R.K.Kent
From a “special to the Washington Times” (August 11, 2002) sent by Georgie Anne Gayer it would appear that the “savage” Serbs took Vukovar manu militare because this civilized City was “too perfect for the Balkans.” “It was the special vengeance,” she writes, “of the mountain people of the Dinaric Alps” (read “Serbs) “against the cultured and tolerant ‘European’ elites of the valleys and plains” (read Croats). Apart from thus taking the Croats out of the Balkans she is simply parroting the racist ideas which evolved toward the end of the Nineteenth century. These ideas in action led ultimately to the mass extermination of hundreds of thousands of Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia (1941-1944). The cultured elites of the Third Reich did the same thing to the Jews but their Croatian counterparts lacked Teutonic efficiency. The killings of the Serbs were done, for the most part, in the facon artisanale, with bestiality that even shocked some officers of the Wermacht in situ.
The whole scenario served by Gayer is either meant to mislead or else rests on nothing more than historical ignorance. It was not quite the Serb Army (under the banner of the Yugoslav People’s Army) that attacked Croatia but quite the opposite. Let me cite a report of January 1991, some six months before the local war even started. It proposed a secret course of action by Martin Spegel (Croatia’s Minister of Internal Affairs) to his collaborators while the Yugoslav People’s Army was still extant. “We are in a war with (this) army. Should anything happen, kill them all in the streets, in their homes, through hand grenades, fire pistols in their bellies, women, children…We will deal…by butchering.” In fact, the Croatian Army and para-military began, in August 1991, the first post-WWII campaign of “ethnic cleansing,” in Western Slavonia. Their pogrom led to the flight of some 40,000 Serbs, the looting of their properties and destruction of all the local Orthodox Christian Churches.
Vukovar happens to be the capital of Western Salvonia. Its baroque-style Elc
Palace housed the Museum of Vukovar which was used to stage
the war. The Croatian Guard Corps and police took the Museum
over in the summer of 1991, storing weapons and explosives. Mortars and
machine-guns around the palace were turned then on Serb villages across the
Danube as well as against the positions of the Yugoslav People’s Army (already
deserted by its Croat officers and men). One does not have to invent
pseudo-intellectual canards in order to “explain” why Vukovar became the target
of the
as yet “Yugoslav” People’s Army. One could add that hardly a
Serb civilian remained alive in Vukovar under Croat control and torture, using
gym and other equipment, appears to have been commonplace.
Raymond K. Kent, Emeritus
History Department
University of California,
Berkeley, CA. 94720
(510/642-1971)
