by Nick Thorpe
The police stayed on in the village, and Nenad with them. ‘This all looked to me a little bit like a circus. When I see the thief caught on television, with a couple of cartons of cigarettes, there are the special police with their long-barrels, breaking down the doors and everything. But here there was none of that, I told them. But they just smiled at me. “No comment” was all they would say.’
3. The Upper-Middle Danube, from the Fruşka Gora hills in Serbia, across the Hungarian plains to the foot of the Carpathians in Slovakia.
CHAPTER 9
The Black Army
One fortunate morning, when the edge of the sky was tinted by the pink of dawn's blood, when the moon turned its flag around, and the black army rose; when the dawn showed its pink face, and a wound appeared on it like the cut of a sword …
KEMAL PASHA ZADE, poet in the court of SULEIMAN the Magnificent1
THE CLOCK tower in the castle at Petrovaradin, the fortress on the right bank of the Danube in Novi Sad, has four wide faces, so that those on ships passing on the river below can always tell the time. The Danube cuts a long, pensive meander through the city, as though uncertain whether to stop for the night or move on. The little tower reminds me of the lighthouse in Sulina at the start of my journey. The big hand has three white grapes, the little hand two, against the black of the clock. There's a golden globe on the top with a weather vane, but no wind this July day to take the edge off the summer heat. The hands hardly leave a shadow on the faces of the clock.
The fortress on its rocky outcrop was home to the first known settlement, by a Celtic tribe. They were displaced by the Romans, who valued the defensive possibilities of the place. The ‘Petro’ in the name comes from a Byzantine bishop called Peter. In 1526 Suleiman the Magnificent marched with his army to the decisive battle with the Hungarians at Mohács. Taking the town, he told his Grand Vizier Ibrahim, would be ‘like a snack to keep him going before breakfast in Vienna’.2 In fact it was not quite so easy, but when the Turkish soldiers blasted two holes in the walls by attaching mines, resistance crumbled. Five hundred of the defenders were beheaded and three hundred taken into slavery. The criteria for deciding their fate is not known. The Serbs had to wait till 1716 for their revenge, when Damat Ali Pasha was defeated by Prince Eugen of Savoy. He tried to rally his forces with a charge straight into the Austrian ranks. His reckless bravery and death were much like those of Mehmed Köprülü at the battle of Slankomen. Damat Ali did not die on the spot, however, and was carried, mortally wounded, on horseback by his troops to Karlowitz – Sremski Karlovci – and died there. In the garden of the Church of the Lower Town in Sremski Karlovci an enormous white plane tree stands, one of the oldest in Europe, planted exactly three hundred years ago when the church was built. Perhaps Damat Ali the Dauntless breathed his last in its teenage shade. Not to be outdone, the Orthodox seminary nearby boasts a magnificent yew of similar girth and vintage – the plane almost white with age, the yew dark and green and brooding.
Novi Sad is Serbia's second city, proud of edging ahead of Niš in the south, and proud above all of its position, straddling the Danube, a rich modern city, the Birmingham of the Balkans. The heat of summer, the cheap ice-cream and beer, make it lighter and brighter than Belgrade, and the agricultural wealth of the province of Vojvodina makes it the most prosperous in Serbia. In the 1960s and 1970s it became a mecca for the pop-starved youth of eastern Europe. The denim-clad teenagers of Yugoslavia had an easier time of it than those kids of Ruse who had to watch their priceless vinyl records being smashed to pieces by border guards. ‘Yugoslavia became the most powerful rock'n'roll country in the region,’ wrote Vladimir Nedeljković in his book The Danube Girls and Boys.3 Radio Novi Sad had a powerful transmitter that reached across the satellite states of eastern Europe and deep into the Soviet Union. It broadcast first jazz, then beat music. 1964 was the turning point. ‘All over Europe that year, the Baby Boom generation started to build a new world on the ruins of the history and politics of the Second World War, personified by Joseph Stalin in the East and Sir Winston Churchill in the West … The standard of living was high, the country was open, foreign rock magazines were available everywhere … So much lucidity, wisdom and goodness take place only once in a hundred years.’4 By the end of the 1970s, the hippy culture was turning to punk, and Novi Sad had its own band, Pekinska Patka. ‘Nobody had thought like that before them. No one had played like that before them. Nobody had looked like that before them.’
