Blueprint of Nations
Welcome to 'Double Helix: Blueprint of Nations,' the podcast where we analyze and look at the events, people and actions that have shaped the nations of our world . From revolutions to treaties, conflicts to triumphs, we explore the historical blueprints that continue to influence the way nations think and act today.
Blueprint of Nations
The Yugoslavian Breakup: Croatia’s Homeland War (Part 5)
Croatia's path to independence was marked by a brutal ethnic conflict that claimed over 20,000 lives and displaced hundreds of thousands, introducing the world to "ethnic cleansing" and challenging assumptions about post-Cold War European civilization.
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This episode contains detailed discussions of warfare, ethnic cleansing and mass executions that some listeners may find deeply disturbing. It is November 18th of 1991. We are in Vukovar, croatia, in the basement of the city hospital, dr Vesna Vozanac makes her final entries in a medical logbook by flashlight. The power has been out for weeks. Above her, the once-proud Baroque building is a shattered skeleton hid by more than 800 artillery shells during the three-month siege. The walls that remain are pockmarked with bullet holes. The roof exists only in memory. Outside, the city that locals once called Little Vienna for its elegant Habsburg architecture is unrecognizable. Row after row of buildings has been reduced to rubble. The water tower once Vukovar's proud landmark, stands damaged but defiant on the horizon. Perhaps the only structure still identifiable is a cityscape that resembles lunar terrain more than European urban centers. We have 420 wounded and no more morphine. Dr Vosinach writes in handwriting made jagged by exhaustion. Last oxygen canister emptied. Yesterday we operate without anesthesia now.
Speaker 1:She's performed surgeries by candlelight for weeks, using hacksaws when surgical tools ran out. A white coat, long sings turn brown with dried blood and the grime of the hospital under siege. In the corridors outside her makeshift office, wounded civilians and Croatian defenders lie on makeshift pallets, some crying, some praying, many eerily silent with a thousand-yard stare of those who've seen too much horror to process. Among them is Marko Zamarsic, the Serbian factory manager whose diary entries we encounter in our previous episodes, who chose to stay when his Croatian wife, anna, took their children to Zagreb. His left leg ends in bandages where his foot used to be taken by a mortar sharpening while he was searching for water. The irony, he tells a nurse changing his dressings, is that the soldier who carried me over here was a serve fighting for Croatia, while the men who fired that mortar include Croats fighting for Serbia. None of it makes sense anymore. The nurse, herself a Serb who chose to remain in Croatian-defended Vukovar, simply nods. Words have become luxury items in a city running out of everything else. From outside comes the sound they've all been dreading the grinding of a tank threat Now unmistakably close. Not the distant percussion of artillery that's been the soundtrack for 87 days, but the immediate mechanical growl of armored vehicles moving down their street. Yugoslav People's Army, the JNA, reinforced by Serbian paramilitaries, has finally broken through the last Croatian defenses.
Speaker 1:Dr Vosenac closes her logbook and stands to address the room. They are coming. She says her voice steady, despite three months with little sleep and less hope. Remember we are medical personnel and these are wounded civilians. We are protected by the Geneva Convention.
Speaker 1:Few in the room seem reassured. They've lived through enough to know the gap between international law and the realities of this new kind of warfare, where the rules that govern conflicts between states seem not to apply to conflicts within them. A nurse clutches a small crucifix. A wounded defender tries, unsuccessfully, to stand, reaching for a weapon that isn't there. Dr Vosenich walks to the door that opens onto a corridor leading to the hospital entrance. Walks to the door that opens onto a corridor leading to the hospital entrance. From there she will walk out to meet J&A officers and negotiate the evacuation of the wounded. A final act of courage in a city whose defense has been nothing. But what she doesn't know, cannot know, is that many of those she's trying to save will be taken from the hospital in the coming hours, transported to a farm in Avkara outside the city and executed. The Vukovar Hospital massacre will become one of the war's most notorious atrocities 264 patients and staff taken from what should have been a place of sanctuary and murder in cold blood. This is the reality of what Croatia came to call its homeland war, the Movinski Rat. Where the lines between military and civilian, between battlefield and neighborhood, between soldier and neighbor, blurred beyond recognition. Where a city under siege became both a strategic objective and a powerful symbol. Where the rules of conventional warfare dissolved into the intimate brutality of neighbors who decided they could no longer live together.
