End of Story

"I hate them, I hate the Ustashi! I hate them a lot! I killed seven of them and I’ve just started," a volunteer from Serbia shouted at a VREME reporter in Vukovar in 1991. He had ammunition belts across his chest, an AK-47 in his hands, a shotgun on his shoulder and a sword taken from the Vukovar museum hanging at his belt.

"We found a tractor trailer full of bodies at the graveyard in Ilok on November 1, 1991," Nenad Canak, drafted by force, recalled. "No one knew who they were but there was woman among the. We buried them in the graveyard."

"Surrounded by people of dubious moral and expert qualities, former criminals," the Croatian government’s envoy in Vukovar wrote to Franjo Tudjman of Tomislav Mercep. "We took control over virtually everything in Vukovar, without refraining from violent and repressive measures over the population - illegal entry into private homes, sending homeless people into those homes, robberies, confiscation of private vehicles, violent arrests and interrogations, even executions".

That is just a small part of what happened in Eastern Slavonia in 1991. It’s hard to list all the things that happened: mass killings at the Ovcara farm, ceaseless shelling, sending civilians into mine fields, night arrests and executions on the Danube and Drava rivers, private jails, robberies, ethnic cleansing, private armies like Arkan’s who were given drafted refugees to train.

"I don’t want to remember, I don’t like talking of it," said a former JNA veteran of the Slavonian front. "I’d like to forget it all, I wish I had never been there."

That is also the general stand in Serbia (both among the authorities and opposition) after January 15 when Croatia established its rule over Eastern Slavonia. No one spoke of protecting Serb children from the Ustashi or claimed that this was Serb territory. If someone insisted the authorities would have said the Erdut and Dayton agreements are something the Serbs have dreamed of for centuries and Vojislav Seselj, who once walked through the ruins of Vukovar in uniform, would repeat that his Radicals would achieve what they feel are the Serb ethnic borders peacefully, once Russia gets back on its feet.

As for professional Serbs they have turned from volunteering other people’s blood to other things. Former Eastern Slavonia chiefs are nowhere really, somewhere between the Hague tribunal and the apartments they bought in Vojvodina. Like Goran Hadzic, they stopped telling the people of Serbia that they would turn them into Serbs again and the rest of the world that Milosevic doesn’t do anything without consulting them. What can they say: their first mentor and commander of the Eastern Slavonia territorial defenses, Serbian police General Radovan Stojicic was killed in a restaurant and the second, Arkan, has traded his gun for a soccer club, petrol stations and folk music.

The main concern in the FRY about the Eastern Slavonia Serbs is whether they will stay there or move out quietly.

In Vukovar and other places after the handover cafes and shops are being closed and their owners are saying they will move out or that they can’t afford the new registration fees.

Many people from Slavonia have taken their moveable assets to Serbia and entire families are moving out without completing emigration formalities and there’s a flood of applications for US, Australian and Canadian visas.

The situation is better in native Serb villages while in others where Serb refugees from other parts of Croatia are housed the prevailing mood is fear. Although the local police have reacted effectively against Croats who forcibly move into houses, there’s no shortage of threats, intimidation and blackmail.

All that is registered by the Serbian media but the effect on the public is nowhere near the excitement over the soccer cup draw when the FRY and Croatia were put into the same qualifying group.

"I was deployed in the Belgrade territorial defense," a former veteran recalled. "After two days of drinking in a barracks near the city, we became the defenders of the Erdut bridge."

It was simple for the regime to send reserves to Eastern Slavonia in 1991, but no longer. The Serbs in Eastern Slavonia were promised FRY citizenship early last year but that hasn’t happened yet. Nothing illustrates the hypocrisy and abuse of the population there as well as that. They were pushed into bloodshed for the sake of the authorities here and now those same authorities don’t want to know about Vukovar.

The handover ceremony in Vukovar can be seen as the formal end of the never declared Serb-Croat war but Vukovar will be a symbol of that bloodshed for a long time to come with retired army officers arguing over how many died there and more movies (not just the two filmed to date in Croatia and the FRY).

To Franjo Tudjman, the peaceful reintegration is a victory which will keep him power for a long time; to Slobodan Milosevic it’s just another deftly concealed defeat which will allow the Hague tribunal and US envoys to disturb him over the Ovcara massacre and the three JNA officers in command in Vukovar.

The original population of Eastern Slavonia, the refugees who took their place and anyone who intends to go there gave up trying to understand why their lives had to be destroyed long ago.