Introduction
The three month siege of Vukovar, in the autumn of 1991, when an average of 5,000 shells a day landed on the city, set a pattern for events in the former Yugoslavia. We are living with that pattern still. And yet, strangely, the world appears to have forgotten what occurred there. The heavy toll suffered by Sarajevo does not compare with the fate of this city. Only the siege of Mostar, two years later, comes close to reproducing the same total misery and destruction (although even there the world concentrated most of its attention on the collapse of Mostar’s historic bridge). It is timely and salutary to recall the sheer horror of the underground existence endured by so many, while, above them, buildings were being pulverized.
A year after the fall of Vukovar, I saw the shattered remnants of the city from a helicopter. It was an awe-inspiring sight. I had not seen anything remotely like it since I returned to my home city of Plymouth at the age of six and walked amid the rubble of the Blitz. I will never forget Vukovar; I certainly could not forget it during the later discussions about the heavy artillery positions that ringed Sarajevo. As no military adviser ever believed that we could successfully take out the majority of these artillery positions from the air, the question remained: how would the Serbs respond if we went ahead with the air-strikes anyway? I used to invoke the famous saying of Aneurin Bevan: ‘Why look in the crystal ball when you can read the book?’ Vukovar had shown us how the Serbs would react: if there had been air-strikes, I never doubted that there would be a pounding of Sarajevo that would more than match anything we had seen.
Historians will long argue about the exact origins of the war between the Serbs and Croats that started the break-up of Yugoslavia. Unlike the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where the politicians had, and continue to have, a major role in the conflict that ensued, the Serbo-Croat war has been a peculiar one between generals of what was once the same army–the Federal Army of Yugoslavia. The siege of Vukovar became proxy for fighting for Zagreb and Belgrade. Within weeks, the people became engaged as their different television stations evoked all the hatreds of the civil war that had torn up Yugoslavia during the Second World War. The Croats, according to Serbian television, were fascist Ustashe; the Serbs, according to Croatian television, were royalist Chetniks.
So many terrible precedents were established here. The siege as a bargaining tool was one. This was the time when the various Federal Army barracks were surrounded by Croat forces. General Kadijevic, the defence minister of the Federal Army, made it clear that, if his soldiers were released, the siege of Vukovar would stop. Civilians, too, became bargaining tools, despite the protests of the International Red Cross. We also now know that the hospital patients at Vukovar were taken away when the siege ended and never seen alive again. A forensic investigation into a mass grave is being conducted as I write.
What would have happened had President Bush authorized the United States, as a member of NATO, to intervene to stop the bombardment of Vukovar? We will never know. But at the time, a critical military threshold was not crossed. It’s possible that had that occurred, then the shelling of Vukovar would have been curtailed. There would never have been the same siege of Mostar. Or of Sarajevo.
