{"id":134470,"date":"2015-08-10T10:48:48","date_gmt":"2015-08-10T09:48:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.recom.link\/?p=134470"},"modified":"2015-08-10T10:48:48","modified_gmt":"2015-08-10T09:48:48","slug":"forgotten-in-the-storm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.recom.link\/en\/forgotten-in-the-storm\/","title":{"rendered":"Forgotten In the Storm"},"content":{"rendered":"

20 years have passed since Oluja, but by following the media and listening to the politicians speak, one could easily get the impression that the war has never really ended. And yet the experience of times past tells us that, out of political interest, if nothing else, the passions will wane and the rhetoric become more moderate, while the refugees will be completely forgotten until the next anniversary.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Antonela Riha<\/strong> For RECOM<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In the past couple of days, it has been the exiled Serbs who have been spoken about the least. In the general hypocrisy shrouding the victory celebrations of one side, and the mourning ceremonies of the other, it was once again the politicians who were the loudest, competing over who could demonstrate national solidarity – along with their own personal power – with most passion and pathos.<\/p>\n

It all ended with an exchange of diplomatic demarches between Serbia and Croatia, each accusing the other of provocation and the hate speech, which, during the two day-long commemoration of Oluja <\/em>[\u201cStorm\u201d], could be heard and seen not just in the streets, but also coming from political podiums \u2013 and without a single word being uttered about the much anticipated reconciliation and regional cooperation.<\/p>\n

In this contest of striking statements, it\u2019s hard to choose just one. \u201cWe celebrate the return of our lands and the victory which broke the very spine of Milosevic\u2019s Greater Serbia policies. Oluja<\/em> prevented another genocide\u201d, said Kolinda Grabar Kitarovi\u0107, the President of Croatia, addressing the crowd from the fortress of Knin. To which Tomislav Nikoli\u0107, her Serbian counterpart , responded that the Croats \u201chad fallen so low\u2026 as to celebrate the creation of an Usta\u0161e<\/em> state, recognized only by Hitler\u2026 and to use a military parade to send a message to all the expelled Serbian survivors: don\u2019t come back, or this will happen all over again.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Zagreb, people are scandalized by Vojislav \u0160e\u0161elj\u2019s latest performance. Along with twenty or so of his supporters and unimpeded by the police forces present, he once again burned the Croatian flag in front of the country\u2019s Serbian embassy. In Belgrade, they are embittered by the celebrations in Knin, where tens of thousands of people, including the mayor, Josipa Rimac, sang along with [ultra-nationalist singer] Marko Perkovi\u0107 Tompson, shouting Usta\u0161e <\/em>slogans, and calling for the lynching of Serbs: \u201cWe Croats don\u2019t drink wine, we drink the blood of Knin\u2019s \u010cetniks <\/em>instead\u201c.<\/em><\/p>\n

The whole front page of Zagreb\u2019s Jutarnji list <\/em>daily of August 5th<\/sup> had the words \u201cDays of Pride\u201d printed on it. The following day, Belgrade\u2019s Informer<\/em> used its front page to openly threaten: \u201cWhat would happen if there were a war? \u2013 Croats, you wouldn\u2019t stand a chance\u201d, and then went on to compare the weapons on each side, concluding that \u201cour army was significantly stronger than Croatia\u2019s\u201d.<\/p>\n

This holiday of celebrations in the name of \u201cvictory, gratitude to the motherland and the glory of Oluja\u201d <\/em>has apparently also kicked off the Croatian election campaign, as the HDZ, to the applause of those gathered, unveiled a monument to Franjo Tu\u0111man in Knin, while Prime Minister Zoran Milanovi\u0107 was booed off the stage for having gone through the fiasco of failing to get any of Croatia\u2019s wartime western allies to take part in the military parade held the day before in Zagreb.<\/p>\n

Serbia and Republika Srpska declared the 5th<\/sup> of August a day of mourning \u201cin remembrance of all the killed and exiled Serbs\u201d. Serbia\u2019s Prime Minister Aleksandar Vu\u010di\u0107 and the President of Republika Srpska, Milorad Dodik, then went on to cast wreaths of flowers into the Sava from the bridge in Sremska Ra\u010da. In his speech, the Prime Minister said that \u201cit would take 4,000 pages to record the names of all those exiled or killed, and six days and six nights just to read them out loud\u201d. He continued: \u201cI would like to take this opportunity to ask those celebrating Oluja<\/em> \u2013 why don\u2019t you celebrate for six whole days and nights in remembrance of each person you drove out of their home?\u201d<\/p>\n

