Waiting For The People To Decide

The scene was quite surrealist: a group of Croatian soldiers were having their photograph taken in front of a wall with the advertisement "Foto Krajina" written in big Cyrillic letters. The place is Okucani, and the time a few days after the swift action by the Croatian army and police after which the entire region of Western Slavonija was placed under the Croatian constitutional-legal order. If it weren't for the great number of soldiers and police celebrating their victory in the center of Okucani with beer, the place would look deserted.

Unlike the first few days, numerous Croatian and foreign journalists have access to the entire area. After turning off the highway to Okucani, and cutting through fields covered with yellow oil rape flowers, the Croatian police will stop you after the demolished tollhouse, take down your data and let you photograph anything you like and talk to anybody you wish to. Okucani does not look like a place in which heavy street fighting took place - the houses are intact, and so are the roofs. Explosions and subsequent cleaning up actions left shattered windows on houses, shops and some pubs in the center.

The efforts of the Croatian authorities at establishing normal life are obvious. A large board has been covered with the blue "Zagreb Bank" logo, while letters spelling out "Beobanka" (Belgrade Bank) can still be seen underneath. The post office is open, and so is the public telephone at the entrance. The Croatian radio program is broadcast from the same studio that used to broadcast the "Serbian Radio Okucani" programs. The wave length is the same - 93.6 MHz.

A young woman who suffers from diabetes does not complain of the way she has been treated. She has remained because she has "nothing to fear, not having hurt anybody". We asked if something was missing from her house. She hesitated before saying that her color television set and cassette recorder had been taken away. The same thing happened to her neighbor. "It isn't important", she said. "Just as long as there's peace, and we don't live in fear."

We looked for Veljko Dzakula, one of the Serb leaders, in the part once held by the Serbs. There are many more people in Gavranica, which is just a hundred odd meters after the bullet scarred Orthodox church, than in Okucani and the villages we passed. An UNCRO vehicle was parked in front of the house and there were several armed soldiers. Two Croatian policemen were also present. We asked them if we could see Dzakula. They said we could and that it depended on Dzakula if he would let us in.

Dzakula invited us to come in. He was in the company of Obrad Ivanovic and former president of the occupied part of Pakrac municipality Miroslav Grozdanic. We asked Dzakula if he was under house arrest. He said no, but that he had been told not to walk around too much. "I know that some people get goose pimples on hearing my name", he said. He told us that the Croatian military action had found him sleeping, and that no one had expected the attack. He described the ensuing panic. Dzakula claims that seven civilians died while fleeing and an undetermined number when the truck in which they tried to get across the Sava River ran into an ambush laid by Croatian police near Seovica. That's all he knows, he has no other facts.

We asked him what he intended to do: to stay and live here or go to Krajina or Serbia. "It depends on what the people here decide," he said. "I'll do what they do. My staying or leaving, if carried out independently, is meaningless."