfortunately failed to protect…”
That momentum was not limited to 2020 but continued into 2021 through joint commemorations. At those moments, it seemed that, for the first time since the end of the war, a more inclusive culture of remembrance had a chance to grow from symbolic gestures into a more consistent public policy. Precisely for that reason, the fact that the process did not achieve the expected continuity now leaves an even stronger sense of a missed opportunity. As early as 2022, and particularly 2023, representatives of the Independent Democratic Serb Party (SDSS), including then-Deputy Prime Minister Anja Šimpraga, were prevented from taking part in commemorations in Vukovar and Škabrnja amid threats of physical violence. This brought to an end a political process that had nevertheless demonstrated that mutual recognition of suffering is not unattainable, but achievable and possible.
But let us take a step back. This brings us to a question that should form the basis of any serious discussion of the past and its traumatic periods, stripped of political manipulation, exclusionary thinking, and emotional reflexes: what will we do with the facts that have been established over the years through research, court proceedings, and the long-term work of organizations documenting human losses and human rights violations?
This painstaking, long-term, and often thankless work, which should long ago have been carried out by the institutions of the Republic of Croatia, including those established for precisely that purpose, has largely been left to civil society organizations. Instead of their work being recognized as a valuable contribution to understanding the past, they have for years been subjected to continuous attempts to discredit them precisely because they insisted on the facts, regardless of whose position those facts supported. It is worth recalling that in January 2026, Most MP Zvonimir Troskot stated:
“In our country, Documenta and RECOM fall under Antifa, and they have gone the furthest in criminalizing the Homeland War…,” after which he asked: “When will the Government submit a proposal to Parliament to have these organizations and their conduct declared terrorist organizations?” Such statements are disturbing not only because they come from a member of parliament who wields public and political power, but also because of the political rhetoric they generate. More importantly, they show how easily efforts to confront the past can be branded as hostile acts when their findings do not align with dominant national narratives or short-term political interests.
For that reason, it is worth recalling the foundation of the human loss research conducted by Documenta – the Center for Dealing with the Past in Zagreb, as part of which, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of Operation Storm in 2025, the results of the study Human Losses in Croatia, 1991–1995 – Operation “Storm” and Its Aftermath were published. The fundamental principle of the research is equal treatment of all persons killed or missing, regardless of their nationality, ethnicity, or military or civilian status. The criterion is not the victim’s identity, but the fact that the person lived or was killed within the territory of the Republic of Croatia.
For each individual, as many mutually independent sources as possible are collected and compared – from official documentation and court records to civil registry records, field interviews, testimony from family members, and other relevant archival sources. A victim is considered confirmed only when their identity and the circumstances of their death are corroborated by at least three independent sources, while individuals for whom that level of confirmation is unavailable are classified as partially confirmed or unconfirmed. This methodology is important because it prevents arbitrary manipulation of the numbers and identities of victims and returns the discussion to where it should have been from the outset – to verifiable facts.
According to the research results available so far, the list includes 1,170 civilians and 918 members of the armed forces and encompasses victims of different nationalities. The research is not limited solely to the period during which Operation Storm was carried out but also includes deaths that occurred after the military operations had ended. Of the total number of confirmed and partially confirmed victims, 1,791 were killed in the period encompassing Operation Storm itself, from August 4 to 9, 1995, while another 286 were killed by September 28, 1995, clearly showing that human losses did not end with the conclusion of military operations.
