Croatia

Croatia enters the narrative as a question without an easy answer: whether a people may leave a state, and what happens to those who become a minority when it does. As the former Yugoslavia breaks apart, the country’s bid for independence is argued over from a distance, then made brutally concrete by the destruction of Vukovar. Croatia is at once a political claim, a contested home, and a battlefield where neighboring communities are recast as enemies.

Independence and the Serbian minority

At first, Emmanuel Carrère describes listening to debates about the former Yugoslavia without taking a firm position. Many of his friends support Croatian independence on the principle of national self-determination: a nation should not be held in a state by force. Others answer that accepting this principle universally could encourage a seemingly endless succession of separatist claims. They also invoke the historical friendship between France and the Serbs, who had resisted Nazi Germany, and point to the wartime record of Croat support for the Nazis. In one lurid anecdote from Kaputt, a Croatian leader presents a visitor with a basket said to contain the eyes of Serbs, offered by his Ustaše followers. The narrative gives this story as part of the arguments circulating at the time, not as a resolution of the competing claims.

The narrator finds the question of Croatia’s Serbs more persuasive still. They had lived for a long time as a majority and a dominant population within Yugoslavia; independence, if achieved, would leave them a minority in a new Croatian state. Their apprehension was sharpened by the first measures of the government under Franjo Tuđman: Cyrillic signs were banned, Serbs were dismissed from the civil service, and the red-starred flag of the Yugoslav Federation was replaced by the independent state’s red-and-white checkerboard flag. The narrative says that the Germans created the flag in 1941 and that, for people who had lived through World War II, it carried associations comparable to those of the swastika. These details make the dispute more than a contest between an abstract right to independence and its denial: they place the security and status of a resident minority inside the argument.

Carrère stresses that in the first months after the breakup, Croats and Serbs could not simply be sorted into wholly good and wholly bad camps. Propaganda shaped the competing accounts, but he considers it understandable that Serbs in Croatia might fear persecution. That qualified judgment is not a final verdict on the war. It establishes the uncertainty from which the narrative approaches the point at which the destruction of Vukovar makes the conflict harder to view as a distant dispute.

Vukovar and the experience of war

In November 1991, Eduard Limonov is invited to Belgrade for the launch of one of his books. During a signing, uniformed men tell him about a Serb-inhabited enclave at the easternmost tip of Croatia: its inhabitants have rejected Croatian secession and seceded themselves, and fighting has followed. Vukovar, a key city in the conflict, has just fallen. Limonov has other interests, but he is nearing fifty and has never been to war. He accepts an invitation to see it for himself, and his excitement is so intense that he does not sleep that night.

Two officers collect him at dawn and drive him from Belgrade toward the front. The highway between Belgrade and Zagreb, normally a route between the Serbian and Croatian capitals, is marked by roadblocks and checkpoints. Soldiers inspect travelers’ identification while others keep rifles trained on them. Limonov’s Russian identity leads people to assume he is Orthodox and pro-Serbian; his French passport suggests to them that he is Catholic and pro-Croatian. Suspicion eases after he joins in denunciations of Tuđman and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, whom people in Belgrade blame for encouraging European recognition of an independent Croatia. Their exchange, sealed with a drink, gets him moving again toward the distant sound of gunfire and villages still smoking from the fighting.

Vukovar had been taken by Serbian troops two days before Limonov’s visit. Those around him call its capture a liberation, but the city he sees is devastated: the narrator compares it to a smaller Berlin in ruins. When a writer later asks what hotel Limonov stayed in, he does not explain that there are no hotels left, that few houses remain standing, and that none is habitable. The landscape is rubble, twisted metal, and heaps of glass being cleared by bulldozers. Even urinating beside the path is forbidden because of mines. Many bodies have already been removed, but Limonov is taken to a body-identification center.

There he sees tortured, burned and mutilated remains, and soldiers unloading bags of human remains from trucks. When he asks whether the dead are Serbs or Croats, his guide answers that they are Serbs. The answer exposes the guide’s assumption that the war’s victims are Serbs and their torturers Croats, an assumption the setting makes difficult to sustain: Vukovar is a Croatian city annihilated by Serbian—or, as the narrative qualifies it, federal—artillery, and a quarter of its population is missing. Limonov does not conclude that one side is wholly right and the other wholly wrong. He believes that innocent victims, courageous fighters, and unjustly displaced people can be found on both sides, but he also rejects neutrality as cowardice and feels that fate has put him on the Serbian side.

Militias, prisoners, and neighboring communities

The violence in Croatia is also shown through the Serbian militias operating after Vukovar’s surrender. Jean Hatzfeld describes Croatian prisoners gathered in a warehouse after being driven from their cellars during the final attacks. They are nominally under the protection of the People’s Army, which steps aside and lets Arkan’s Tigers decide their fate. The victors and captives often know one another from the same villages and neighborhoods, where they had lived, worked, and drunk together before the war. Their familiarity does not prevent violence; it makes the new division between them more intimate and more stark.

Hatzfeld’s account follows prisoners being forced onto military trucks for destinations they do not know. It also describes the militia’s routine of throat-slitting as an initiation for its members. The narrative attributes these details to Hatzfeld’s reporting, rather than claiming that Limonov witnessed the particular scene. Together, the warehouse and the abandoned city supply two different views of Croatia in wartime: a place of mass destruction, and a social landscape in which former neighbors are made captive and exposed to the power of armed men.

Croatia’s place in the narrative

Croatia’s significance lies in the way the narrative sets competing political explanations against physical consequences. Independence is argued as a right of peoples; Serbian fears are tied to the prospect of becoming a minority and to government measures they experience as threatening. At Vukovar, the word liberation sits beside ruined homes, mines, missing residents, and a center filled with human remains. Neither the language of national self-determination nor the guide’s sharply divided account of victims can contain what the city reveals.

For Limonov, Croatia is also where a long-imagined military brotherhood becomes an immediate experience. He has come because he believes a man ought to know war, and he finds himself drawn to the Serbian camp despite recognizing that suffering and valor are not confined to one side. The place therefore does not settle his uncertainty so much as give it a dangerous direction: he refuses the position of neutral observer, while the destruction around him makes the limits of that choice visible.