Speaker 1:This is part five of our series on the Yugoslavian breakup Croatia's homeland war. You know how they say you can't understand someone until you walk a mile in their shoes. Well, I'd argue, you can't understand a nation until you've walked through its history, not just the highlight reel or the sanitized version you find in textbooks. I mean really getting into its DNA, those defining moments that shaped everything that came after, those moments where paths were chosen, where decisions were made in palaces and backrooms and city streets that changed the course of millions of lives. I'm your host, paul, and this is Double Helix Blueprint of Nations, where we unravel the genetic code of countries through their most transformative moments. Think of it like ancestry testing, but for entire nations. We dig deep into the historical DNA, finding those crucial moments that made countries who they are today.
Speaker 1:Last time we witnessed Slovenia's relatively clean break from Yugoslavia, a 10-day conflict that claimed 76 lives but established a precedent that Yugoslavia's internal borders could be internationally recognized as new national frontiers. We end it with JNA forces withdrawing from Slovenia and moving south, where a much bloodier conflict was already taking shape in Croatia. Today we're going to explore how Croatia's independence struggle escalated into the first sustained European conflict since World War II, introducing terms like ethnic cleansing into our modern vocabulary and testing international norms about state sovereignty in a post-Cold War world world. Unlike Slovenia's homogeneous population, croatia contained a significant Serbian minority. About 12% of its population concentrated in regions bordering Bosnia and Serbia. For these Serbs, croatian independence wasn't liberation, but instead it was viewed as existential threat, awakening memories of the World War II Ustasi regime that had massacred hundreds of thousands of Serbs.
Speaker 1:When Croatia declared independence along Slovenia on June 25, 1991, it set in motion a conflict that would claim over 20,000 lives, displace hundreds of thousands and destroy centuries of cultural heritage, displays hundreds of thousands and destroys centuries of cultural heritage, but more than that, it established patterns of ethnic separation that would later reach genocidal proportions in Bosnia. To understand this pivotal conflict, we must examine three dimensions that made it unique the siege of Vukovar that became Croatia's symbolic Alamo. The systemic campaign of ethnic cleansing that emptied historically mixed regions, and the international response that ultimately recognized Croatia while failing to protect the citizens of all ethnicities. Let's start with how the conflict in Croatia differed fundamentally from Slovenia's brief war, with how the conflict in Croatia differed fundamentally from Slovenia's brief war, beginning with the tensions that had been building since Croatia's first democratic elections in 1990. It is May of 1990. We are in Zagreb, croatia.
Speaker 1:The mood in the capital following Franjo Tupman's electoral victory combines the euphoria of democratic transitions with the edge of nationalist revival. The new government moves swiftly to replace Yugoslav symbols with Croatian ones, adopt the historical salvica red and white checkerboard of the national emblem and purge state institutions of those deemed insufficiently loyal to the new national project. For many Croats, these changes represent the restoration of national dignity after decades of perceived subordination within Yugoslavia. For the country's Serbian minority, they trigger alarm bells that grow louder with each government decree. Milan Babic, a dentist turned politician who becomes leader of the Croatian Serbs, explains this perception to foreign journalists in his stronghold in Knin. First, they change the flag to one used by fascists who killed our grandparents, and they fire Serbs from police forces. And they call it democracy. When we object, what comes next. We've seen this movie before in 1941. The reference to 1941 is no historical footnote but living memory.