The research timeframe was expanded in order to include the military actions and events that preceded and followed Operation Storm and to allow the events to be viewed in their broader context. At the same time, the research faces limited access to sources and inconsistencies in their quality, which means that in some cases it is not always possible to determine the timing of a person’s death with certainty. For that reason, the numbers alone cannot provide a complete picture of the human losses. Each recorded victim died in specific circumstances that need to be examined individually and on the basis of verifiable facts. This is precisely why the research is based on documenting each person by name, rather than merely establishing the total number of people killed. The complete table containing the names of the victims, along with information on their identity, nationality, status, place and circumstances of death, degree of confirmation, and the classifications used, is available here: Documenting Human Losses in Croatia, 1991–1995 – Operation Storm and Its Aftermath (PDF)
What is particularly troubling today is that many crimes against civilians are barely discussed at all in Croatian public discourse. No one expects them to become a central part of commemorations and celebrations marking the end of the war or Operation Storm, but the very least we owe the victims is consistency in acknowledging the facts and a sense of reverence that shows we are capable, as a society, of empathizing with all civilian victims, regardless of their nationality.
It is therefore worth recalling the victims and crimes that are rarely, if ever, mentioned in public discourse. In Grubori, for example, six civilians were killed, among them Miloš Grubor, born in 1915, who was shot dead by Croatian soldiers in his village on August 25, 1995. Nor are the victims in Prokljan often mentioned, including Milica Damjanić (1921), who was killed and then burned in front of her family home. There were also crimes committed in Kistanje, Laškovci, and Dobropoljci. Among the forgotten victims are Draginja Agić (1931) from Umetić, killed on August 7, 1995; Ilija Božić (1920) from Ostojići, killed in his own home; Bogdan Bajlović (1937) from Luščani, who died as a result of a beating; Borislav Bašić (1927) from Živaja, who was ill and had limited mobility; Stevo Brajenović (1924) from Šakanlije; and Danica Bulat (1930), killed between Klasnić and Brezovo Polje during the retreat. Particularly harrowing is the fate of Petar Dobrić and his twelve-year-old grandson Siniša, who were killed by sniper fire in the Zelenik forest near Slovinci.
In Mokro Polje, at least nine civilians were killed, among them Sava Babić (1913), whom UN observers found dead in a passenger vehicle in front of her house on September 4, 1995. She had three gunshot wounds to the head and two gunshot wounds to the chest. In Gošić and Varivode, almost two months after the end of Operation Storm, sixteen civilians who had decided to remain in their homes were killed – seven in Gošić in late August and nine in Varivode in late September 1995. In Golubić and Radljevac, at least eighteen civilians were killed, among them Glišo Čučak, born in 1934, who was killed in the hamlet of Čučci. Ilinka Dondur (1930) and Vera Dondur (1939) had taken shelter in the basement of a house in Žagrović. They came out after being called by Croatian soldiers, but both were then killed. They were killed on the doorstep of the family home at Bulina Strana BB on August 5, 1995.
Many victims are still listed as missing to this day. Ljuban Durman, born in 1926, and Milan Durman, born in 1908, were last seen in their own home in Paukovac on August 9, 1995. Both are still officially listed as missing persons. Milka Dmitrović disappeared from her home in Bojna, Pero Berić from his family home in Gvozdansko, and Dragan Davorija was last seen in the Vratnik area near Veliki Šušnjar. For decades, there have been no answers about their fates, just as there have been no answers about the fates of many other missing persons whose families have lived with uncertainty for years. Equally rarely discussed is the crime in Deringaj, where the dead and missing included eighty-year-old Milka Mika Milovanović, as well as the killings in Biovičino Selo, where at least five civilians were killed.
Therefore, instead of a conclusion, what remain are questions that go beyond day-to-day politics and concern our relationship with human dignity and humanity: where are these victims in our public space today? Where are their names, their life stories, and their families? If we remember them only in passing, or not at all, can we truly speak of a society that is prepared to confront its own past? What kind of image of the past are we actually defending? Facts alone cannot change what happened, but they can change the way we remember the past. And it is precisely on that that the kind of society we will become in the future depends.
Jurica Vitković (1995) holds a degree in cultural studies and works at Documenta – Center for Dealing with the Past.
DwP, 07.08.2026.
Translated by Bogdan Petrović
Peščanik.net, 08.08.2026.