Sladjana, 19, came to Vukovar in search of safety. Her Serb village in Bosnia had been besieged by Croats. Sladjana’s aunt took Sladjana’s family in and recently opened a store, selling soap, toilet paper and cheap booze. A Serb, she was beaten by Croat police, then spent two months in the basement of her Vukovar home, hiding from Serb shell fire. She fumes at Croat leaders for provoking the war: “Fascists, communists, bandits, robbers. If this becomes Croatia again, the Croats will cut our throats!”
Roman Catholic Croats and Eastern Orthodox Serbs have destroyed and desecrated each other’s churches. At Vukovar’s 18th-century baroque Franciscan monastery, red roof tiles lie shattered in the overgrown courtyard. Frescoes are cracked by shrapnel. Garbage reeks. HERE WORKED PLACIDO BELAVIC, THE GREAT CROAT WRITER, HISTORIAN AND PHILOGIST, a plaque at the entrance says. But today it is inhabited by Serb paramilitary men. On my way out, one hands me a postcard-an arch reminder this was once Vukovar’s principal tourist attraction-and never will be again.
In Borovo Naselje, a suburb of Vukovar, many homeowners have daubed SERB HousE on their semi-destroyed houses to ward off looters who sacked Croat dwellings. Stevan Curcija, a 21-yearold Serb student, shows me two semidetached houses: 1 Zrmanjska Street, owned by a Serb family, has been rebuilt; 3 Zrmanjska Street, where Croats used to live, has not. A block away stands a neat pile of bricks. Every day an elderly Serb named Vukicevic comes to pick up the bricks of his bombed-out house, stacking them one by one in the apparent hope of piecing his house back together. Stevan shakes his head: poor, crazy old man.
We visit what’s left of the Brotherhood and Unity school, named after Tito’s policy of reconciling Serbs and Croats after their mutually murderous World War II experience. The playground is mined. Stevan leads me along a mortar-pocked sidewalk into one of his old classrooms. On the chalkboard, Croat troops wrote DEATH To YUGOSERBIA! The Serbs who drove them out have scrawled BERBIA across a chalk map that once read GREATER CROATIA. Could the two groups ever live in peace, as everyone in Vukovar claims they once did? For most Serbs, Stevan says, the answer is no: “They’ve had bad experiences with the Croats in two wars.” I confess the two groups look alike to me. “The difference is just in the church we go to,” Stevan shrugs. Apparently, that’s a lot.