Speaker 1:Many elderly Serbs in Croatia survived the Ustachian regime's concentration camps, like the one at Jesinova, when Croatian nationalists began describing the new state as a fulfillment of a thousand-year dream. That's the same rhetoric used by the World War II fascists. These historical echoes created genuine fear that transcended political manipulation. By August of 1990, this fear had coalesced into organized resistance. The log revolution we described in our previous episodes, where Serbs in the Krajina region blocked roads with fallen trees to prevent Croatian police from asserting control, marked the beginning of territorial separation. Serbian-majority areas established autonomous oblasts that rejected Croatian authority while remaining nominally within Yugoslavia. Jovan Raskovic, a psychiatrist and intellectual who initially led more moderate Serbian resistance, captured the psychological dimension of this separation. Fear is the basic political currency in the Balkans. Once you convince a people, they cannot physically survive under another's rule. Once you convince a people, they cannot physically survive under another's rule. No democratic institution can bridge that gulf. This dynamic, where democratic transition became ethno-national separation, distinguishes the Croatian conflict from Slovenia's exit.
Speaker 1:While Slovenia dealt primarily with federal authorities, croatia faced both the JNA and internal Serbian resistance simultaneously. Their result wasn't just war, but civil war, where frontlines ran through neighborhoods and former neighbors found themselves on opposite sides of the battle lines. The media landscape reflected and amplified this separation. Marija Petrovic, a Croatian, and her neighbor Dragona Nikolic, a Serbian, met at the well that they've shared for decades. Their conversation captures this fracturing information ecosystem. Did you hear about the massacre at Daš Dragona? Asked referring to reports on Belgrade television about Croatian forces killing Serbian civilians. That's not what happened, marija responds. Zagreb TV shows Serb paramilitaries executing Croatian policemen there. Same village, same day, same event, completely different understanding based on ethnically segmented media. This pattern replicated across Croatia and made compromise increasingly impossible. As shared reality dissolved by July of 1991, these tensions erupted into full-scale war.
Speaker 1:The JNA, which had intervened against Slovenia with relative restraint, took a far more aggressive stance in Croatia. No longer merely preserving Yugoslavia, it actively supported Serbian separatism within Croatia, while presenting itself as a neutral peacekeeper. The war's early phase centered on eastern Slavonia, where Serbian-powered militaries often volunteers from Serbia proper, sometimes with criminal backgrounds joined local Serbs to drive out Croatian residents from mixed areas. Towns like Vorovo, selo, daus, erdut became sites of the first systematic ethnic cleansing, a term that would enter international vocabulary through this conflict. But it was Vukovar where this conflict reached its symbolic and humanitarian nadir. The city's three-month siege, from August to November of 1991, represented both military turning points and moral watersheds.
Speaker 1:Located on the Danube River near the Serbian border, vukovar had been among Yugoslavia's most integrated cities Roughly 47% Croatian, 32% Serbian and the remainder Hungarians, ruthenians and other ethnicities. Before the war, its economy centered on the Borobo shoe factory that employed workers across ethnic lines and intermarriage was common enough to be unremarkable. As tensions rose in the summer of 1991, the city's social fabric began unraveling along lines we explored in our previous episode. Cafes segregated informally, neighborhoods became ethnically marked, and suspicion replaced the casual interactions that had characterized mixed communities. When JNA forces surrounded the city in August, many local Serbs faced impossible choices. Some joined the attacking forces, some fled to Serbia and others often those in mixed marriages or with deep local roots chose to remain and defend the city alongside their Croatian neighbors. Goran Nikolic, a Serb who stayed to defend Croatian Vukovar, explained his choice in a letter to his brother who had joined the JNA forces. You ask how I can fight against fellow Serbs. I ask how you can fire on the city where we grew up together. I'm not defending some abstract Croatia. I'm defending our street, our neighbors, our life, before politicians told us we had to choose sides.