The dreams of the 1960s and the rude rebellion of the 1970s turned sour in the 1990s. Young men fled into exile rather than fight Slobodan Milošević's wars. Many who stayed were killed or wounded on the battlefields of Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. The crowning disaster of the decade came in 1999, when Novi Sad received special attention from NATO. Three bridges over the Danube, the oil refinery and many electricity transformers were hit. The Varadin Bridge, constructed by German prisoners of war in 1946, was the first to fall, just before dawn on 1 April 1999, the seventh day of the air-strikes. Liberty Bridge, the most modern, completed only in 1981, was hit by three missiles on the evening of 3 April. The Žeželj bridge, built in 1961 and named after its architect Branko Žeželj, proved the most resilient. The first missile struck on the night of 20 April, but it needed another direct hit, on the night of the 25th, to knock the last twisted metal supports into the swirling Danube. There is a seventeen-second black-and-white video, posted on YouTube, of the final blow, filmed from a camera in the nose of the missile. The final frame explodes in a fuzz of black-and-white particles. One of the jokes circulating in the city immediately after the bombing was that Novi Sad was the only city in Europe where the river flows over three bridges.
The task of rebuilding began even before the war ended in June 1999. The Serbs wanted the West to pay for the damage, as compensation for ‘the aggression’. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development put up some of the money. Slobodan Milošević arrived at the opening ceremony on the Beska motorway bridge over the Danube. ‘Dear citizens of Novi Sad, dear citizens of Vojvodina, dear bridge builders! The worst eleven weeks since World War II are behind us, in which the most brutal aggression was carried out by the largest military machinery ever created in the world.’ The Beška bridge would be rebuilt within forty days, Milošević promised – the magic forty again – because its building blocks were prepared ‘even while the bombs were still falling’.5 Thirty-nine days later, traffic was rolling over Beška once again. The three bridges in Novi Sad took longer. I sat in a small motor boat filming the ruins of Liberty Bridge a few months after the war. The pilot grew increasingly nervous. The huge chunks of concrete that had fallen into the water created unpredictable whirlpools as the Danube swept over them. We had to cut the engine for me to speak into the camera. Each time I had to repeat my words the danger increased.
Up and down the river, shipping companies fumed about the unexpected interruption to their trade. The United Nations-imposed sanctions against Yugoslavia in the early 1990s had been bad enough, with sudden searches of barges by international monitors looking for oil or weapons. But now the Danube was impassable, at first because of the dangerous debris, and then on account of the temporary pontoon bridge the city authorities threw across the river to reconnect the two halves of their town. For ships to pass, this had to be opened up completely. Once a fortnight, at first, when a long queue of barges had built up, then once a week. The wine exporters of the Ruse region were just one of the injured parties. Sending their wines to their favourite markets in Britain and Scandinavia, by road or rail as opposed to ship, was adding about 20 per cent to the retail price, Danail Nedjelkov, the Bulgarian member of the Danube Commission, told me at the time. That extra cost destroyed the place they had won in the market, which they were never to win back. Wines from Chile, South Africa and California poured into the breach created by cruise missiles.
In 2001, ten years after the Serb–Croat war, I found the whole museum collection from Vukovar in the bas
ement of the Petrovaradin museum. From shards of Neolithic pots to elegant turn-of-the-century oil paintings from the Bauer collection, they became the subject of a bitter dispute between the two countries. The Serbs said the collection had been removed for safekeeping after the siege. The Croats said the items had been looted by Serb soldiers and irregulars when they captured the town and shot the remaining population. Eventually the items were returned.
The Petrovaradin fortress has many treasures of its own: the ossified remains of a wooden Danube long-boat; ancient maps of the Danube which show the wriggling course of the river, rich in islands, before regulation straightened its back and disciplined its elbows in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each successive map seems to have less islands. Evocative names such as ‘war island’ and ‘snail island’ fade from the maps, and from memory. There's an etching of Suleiman the Magnificent in 1526, on his way to victory at the battle of Mohács, and a black-and-white photograph of the Baross paddle steamer.
