Practice and Discourse about Practice: Returning Home to the Croatian Basin Maja Povrzanovic Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb

Introductory remarks: scope and context

When gained European Union recognition in early 1992, a United Nations- brokered cease-fire was in place which left one third of the Republic not under the control of the Croatian government. At the same time, more than 15% of Croatian citizens (approximately 700,000 people) were registered as displaced persons (cf. Rebic 1995:16). In this paper I focus on the situation in the Croatian Danube basin (encompassing Eastern , Baranja and Western Srijem) which is the border region to , in late 1997. It remained a United Nations Protected Area until January 15, 1998, when it was reintegrated into Croatia under the terms of the agreement (signed on November 12, 1995). Over 80.000 people who fled in 1991 are meant to return to that area, mainly ethnic but also and . According to the internationally negotiated Plan for Peaceful Reintegration, they are supposed to re-start living with their Serbian neighbors whom they perceive as having supported Serbian aggression. This is a general attitude, although the experiences varied in different places. There were who helped the Croatian neighbors to save their lifes and belongings. However, there were also many Serbs who engaged in the military acts against their Croatian neighbors. Many Croats who lost their relatives and had to flee their homes due to Serbian aggression had problems in accepting the Amnesty Law that allows the local Serbs who took part in military actions against Croatia but are not accused of war crimes, to resettle (if they fled) or continue to live in Croatia.1 Sociological surveys show that one half of the displaced Croats from the Croatian Danube basin agree with the Plan for Peaceful Reintegration (cf. Drustvena istrazivanja 1997, esp. Sakic et al. 1997) and believe it could solve their current problems. One third disagrees with the Plan but still want to return home or intend to return for not having an alternative option.

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This paper was written in October 1997 (and presented at at the panel "'Coming Home?' Encounters Between Refugees, Immigrants and Those Who Stayed Behind", AAA 96th Annual Meeting, Washington, DC, November 19-23, 1997). Therefore, the subsequent events in the Croatian Danube basin -- after January 15, 1998 when UNTAES (United Nations Transitional Administration in Eastern Slavonia) ended its mission -- are not taken into consideration. Namely, several Croatian journals (e.g. Globus of March 13, 1998, and Nacional of March 11, 1998) report on the new asylum-seekers in Norway -- Croatian citizens from the region (mostly from ) who claim to have felt insecure since January 15, 1998, or even to have been harassed because they are Serbs. Since this paper is not an ethnography of the complex and troublesome process of home- return of the refugees from the Croatian Danube basin, it does not offer insights about the attitudes of either the returnees or those who feel threatened or are threatened by their return. The scope of this paper is to show how the ideology of "establishing trust" is used to overcome the inadequacy of the practice of return in the public discourse. This ideology is established by neglecting the psychological problems framing the actual practice of return. The clefts between the media-promoted images of the people victimized by military violence and their lived experiences in war (cf. Povrzanovic 1997) and exile (cf. Povrzanovic & Jambresic Kirin 1996) are also present in their return home. In the following sections, some examples of public discourse on home-return to the Croatian Danube basin in 1997 are discussed: they serve as a model for areality that is yet to be established. In the concluding section, the emotional and broader cultural aspects of the supposed coexistence of people who until only recently were mutually perceived as war enemies are brought to the fore.

The prospects of return: discourse vs. practice

Anthropological and sociological literature on refugees shows that younger and more educated people -- especially if they get a regular job -- tend to stay in the new environment. It is frequently reported that the children of migrants' as well as the refugees' often want to remain in the new settlement. This is also true for Croatian displaced persons (i.e. internal refugees). Still, the vast majority express the wish to return home. Croatian and UN politicians repeatedly make public statements about the home-return of all the refugees from the Croatian Danube