Speaker 1:The siege that followed tested both military capability and humanitarian norms. Croatian defenders, numbering only about 1,800 against a JNA force of over 36,000, supported by hundreds of tanks and heavy artillery, conducted a defense that military historians still study for its effectiveness, against overwhelming odds, using a network of cellars, tunnels and ruined buildings, they held out for 87 days, far longer than military logic suggested possible. The human cost was catastrophic. Jna forces employed a strategy of herbicide. The deliberate destruction of urban environments was both military tactic and cultural erasure. Artillery pounded the city day and night, with over 6,500 shells falling on some days. Cultural landmarks like churches, museums and the city's Baroque core were specifically targeted, erasing divisible evidence of Vukobars Austrian and Hungarian heritage that distinguished it from Servian architectural traditions.
Speaker 1:For civilians caught in this maelstrom, daily existence became a struggle for basic survival. Testimonies from survivors described living in basements for months, emerging only at dawn to collect rainwater or forage for food, always tracking the rhythm of shelling that typically intensified in late mornings after J&A gunners had had their breakfast. Slata Kovacevic, a teacher who survived the siege, described this underground existence we became like nocturnal animals, moving at night, when shelling decreased, children forgot what sunlight looked like. We marked birthdays in shelters by drawing cake shapes in the dust and pretending to blow out candles, afraid that real singing might draw sniper fire. The hospital became the siege epicenter, both humanitarian lifeline and, ultimately, side of his war's atrocity both humanitarian lifeline and, ultimately, side of his war's atrocity. Dr Vesna Vosenich, whom we met in our opening scene, managed increasingly impossible medical challenges as supplies dwindled and casualties mounted. Surgeries were performed without anesthesia, antibiotics rationed by likelihood of survival, and medical staff worked shifts that stretched into days without rest.
Speaker 1:It is mid-November of 1991. We are in the basement corridor of the Vukovar Hospital as Croatian defenses finally collapse. The hospital contains over 400 wounded, both soldiers and civilians. International Red Cross representatives had negotiated evacuation with JNA commanders and European community monitors were supposedly en route to oversee the process. What happened instead became emblematic of how thoroughly civilian protections had collapsed.
Speaker 1:On November 20th, when the promised evacuation finally began, jna officers separated men of military age from women, children and the elderly. Against Dr Vosenach's protest, 264 patients and staff were loaded onto buses that took them not to safety but to a farm at Ovkara where they were beaten and executed over several hours. Stretan Milosevich, a JNA reservist who witnessed but did not participate in the killings, later testified it wasn't combat, it was slaughter. Men who couldn't walk were carried to execution. Some were patients with IVs still attached. They begged for their lives, afraid money watches. The paramilitaries just laughed. The Vukovar Hospital massacre represented something beyond conventional war crimes. It was deliberate targeting of those most protected under laws of war. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia would later convict several officers for these killings, but at the time they demonstrated how thoroughly their restraints on violence had dissolved.
Speaker 1:While Vukovar focused international attention on urban siege, an even more systematic campaign was unfolding across rural Croatia, but would soon be recognized as ethnic cleansing. The term itself emerged during this conflict, first used by Serbian politicians to describe their own policy, then adopted by international observers to name a practice that seemed to fall between traditional categories of warfare and genocide. It described the deliberate removal of unwanted ethnic populations through violence, intimidation and destruction of cultural heritage, creating ethnically pure territories through forced demographic change. The pattern was consistent across regions where Serbs established control, particularly in the Krajina region bordering Bosnia and in eastern Slavonia near Serbia proper. First came isolation Roads were blocked, phone lines cut, villages surrounded by checkpoints that separated them from Croatian government territory. Next came intimidation Nationalist symbols painted on Croatian homes, threatening visits from armed men, selective killings of community leaders. Then ultimatums, deadlines for departure often just hours to pack essentials before forced expulsion. Finally, erasure Homes burned after looting, often just hours to pack essentials before forced expulsion. Finally, erasure Homes burned after looting, churches demolished, even cemeteries desecrated to remove evidence of Croatian historical presence.