With regard to \u2018\u2018remembrance\u2019\u2019, in the Belgrade media we could see images of columns of refugees on tractors, but, on the other hand, nothing to remind us of the fact that those same Serbian refugees were not allowed to enter Belgrade, or that they were housed in dirty industrial warehouses and abandoned motels, far from any human settlement, or that they were being sent to Kosovo in order to \u201cbalance out\u201d its majority Albanian ethnic composition.<\/p>\n

Nor was there any mention of the forced enlistment of refugees that took place in August and September of 1995, when they were being summarily arrested (at group housing centers, busy marketplaces, and even on public buses) and sent off to fight in Bosnia and Croatia. And then, there were certainly no stories of how \u017deljko Ra\u017enatovi\u0107 Arkan abused them at his training camp in Erdut, forcing some of them to bark and to live in doghouses. Thanks to the HLC (which filed claims on their behalf), 721 of them were in the end able to sue the state and win; but the damages awarded were pitiful and miserly. The rest will never get the chance to sue, as all their cases are now well past the statute of limitations.<\/p>\n

In the Belgrade media, one could find only a handful of reports on the lives of returnees to Krajina, or of those of the several families that stayed behind at the Center for Refugees in Krnja\u010da, near Belgrade, and have been surviving day-to-day ever since. Nor is there a single word to be found in the Croatian media about all the rights they have been denied to this day, nor about why they would rather not return to Krajina or Slavonija.<\/p>\n

In Croatia, several NGOs staged a protest against the military parade in Zagreb city center, lighting candles and holding vigil for the victims of Oluja. <\/em>They were constantly exposed to insults because of a sign they used, which read: \u201cThe war is over, now go home\u201d. In the days leading up to Oluja\u2019s<\/em> 20th<\/sup> anniversary, film director Oliver Frlji\u0107 also found himself under fire over his decision to stage a performance piece titled \u201cThe Second War\u201d at Rijeka\u2019s National Theater, involving five women of different nationalities who spoke about their war memories. In the end, the event had to be held under police protection from angry, unsatisfied and aggressive members of \u201cthe Armada\u201d, a Croatian war veterans\u2019 association.<\/p>\n

In Serbia, there were no dissenting voices to be heard in the context of the monolithic, organized expression of sorrow \u2013 not even from the political opposition to the government, which never thought to bring up the question of the responsibility of Serbia\u2019s current leadership for the fate of the missing Serbs from Krajina. There was virtually no one there to remind Tomislav Nikoli\u0107 and Aleksandar Vu\u010di\u0107 of the maps of Greater Serbia they used to wave alongside \u0160e\u0161elj, as they led the Serbs into yet another war. Very few people even noticed that the actual number of casualties of Oluja<\/em> has not been determined to this day.<\/p>\n

Both the Croatian and the Serbian sides agree that, during those two days in August of 1995, more than 200,000 Serbs were driven out of their homes in Krajina. Croatia, however, celebrates the occasion as a war victory, despite the fact that these people from Krajina left their homes without taking up arms or offering any resistance, and without the help of the armies of Slobodan Milo\u0161evi\u0107\u2019s or General Ratko Mladi\u0107\u2019s, both of whomwholeheartedly helped them organize an insurgency against the new Croatian state four years earlier.<\/p>\n

With respect to the number of those killed during Oluja<\/em>, the records differ significantly, depending on the source. The Office of Croatia\u2019s State Attorney went public with the official number of 217 killed, while the Croatian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights alleges 677 cases of civilian deaths. In Serbia, the Veritas NGO claims that the total number of those killed or disappeared during Oluja <\/em>was 1,852, including 1,078 civilians. The state of Serbia has yet to deal officially with recording any of Oluja\u2019s<\/em> casualties.<\/p>\n

20 years have passed since Oluja, <\/em>but by following the media and listening to the politicians speak, one could easily get the impression that the war has never really ended. And yet the experience of times past tells us that, out of political interest, if nothing else, the passions will wane and the rhetoric become more moderate, while the refugees will be completely forgotten until the next anniversary.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The author is a journalist from Belgrade <\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Antonela Riha","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":134471,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[608],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-134470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-recom-exclusives"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nForgotten In the Storm - REKOM ~ KOMRA ~ RECOM<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.recom.link\/en\/forgotten-in-the-storm\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Forgotten In the Storm - REKOM ~ KOMRA ~ RECOM\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Antonela Riha\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.recom.link\/en\/forgotten-in-the-storm\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"REKOM ~ KOMRA ~ RECOM\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/ZaREKOM.PerKOMRA.ForRECOM\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2015-08-10T09:48:48+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.recom.link\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/Antonela-Riha.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"4288\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"2848\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Recom Editor\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@REKOM_KOMRA\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@REKOM_KOMRA\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Recom Editor\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.recom.link\/en\/forgotten-in-the-storm\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.recom.link\/en\/forgotten-in-the-storm\/\",\"name\":\"Forgotten In the Storm - 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