As sad as it may be, an identical article could be written about Operation “Storm” on the occasion of its anniversary every year, because there is no one interested in healing the social and inter-ethnic divide in Croatia, apart from a handful of Serbs who stayed to live there or returned after the exodus. Whether we’re talking about the Croatian state which considers “Storm” its fundamental constitutive fact, putting aside all the crimes, destruction of property and collective looting that took place, as well as legal efforts to make return impossible; or the Serbian state, which holds ever greater mass gatherings, trying to hide the fact that 1995 didn’t just happen, but was preceded by crimes against the Croats and their expulsion from the occupied regions in 1991, the occupation of Vukovar, Sibenik, Zadar, Dubrovnik, Sisak, Petrinja, Karlovac and a large part of Slavonia, and the crazy idea that it is possible to occupy a third of the territory of another country and keep it for good. In addition, the Serbian state didn’t manage to say anything about its own role in that whole story at any of these gatherings.
And precisely because of the unreadiness and lack of political will to overcome the traumas, every praiseworthy attempt to do so, such as the one in 2020, when Boris Milosevic, acting as SDSS’s Deputy Prime Minister, went to Knin, and Defense Minister Tomislav Medved came to the commemoration in Varivode, is simply suppressed, as if it never happened.
However, despite all that, I also feel sorry for those people and regions, regardless of the fact that many of them believed that Belgrade was their capital, and others still search for their happiness with HDZ. Even though some of them left, and others came to live in a burnt country with no perspective. So here are a few lines about what that hinterland of Dalmatia looks like after all these years.
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The year is 2007. In late summer, I participated in the initial cleanup of Stojan Jankovic Tower, in Islam Grcki (lit. Greek Islam). That burnt gem of Venetian architecture, in which Vladan Desnica wrote ‘Winter Vacation’, the Desnica family decided to partially cede to the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb and Zadar, the ministry gave some funds for the restoration, professors and volunteers came, we hang out with the wonderful Desnica family, Uros and Natasa, and it was only the night before our arrival that the village got electricity, but only for public lighting, not individual houses. The water still wasn’t connected, so the few dozen remaining locals and returnees, out of slightly more than two thousand pre-war residents, had to collect water at the spring under the tower.
In contrast to Islam Grcki, which was a predominantly Serbian village, with a few dozen returnees, weeds eating burnt houses and the heavy darkness that hangs over the place in the evening, the neighboring village of Islam Latinski (lit. Latin Islam), predominantly Croatian, which was also burned, but at the beginning of the war, is completely restored and living a normal life, with complete infrastructure and most of its inhabitants back. All of this is a five-minute drive from the Zagreb-Split highway, and less than half an hour to the center of Zadar, where the regular tourist season is happening, without any awareness of the scorched villages in the hinterland.
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Now we are in the second decade of the 21st century. A scientific meeting about the Krka River is being held in Kistanje. In order to get there, we had to drive by every toponym mentioned in Arsen’s unsurpassed song ‘Last Tango in Djevrske’, in which he listed, not by accident, all the abandoned and burned places of Sibenik’s hinterland. The atmosphere is post-apocalyptic, almost identical to that of Islam Grcki. The highway is in a poor state, half the houses are still burnt, some inns are working, but it is evident that time is standing still here. One part of Kistanje is populated by Croats from Janjevo, mostly of a nationalist bent, but SDSS is still in power. I am talking to the mayor, asking him about the nineties, and, at one point, he says to me: “I was here until D-Day”. He was referring to Operation “Storm”, of course, while, at the same time, I was imagining the logs and barricades on the road. Only then did I realize that we had completely different associations about what “D-Day” means.
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Now it’s already 2014 and I am one of the speakers at the celebration of the former Day of the Srb Uprising, after which I went to lunch at one of the returnee families in Cista Mala with Milorad Pupovac and Zoran Pusic. And again, the same thing happens, as in the hinterlands of Zadar. The predominantly Croatian Cista Velika, which is located just across the road and which was burned down in 1991, was completely restored and is a lively place, while the predominantly Serbian Cista Mala, which was burned down in 1995, is still in ruins, with a few dozen returnees and a few renovated houses in which it is apparent nobody lives. And all of this is happening at a place that is literally an entrance to the highway and located only 14 kilometers from the tourist center Vodice.
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On Orthodox Christmas 2017, I came to Knin for the funeral of my ex-wife’s grandmother, whose husband was the mayor of Knin in the eighties and a man who had a hard time bearing what his countrymen decided to do in the early nineties. It was incredibly cold, with a wind blowing from the Dinara mountains. There were only about fifteen of us from Split and maybe as many people who still live in Knin at the funeral. One of them told me these are all the people who still live there throughout the year. The town is deserted and evidently forgotten by everyone, apart from the shiny, oversized Church of the Great Croatian Baptismal Covenant. The entire time, I feel immense sadness and keep wondering how anyone could ever think that Knin could be the center of any state?
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It’s already 2018 and I’m driving from Zagreb on the highway to Sveti Rok, which is closed due to a storm, so I have to continue down the Velebit. At one point, descending towards the still largely burned down Zaton Obrovacki, the place where Luka Modric grew up, I see a lynx on the road, sitting in the middle of the highway and looking lovingly at the moon. The road further descends to the beautiful Obrovac na Zrmanje, a place so desolate, abandoned and neglected, that all the sadness of the world has gathered in it.
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We are now in 2019 and there is another storm. I decided to go to Knin, via the previously unused road through Zelengrad, and drive across completely burnt land all the way to Djevrsak and Knin. Just before Zelengrad, I saw two shepherds and two cows calmly walking along the main road, looking puzzled to see a car on their usual route – more puzzled than I was to see them. The road takes me further through Plavno, which is still largely burned down, and the scene is the same everywhere, only about twenty percent of the houses have been restored, and even fewer have lights burning inside. There is also a monumental Partisan monument with a large SFRY coat of arms on top, next to which I stop to take a photo.
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And finally, the railway. The war has forever stopped the Una railway, despite all attempts to restore traffic on it, so only two trains a day run between Split and Zagreb. And when one passes the mythical Perkovic and goes through those parts, one sees only general desolation and a single window on the now unnecessary auxiliary building of the railway station in Padjeni, with a single shutter hanging from a single hinge, and getting slammed into the stone wall by the wind for a quarter of a century now.
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All of this is happening in the heart of tourism-obsessed Dalmatia, where the price of a square meter in Split does not fall below 3000 euros, and which doesn’t know what do with the sheer number of tourists, no more than an hour’s drive from Zadar, Sibenik and Split, this abandoned terra incognita, abandoned to remain so forever.
Translated by Marijana Simic
Peščanik.net, 10.08.2022.