Speaker 1:The village of Kijevo on the Dalmatian hinterlands exemplifies this process. In August of 1991, after blockading the predominantly Croatian village for weeks, jna forces, supported by local Serbian militia, issued an ultimatum Leave immediately or face artillery bombardment. When residents refused, the shelling began. After forcing evacuation, paramilitaries systematically burned every Croatian home while leaving Servian properties untouched. Churches were dynamited, centuries-old cadastral records destroyed and even grave markers removed or defaced. A Servian militia leader told journalists allowed to visit the smoking ruins. We didn't expel them, we liberated the land. This was always Serbian territory. There were colonizers. This inversion of victim and perpetrator characterized ethnic cleansing rhetoric portraying systematic removal as historical correction rather than a crime. By December of 1991, an estimated 500,000 Croatians had been displaced, some fleeing combat zones voluntarily, others forcibly expelled after conquests.
Speaker 1:The Serbian-controlled Republic of Serbian Krajina that emerged from these conquests was a strange political entity claiming to remain part of Yugoslavia while functioning as an ethnically purified statelet within Croatia's internationally recognized borders. Milan Martic, who emerged as the Krasina's political leader after more moderate voices were sidelined, explained his purpose with chilling clarity. Borders between Serbs and Croats can only be drawn in blood. Once drawn, they must be permanent. We create facts on the ground that no peace agreement can reverse.
Speaker 1:The United Nations proved equally ineffective. Initially Operating under peacekeeping doctrines designed for conflicts between states, it struggled to adapt to wars within internationally recognized borders where consent of all parties, the traditional prerequisite for UN intervention, was surely forthcoming. This international paralysis created a vacuum filled by Germany's unilateral recognition of Croatian independence in December of 1991, followed reluctantly by other European states and eventually the United States. Croatia was recognized as a sovereign over-territory roughly one-third of its landmass that it did not control. The United Nations finally deployed peacekeepers under UN-PROFOR or the United Nations Protection Force, in early 1992, their mandate reflected this contradiction they would monitor ceasefire lines, protect humanitarian deliveries and maintain pink zones between combatants, but they lacked the authority to reverse ethnic cleansing or ensure Croatia's actual control over its territory. The result was what analysts called a frozen conflict, where violence diminished but underlying issues remained unresolved. The Krasina Serbs maintained their separatist entity.
Speaker 1:Croatian authorities planned eventual reintegration by force if necessary, and displaced persons from both communities' language and refugee centers that gradually transformed from emergency shelters to semi-permanent housing. While international diplomacy focused on ceasefires and peace plans, the Tudman government began systematically building military capability for eventual reconquests. This preparation would bear fruit in two major operations the Medak Pocket operation in September of 1993, which tested Croatian military capabilities in a limited offensive, and the much larger Operation Storm in August of 1995, which would finally reintegrate most Serb-controlled territory and trigger another wave of ethnic displacement, this time of Serbs fleeing Croatian forces. Operation Storm represents both Croatia's military triumph and its moral compromise. A massive offensive that restored territorial integrity while perpetuating the cycle of ethnic cleansing that had victimized Croats earlier in the war. Planned for months with tacit American support through private military contractors, storm involved over 130,000 Croatian troops attacking across a 630-kilometer front. Attacking across a 630-kilometer front, the operation's scale and effectiveness demonstrated how thoroughly Croatia had transformed from the disorganized defenders of 1991 to a professional military power. It is August 4, 1995. We are at the front lines of Operation Storm.
Speaker 1:Croatian forces have broken through Kradina's serv defenses with surprising speed, resulting in a mass exodus. Columns of civilians stretching 4 kilometers, fleeing with whatever possessions, could be loaded onto tractors and cars. Within days, an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 Serbs had left Croatia, most never to return. Whether this exodus was spontaneous panic or planned expulsion remains historically contested. Serbian sources point to evidence of deliberate Croatian policy to remove the Serbian population. Croatian narratives emphasize that Kradina leadership organized evacuations before military defeat could become surrender. Like much in this conflict, the truth likely contains elements of both explanations. What is undeniable is that Croatian forces committed significant crimes against those Serbs who remained, particularly elderly villagers, unable or unwilling to flee. The Croatian forces committed significant crimes against those Serbs who remained, particularly elderly villagers, unable or unwilling to flee. Human Rights Watch documented over 400 killings of civilians, thousands of houses burned and widespread looting in the operation's aftermath. The ICTY would later indict Croatian generals for these crimes, though most were eventually acquitted on the most serious of charges.