The twentieth-century history that the new generation wanted to shrug off was particularly heavy in Novi Sad. In January 1942, Hungarian soldiers and police carried out their worst atrocity of the Second World War. In an attempt to discourage partisan activity and scare the local population, several thousand Jews, Serbs and some left-wing Hungarians were rounded up and taken down to the Danube and shot. Their bodies were dumped through holes cut into the ice. When the partisans captured Novi Sad in 1944, they wrought a terrible revenge on the Hungarian population of the city and the surrounding countryside, rounding up and killing several times as many Hungarian civilians. The sad story of both massacres is told in two novels by the Hungarian author Tibor Cseres, both published in the 1960s.6 In June 2013 the presidents of both countries met in the village of Čurug, and apologised for the autrocities of their own countrymen.
The Danube reopened fully to shipping only in 2005, six years after the bridges were destroyed.
Just to the west of Sremski Karlovci, and to the south and west of Novi Sad, the Fruška Gora hills stretch in a thin, sandy-soiled line along the Danube. In any other landscape they might draw little attention, as the highest peaks reach only five hundred metres. But in the broad plains of Vojvodina, Fruška Gora rises like Table Mountain, visible from all directions. I remember crossing the border from Hungary by car, on my way to report on the war in Bosnia, and the relief to the eyes of those hills. A host of monasteries were built here from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, initially with the blessing of the Turks, then with their indifference as they lost more and more of their Balkan possessions. Since Serbia lost Kosovo, with its far more ancient and imposing monasteries, the importance of Fruška Gora as the main, accessible stronghold of the Serbian Orthodox Church has increased.
At Grgeteg monastery, I buy thick, dark honey from hives kept by the monks, and walk into the morning service. A choir of nuns sing like angels, like the young nuns I have heard at Gračanica monastery in Kosovo, and Trebinje in Hercegovina, both places scarred by war. After the morning service, I sit under the cloisters to talk to the aptly named Father Gregor – Grgeteg is from the Serbian form of his name. The church was blessed, he says, in communist times by the relatively benign attitude of the authorities. The monastery nearby, at Vučedol, was used as a prison camp by the Nazis in the Second World War, which helped anchor the church on the side of the anti-fascists, unlike in most other countries of eastern Europe. The Croatian archbishop of Zagreb, Alojzije Stepinac, initially supported the coming to power of the Ustashe, the Croatian fascists, and offered only muted criticism of their crimes during the war.7 He was eventually tried by the communist authorities and sentenced to sixteen years imprisonment. The Vatican responded by making him a cardinal, to Tito's fury. Gregor describes the loss of Kosovo in 2008 as ‘temporary’ – as impossible to bear for the Serbs as the loss of London might be for the English. I drive away from his peaceful oasis of Christian love through fields of tall sunflowers.
The following day, I turn on the radio to discover that the last of the Serbian war criminals on the run, the bearded Goran Hadžić, wanted for his role in the killings in Vukovar, was discovered, hiding just five kilometres from where we sat talking, near the monastery of Krušedol. Hadžić is accused of taking part in the cold-blooded murder of 261 patients and staff from the hospital in Vukovar, who survived the autumn 1991 siege.8
We stop in Ilok for coffee, to reconnect with the green waters of the river. At a café right on the shore, I befriend a young German-Croatian couple, Christian and Daria, who are cycling downriver from Vienna to Belgrade. They have the same bicycle map as mine, and assume we are cyclists too. We compare notes, and in no time my friend and companion on this stretch of the journey Lola (whose real name is Milorad Batinić) persuades them to leave the Danube at Novi Sad, put their bikes in the back of his car, and drive with him to the Adriatic coast. The two cyclists are so happy, so much in love, that they cannot keep their secret for long. A few hours earlier, on the shore of the river, Christian had proposed to Daria. She said yes.
A left turn off the main road to Vukovar, five kilometres before the city, leads past tall trees and outbuildings to Ovčara farm. The farm seems to be prospering. The sheds are packed with grain and the lower buildings filled with pigs. There are vines basking in the heat, and sunflowers and maize growing tall. This is where those taken from Vukovar hospital were killed. Many were patients from the hospital. They included a radio journalist, Siniša Glavašević, whose reports from Vukovar chronicled the siege.9 Some were bludgeoned to death in the hangars; the rest were taken out to a ditch by the road and shot on 20 November 1991. One of the Serb commanding officers, Viktor Šljivančanin, was sentenced to five years in prison by the War Crimes Tribunal. Goran Hadžić was a simple farm worker, accused of taking part in the killings. The white marble sculpture that stands in front of the farm building shows a jumble of body parts and bones. Inside, the floor is made of bullet cases. Photographs of the victims are displayed along the walls in the dark, with lights coming on suddenly to show their faces. There are personal items too – glasses, cigarettes, identity papers. In the centre of the room their names are projected in green light, spiralling downwards, out of sight.
