Robin Harris, President of COK, was one of the four participants at a round table held in London on the Croatian Disappeared. The other panellists were Dr Gordan Grlić Radman, Croatian Foreign Minister, Dr Mate Granić, Croatian Foreign Minister from 1993 to 2000, and Dr Ana Filko. Dr Harris said:
Wider losses to Croatia
‘I want today to make four connected points.
The first is that the fate of those who are categorised as missing, and are certainly dead, in Croatia’s war of independence should be understood against the background of the wider losses to Croatia. 8147 members of the Croatian armed forces were killed – to which can be added those missing, about whom we shall hear more later, mainly but not wholly from the Vukovar area.
About 6,600 Croatian civilians died because of the war. Far lower than in BiH but a high figure for a small country already facing demographic problems.
On top of which you have war damage. A credible estimate for damage sustained by Croatia is 38 billion euros – including public and private damage.
About 550,000 refugees accommodated
Croatia also coped with a huge refugee problem. In 1991 there were about 550,000 refugees being accommodated. Then there was another wave of Croats and Muslims because of the fighting in Bosnia in 1993. Eventually some international help was received for dealing with the refuges, but not at the start.
As for war damages, not a dinar, not a euro, not a cent, of reparations has been paid by Serbia for the destruction its forces perpetrated.
My second point relates to who was responsible for the war, and specifically for the killings, including these disappearances. It is worth briefly referring to this, because memories fade, and the falsehood that what occurred was a civil war rather than a war of aggression, is once again repeated.
The original aim of the Jugoslav Army (the JNA), according to the plan worked out by Branko Mamula after Tito’s death and entitled jedinstvo (Unity), was to keep Yugoslavia as a single federal state by force. This gradually – and decisively after the so-called Ten-day War in Slovenia in June 1991 – turned into a war to unite within a single Serb dominated state – a truncated Yugoslavia – all those areas in other republics where Serbs constituted a real or relative majority.
Programme of a Greater Serbia could not be achieved without ethnic cleansing
This programme of a Greater Serbia was an old one. But in the 1980s it had been revived by what became the Serbian leadership under Slobodan Milošević. Its most significant expression was the memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 1986. Its strongest proponents – as in the past and in the present – were the leaders of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Its current manifestation is in the concept of Srpski svet, the Serb equivalent of the Greater Russian Russkiy mir.
This programme could not be achieved without changes in boundaries and the ethnic cleansing of non-Serbs. Its counterpart was that if the boundaries were not changed and the ethnic cleansing did not occur, the Serbs would be instructed by their leaders to leave. This is what happened after Operation Storm in Krajina in 1995 and after the Dayton Agreement in BiH in 1996, when the Serbs left Sarajevo.
I give one example. On 1 November – in other words while Vukovar’s agony was reaching its height – Serbian Patriarch Pavle wrote to Lord Carrington, chairman of the Peace Conference on Yugoslavia in the Hague. The patriarch urged respect by the international community for 2 key principles. First, Serbs could not live with Croats – they were allegedly threatened by genocide. Second, some parts of Croatia must therefore be joined to Serbia.
The role of the international community
That brings me to my third point – the role of the international community. As now, we should look at the realities and ignore the play-acting.
The United States always played the decisive role – as now – even when it sought to play no role at all. The US was almost wholly preoccupied by war in the Middle East when the Yugoslav crisis erupted. President Bush was also committed to his doctrine of a New World Order, which assumed collaboration with a democratised and unified Soviet Union. Until August 1991, when Gorbachev was overthrown and the USSR inexorably collapsed, maintaining Yugoslavia intact was also viewed in Washington as the counterpart of maintaining the Soviet Union intact. Neither preoccupation permitted the use of force to punish aggression inside Yugoslavia.