109 basin being their primary concern. Indeed, home-return of the refugees in Croatia became an optimistic theme place of the refugees' narratives, and of the Croatian and international political discourse alike. The wish to return is certainly to be differentiated from the possibility of return. The majority of homes in the Croatian Danube basin are either heavily damaged or inhabited by the Serbs who fled some other Serb-held parts of Croatia when they were reconquered by military force in 1995, as well as due to the mines that already have killed a number of returnees.2 The wish to return is also to be differentiated from the actual intention to return (for detailed data see Jelkic 1997), especially in the context of the Plan for Peaceful Reintegration widely perceived by the displaced Croats as forced upon the Croatian government by the international community.3 According to a recent sociological investigation of attitudes regarding home-return of the Croats from the Croatian Danube basin (cf. Drustvena istrazivanja 1997), the Plan for Peaceful Reintegration is also perceived as being unjust towards the Croats from the region. It is seen by the displaced Croats as designed to protect the Serbs in the Croatian Danube basin -- not only as members of a national minority, but also by allowing the Serbs who settled there since the beginning of the war in 1991, to stay. That the first 68 Croatian families have been given the keys to their renovated flats in two block-houses in Vukovar (on October 28, 1997) could be perceived as of somewhat lesser importance that the one ascribed to it by the European commissioner who joined the festive occasion. He wished the Croatian representatives (and -- according to the media reports -- not the residents!) a successful and peaceful reintegration process, and hoped that it will be "the new symbol of reintegration of the communities in Croatia and an excellent example to other countries that want to overcome the remains of the past" (Vecernjilist of Oct. 29, 1997, p.7; Croatian Radio quoted him saying that it "must become a symbol..."). In the context of yet another thirteen mass graves from 1991 to be uncovered in Vukovar area, and the still not concluded procedure of identification of the 200 wounded Croatian soldiers and civilians who were dragged out of Vukovar hospital and killed after the fall of the town in November 1991 (their bodies have been excavated from a mass-grave, but due to the difficulties in identification almost half of them were legally still regarded as "missing" in late 1997) the definition of "the

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remains of the past" becomes controversial, proving the Nordstrom and Martin’s (1992) thesis on different coexisting field realities.4 In early September 1997, a Croatian daily (Vecernjilist of Sept. 9, 1997, p.2) reported on the piece of paper that was attached to the board placed at the entrance of a school in Vukovar with the name of the school written in Cyrillic script, used by the Serbs,5 with "I hate Croats" added in handwriting. It happened on the day of the visit of the Croatian minister of education. The local Serbian representatives did not come to listen to her speech. The Serbian teachers present (although -- as pointed out by the journalist -- accepting their salaries from the Croatian state) sat with their backs turned to her. On the other hand, only a few days earlier in Zagreb, several hundreds of Croatian teachers met the minister of education who threatened by firing those who don't want to return to the Danube region. The teachers (as reported by Vecernji list of Sept. 9, 1997, p.2 and Vjesnik of the same date, p.6) complained about several of their Serbian colleagues being appointed school directors, "who in the former state did not want to write a single letter in Latin script" (which is used by Croats).6 While international diplomacy is all about negotiating various political solutions, the returning Croats and the remaining Serbs in the Croatian Danube basin often have their respective non-negotiable goals which are not set in the frame of real political efficacy but of symbolic efficacy. Neither of the groups refuses to compromise with political institutions, but they address forms of symbolic relation non reducible to instrumental logic (cf. Melucci 1996, 359). The less capacity for action, which means the less strength for politically autonomous decisions (among Serbs and Croats living in the region), the greater -- but also the more basic and the more predictable – is the production of, or the need for the already existing symbols. For example, on October 14, 1997, the Croats walked out of the meeting of the Vukovar City council because the Serbian national flag was exposed together with the Croatian flag. UNTAES confirmed that both flags should be present. A month earlier, in Borovo Selo, the board with the Croatian coat of arms on the municipality building, although in two languages and two scripts, was damaged (Vecernjilist, Sept. 2, 1997, p.2).7 In September 1997, the UNTAES proposed that the Day of National Reconciliation should be celebrated in Croatia on the anniversary of the signing of the Basic Agreement on peaceful reintergration (Vecernji list of Sept. 10, 1997, p.2). In the course of just two days, the