The water tower of Vukovar sprouts over the town, like a tubular mushroom, growing wider at the top. It is my first water tower since Sulina, and while the one serves as the reminder of the kindness of strangers, this one is a symbol of the cruelty of neighbours. And like an old mushroom, bits are falling off it. The tower provided target practice for Serbian gunners besieging the city. It was so large, it was hard not to miss, but their guns and mortars proved incapable of anything more than chewing away at the masonry. The building has been left as a war monument, of a very different kind to the carefully crafted, pinpointed memories of Ovčara farm. It is a monument to the sheer stupidity of war. The door is locked and bolted, but, as I listen at the base, I can hear all the sounds of Vukovar – the passing buses, a child crying, boys playing football, a door slamming. The tower is an echo chamber. Then I distinguish another sound: pigeons cooing, and the sudden beat and flurry of their wings as they circle the dark interior. The doves of peace have taken over Vukovar's war monument.
The city hospital still functions as a hospital, but in the basement there is a museum devoted to its work during the siege. There are bunk beds made up, wax models of nurses, and Siniša Glavašević's young, nervous voice broadcasting the day's news. Screens have been set up with short films about the siege. There is also a hall of mirrors, with glass cases in which candles burn continually. Twelve candles become twelve hundred. My face distorts horribly in the mirror. The effect is powerful, and disturbing. But there is a flavour of war propaganda. I want to know what the Serb soldiers felt, bombing this town. I want to know if they felt any remorse. Who they were, where they went to school, if they knew the people they were attacking. And what they are doing now.
When I hear of Hadžić's arrest, I ring Kristijan Drobin
a, the man in charge of the memorial site at Ovčara farm. ‘Probably the Serbian government felt it was the right moment to arrest him – there must be a political reason, to do so now,’ he says. ‘I'm pleased but I don't know how this will end. Šljivančanin was released on good behaviour after three years. That means he served just eight days in prison for each person who was killed here. They constantly try to minimise what happened at Vukovar, to turn it into a local dispute. But what happened there was ordered by the Serbian government …’
In January 1999 I came to Vukovar on a trip arranged by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). The OSCE were trying to help implement the terms of the Treaty of Erdut, which confirmed Croatian control over the whole region of Eastern Slavonia, seized by the Serbs in 1991. A key provision of Erdut, as with the accords which ended the Bosnian war in 1995, was that everyone had the right to return to their homes – Croats who had fled in 1991, and Serbs who had occupied those houses. The atmosphere was very tense – the remaining Serbs feared they would all be treated as war criminals.10
Jovan Njegić was collecting waste paper to sell. He earnt about eighty-seven dinars – twenty-five Deutschmarks a month – just enough to live on. He used to have a house and two shops. ‘Before the war, we didn't know who was a Serb, who was a Croat here. Fifty per cent of the marriages were mixed.’ He was living with his eighty-nine-year-old mother. He wept as he described taking her down into the cellar to escape the shelling. His wife and daughter went to Zagreb. All he wanted was for them to come back. He took me for a walk down the road, to see his old house. ‘That was it,’ he says, pointing to a gutted ruin, overgrown with bushes. ‘They brought petrol and set fire to it. Look up there – you can see the bathroom! I had a shoe shop here, and a bakery. All built from good materials – just look at these bricks.’ Another man wandered over to where we stood, on the edge of an open air market. It was a man with a beard, which suggested he was a Serb. ‘This is the last Serb territory in Croatia – where shall we go now?’ A Croat in a nearby village, Ivan Prilavić, said he stayed through the war because he couldn't bear to leave his house. What does he think of the Serbs now, I asked. ‘Some were human beings, some were not.’ Wasn't he afraid for his life? ‘The bullet which is meant for me hasn't been made yet,’ he laughed.