Into this vacuum stepped the absurd Jacques Poos of Luxembourg and declared that now was the “hour of Europe” which alone could resolve the crisis. More significant in practice was the intervention of US Secretary of State James Baker who on a short visit to Yugoslavia in June gave what Belgrade considered a green light to send the Army into Slovenia. That war was a failure. But the JNA had massed forces on the frontier with Croatia, where they would be used in due course.
The Brijuni Summit of 8 July suspended the operation of the earlier declarations of independence by Slovenia and Croatia for three months. This effectively conceded Slovene independence. It also gave the JNA and the Belgrade politicians three months to prepare for the war against Croatia.
Intense lobbying by pro-Serb interests
This war was bound to happen. And the clear intention of the West – and certainly Britain as I was able to judge myself, working closely with Mrs Thatcher – was that Croatia should be crushed. The lobbying by pro-Serb interests was intense. The slanders against Croatia – allegedly a fascist state bent on renewing Croat genocide – were shameless but effective. How much this was a means to an end – the end being that Yugoslavia in some form should remain. How much it was directed against Germany – now regarded as a sinister motivating force that Britain had to resist. How much it became an end in itself – and by 1995 it certainly had become this – justifying previous British mistakes. I do not know. There were certainly elements of all three.
The overall objective of securing a victory by Belgrade over the Croats and later the Bosniaks does not need to be shown on paper. It was the only possible outcome of international policy until 1994. There was a refusal to use force, even air strikes. Crucially, there was a refusal to lift the international arms embargo which meant that Croats and later Bosniaks could not defend themselves.
Although there are important differences between the two cases, we can compare Croatia and Ukraine. When Ukraine was invaded by the Russians, the West supplied arms. When Croatia was invaded by the Serbs, the West tried to prevent the Croats getting any arms at all. Had not President Tuđman authorised the siege of the Yugoslav Army barracks in September which provided Croatian forces with a bare minimum of equipment, Croatia would have been finished, and we would not today be discussing the matter.
Western policy contributed decisively to massacres
This leads to my final point – what happened at Vukovar. And that directly relates to the disappeared victims whose fate we are recalling. Vukovar fell because the defenders did not have enough of the right sort of weapons. That was the direct result of the international arms embargo. Thus, Western policy – British policy particularly – contributed decisively to the massacres that ensued.
From the end of August, the Yugoslav Army began serious attempts to seize the city, which was of crucial significance to the plan to drive through Slavonia and eventually up to Zagreb. On 1 October, the city was cut off from Vinkovci and so from reinforcements. Vukovar was occupied on 18 November. During three months of siege, about 1850 Croatian defenders were killed, as were 1600 civilians, including 86 children.
The horrors did not end there. General Aleksandar Vasiljević, head of the Yugoslav military intelligence, arrived at nearby Negoslavci on 19 November. Listed survivors, many now trapped in the Vukovar hospital, were marked out for liquidation. (These lists almost certainly still exist). Vasiljević, may I add, was never indicted, nor was the JNA leadership, because they were by then the main witnesses in the seriously mishandled Hague trial of Milošević.
Vukovar held out long enough for Croatia to survive
On 20/21 November while the International red Cross joined at one point by international negotiator Cyrus Vance argued with obstructive Serb JNA officers, patients were bundled out of the back of the hospital. They were transported in bus loads to JNA barracks to be beaten, then handed to Serb paramilitaries and Territorial Defence (Teritorijalna odbrana – TO) to be tortured and killed and their bodies buried in Ovčara field. The figure – of just these victims – is about 250.
Just as the international policy – despite its chaotic aspects – is fully comprehensible, so is the policy of the Yugoslav Army and the Serb political leadership. It was to liquidate actual and potential enemies, and in some cases to cover their tracks. At the same time, the brutality, whilst doubtless also pleasing the sadists who inflicted it, was calculated to spread fear far and wide and promote the flight of non-Serbs from the territory which Serbia wished to populate exclusively with Serbs.
Vukovar held out long enough to give the Croatian army time to regroup and Croatia to survive. But for the families of the victims that must be of limited consolation.’