111 stunned and sarcastic journalist’s comment on the idea of the Day of National Reconciliation (in Vjesnik of Sept. 3, 1997, p.4) was replaced by an approving comment in the same daily (of Sept. 4, 1997, p.5) with the Croatian representative's statement that "the Croatian government doesn't have anything against the celebration of that day, but for us it will also be a day of return" (Vecernji list of Sept. 3, 1997, p.2). A month later (on October 28, 1997), the same representative -- who happens to be the chairperson of the National Committee for Reconciliation -- was stopped and verbally attacked by several Serbs carrying guns and shouting: "This is not Croatia! The Croats will have to leave Vukovar!". She was on her way to the first meeting of the Committee for the Realization of Reconciliation in the Town of Vukovar (Vecrnji list of Oct. 29, 1997, p.2). On the same newspaper page that report on this incident was a story entitled "The Attack on the Undetainable." It was an overly optimistic account of the very first Croats returning to Vukovar, the ones who were given the keys to the two renovated blockhouses. A bolded title of another article on the very same page assured the readers about "An Improved Atmosphere for Reconciliation". A humorous comment appeared in the regular cartoon at the last page of the same issue of Vecernji list (Oct. 29, 1997). Under the title "The Day of Reconciliation", a person with characteristic cap and a beard smybols of a chetnik (Serbian irregular) was addressing a Croat: "I am finally reconciliated with the fact that my Croatian retirement income is better than yours!" Since that Vecernji list is known for supporting the Croatian government, the fact that such a comment was published might point to the government’s ambivalent attitudes towards some decisions that have been forced upon it by the international community.8 In the town of Ilok, from which almost all Croatian inhabitants were expelled in 1991, a folklore pagent with Croatian and Serbian participants was held on September 20, 1997, continuing the pre-war tradition of "Ilok Vintage". On that occasion, the Croatian county official thanked UNTAES for helping the county to organize the pagent, stating that "it is the best example of peaceful reintegration". The Serbian representative greeted the guests -- many exiled Croats among them -- on behalf of the local Serbs, at least some of whom made the Croats flee. The UN-high official addressed them all by saying that he is "witnessing a perfect example of what he would call the reconciliation of peoples". The Croatian government representative stated that "the pagent has a deeper meaning" and that "it is a foundation of the building of trust

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between the Croats, Serbs, Slovaks and other peoples living in that region" (Vecernji list of Sept. 21, 1997, p.2). The emerging post-war social relationships, made up of a network of tensions and oppositions, are to be (re)structured according to a politically acceptable solution. So, on the occasion of the pagent, the image of the "dancing peasants" was taken out of the conservative, reality-detached old European ethnology, to be revived in the frames of a reality-imposed politics. In the present situation, it is quite easy to discover the meanings of political acts by taking their symbolic representations back to the system of relationships in which, against which, or as a model for which they are produced. The example of "Ilok Vintage" corroborates the general hypothesis on ideology used to overcome the inadequacy of practice. In Melucci’s terms, the symbolic elaboration of action "rationalizes" social relationships according to the interests of the actor (cf. Melucci 1996, 349-350). Croatian state officials and international diplomates expect people to accept and asses their symbols’ expressive dimensions regardless to the war-victims' capacity to emotionally identify with the new collective goals. The cynical interpretation would have it that the diplomates -- international and local alike -- send their addressees messages about what reality must look like in the well-known "soft" wrappings of folklore manifestations which were widely used for political purposes throughout the communist Eastern Europe. Yet today many of their addressees confront the problems totally neglected in the official statements and plans.9

Everyday life: tolerance or "trust"?

In spite of accepting the new political situation and not seeking revenge, many people cannot overcome grief, bitterness and fear. Contempt is also present, because it was their former neighbors – once trusted, treated as friends, and highly ranked in the traditional value-system -- who betrayed them by becoming their enemies in war. As shown by Sakic et al. (1997, 241), majority of the displaced Croats agree with the peaceful aspect of reintegration. One third, however, thought (in 1996) that occupied territory should be reconquered by military force (as it happened in two other Croatian regions in 1995).