Speaker 1:President Tutman's speech after Storm's completion reveals the operation's deeper purpose, beyond military victory. We have dealt with these Serbian questions in such a way that they have disappeared from our lands as if they had never been there. This explicit connection between military conquest and demographic engineering epitomized how ethnic cleansing had become normalized strategic policy. The international response to Operation Storm highlighted evolving standards in humanitarian intervention. While condemning specific atrocities, western powers largely accepted the operation's outcome as resolving a frozen conflict that diplomatic efforts had failed to address, establish a precedent that would influence later interventions in Bosnia and in Kosovo, where military force rather than negotiations ultimately determine the outcomes.
Speaker 1:It is worth reflecting on what Croatia's homeland war reveals about conflicts where ethnic identity become the primary organizing principle of violence. The war shatters several post-Cold War illusions that had briefly flourished after communism's collapse. It demonstrated that democratic transitions could accelerate rather than resolve ethnic tensions. When nationalism became the dominant political currency, it showed that modern European societies could revert to brutal identity-based violence, given the right combination of historical grievance, leadership manipulation and security dilemmas. Most disturbingly, it normalized population transfers as conflict resolution strategy. Separating mixed communities into ethnically homogeneous territories emerged as a de facto international policy.
Speaker 1:It is spring of 2002. We are walking the streets of Bukovar A decade after its destruction. The city is slowly rebuilding. The water tower remains damaged, preserved as a war memorial rather than restored to function. The hospital operates again, though many of its staff bear physical and psychological scars from the siege. The Borobo factory, once the economic heart of the region lies largely abandoned, symbolic of how difficult rebuilding social fabric proves compared to physical reconstruction. In what was once a mixed neighborhood near the city center, croatian returnees and remaining Serbs lived in uneasy proximity Separate schools, separate cafes, separate commemorations of the same events, interpreted to incompatible historical narratives. What foreign observers call peaceful coexistence of the same events, interpreted to incompatible historical narratives. What foreign observers call peaceful coexistence? Locals describe more accurately as living apart together Physical proximity without social integration.
Speaker 1:Croatia's war officially ended with the Erdő agreement in 1995. But its consequences continue shaping the region today. The country achieved its independence objectives, gained control of its internationally recognized territory and eventually joined NATO and the European Union. External validations of a successful state-building project. Yet the vision of Croatia that emerged, ethnically homogeneous, historically revisionist about both World War II and the 1990s conflict, defining citizenship through cultural identity rather than civic participation, remained far from the democratic ideal that independence originally promised.
Speaker 1:As Croatian writer Slavenka Draculic observes, we want our national liberation at the cost of our democratic potential. By defining the state in ethnic rather than civic terms, we created a Croatia where one must constantly prove national loyalty rather than simply contribute as a citizen. These tensions between ethnic and civic definitions of nationhood between states built for particular peoples versus people governed by particular states would reach its tragic apex in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where no single ethnic group could claim demographic dominance and where the very concept of exclusive national territory proved impossible without massive population displacement. Next time, on Double Helix, we'll examine how Yugoslavia's most integrated republic became the site of its most devastating conflict, where ethnic cleansing evolved into genocide, where international peacekeeping confronted its fundamental contradictions, where the possibility of diverse peoples sharing common territory faces greatest modern challenge. We'll witness Sarajevo's transformation from Olympic host city to urban battlefield, explore how concentration camps returned to European soil 50 years after the Holocaust, and examine how international intervention ultimately reinforced the very ethnic separations it claimed to oppose Until then. Thank you for listening. We will see you soon.