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Mirjana Krizmanic, a psychologist with experience in the Croatian refugees' problems and attitudes, recently warned about the reality-detached character of the political syntagm on "establishing trust" (Krizmanic 1997). In Croatia, a tacit -- non-official and never publicly stated, but widely present -- collective guilt (guilt by ethnic affiliation) is imposed on the Serbs by the Croats who lack some kind of symbolic satisfaction for their own war-sufferings and losses. However, people with lived war experience prove to have remarkably objective attitudes, in so far they differentiate those who attacked them from those who just passively agreed with Serbian occupation because they believed they did not have any other choice.10 Still, generally speaking, the situation in the Croatian Danube basin is a situation of the victims and the aggressors forced to live together again. Pretending that there are no serious problems means not even trying to solve them in a way that promises peace in the future. Krizmanic argues that the establishing of trust cannot be the first, but only the concluding stage of the process of rebuilding contacts between people until recently mutually perceived as enemies. She lists the many psychological difficulties people are meeting when confronting the unpleasant facts they cannot change. She also points out that the "other", Serbian side is equally responsible for the success of the establishing of trust. She pleads for a step-by-step strategy, i.e. for defining minimal goals. At this moment, she claims, the only realistic objective is to help people to be just tolerant towards each other, and not to expect them to forget (as the politicians would like them), or to forgive (as advised by the church). Coexistence, or rather, parallel existence without aggression, is a precondition for the possible living together of the next generations. The importance of cultural aspects of the processes of social reintegration should not be underestimated, too. The rebuilding of acceptable life-worlds for people in the Croatian Danube basin will be based on the elaboration of the local meanings of justice and injustice, victory and defeat, honor and shame, moral superiority and guilt, humiliation and dignity. Their present importance is to be understood primarily in relation to the massively shared war experience that forced people to become painfully aware of the very basic physical conditions of life and of the fragility of some social bonds. Also, most of them had a hard time living in exile for the last six years, impoverished, statistical targets of various help-strategies, often without a job, depended on aid-workers who could not really let them define their own needs.

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"We are holding our heads high," was the only sentence a middle-aged woman -- one of the first returnees to Vukovar -- uttered when a TV journalist asked her how it feels to be back home (Croatian TV, Oct. 28, 1997). The regained self-esteem emerging from finally not being a refugee any more might help the peaceful reintegration process. However, the same spaces can be perceived as places of ultimate trauma by some people, and as territories that should be conquered in the next war by some others. Therefore, a remarkable hermeneutic subtlety is needed when analyzing how people are symbolically constituting reality in order to regain it (cf. Melucci 1996, 357). Trying not to become part of the game of demands, expectations, and interests which tie together or put in opposition refugees, aid-workers and politicians, several Croatian anthropologists have shown (cf. Jambresic Kirin & Povrzanovic, eds. 1996) that any particular position in the social field implies partiality and tensions. They keep juxtaposing the abstract political categories of "inter-ethnic relationships" in "post-war zones" to the lived experience of people victimized by the war regardless to the side they were trapped in. Yet, they believe it is also the anthropologists' responsibility to point out that many of the people supposed to live together after the war have radically different war-experiences which certainly do make a difference regarding their capacity to forget, forgive, and to thinking positive and looking forward to the future. They repeatedly make clear that "the capacity to trust needs to be underwritten by the capacity to tame chance, especially the chance of being hurt" (Daniel & Knudsen 1995, 2). Elaborate field-insights in the complexities of exile and return should be informing the political pragmatics. Since the Plan for Peaceful Reintegration is the only realistic peaceful solution for the people of all ethnic affiliations in the Croatian Danube basin, even the small- scale traces of its success felt by the people living there would be a reason for optimism. Anthropologists, after all, should keep believing in the coincidental creativity of everyday life as an arena of infinite improvisation of making do and making up, of constant negotiations of daily value judgements (cf. Read 1993, 35) -- perhaps also for people with radically different war experiences. Their direct, not mediated encounters could entail a possibility of a "grassroots democracy". It is namely in the peaceful everyday life where the situatedness and relational character of identity is easily recognized, pointing to the primary importance of personal

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qualities and not of ethnic affiliations.

Notes 1 The Amnesty Law and the actual realization of the Plan for Peaceful Reintegration seem to be the major political cause of dissatisfaction for a considerable number of Croats from the Croatian Danube basin. While only 146 Croats returned to the region in early September 1997 (out of 8O.822 Croats from that region displaced in Croatia and around 25.000 abroad), UNTAES reported that 736 Serbs returned from the Croatian Danube basin to their homes in other formerly Serb-held parts of Croatia (which they fled in 1995 in the course of Croatian miltary reconquering of those regions) (Vecernji list of Sept. 6, 1997, p.2). Still, it would not be appropriate to talk about massive political disappointment since the process of return has just begun and there might be hope for everyone who really intends to go home. However, the Croatian official prognosis on 20.000 Croats returning to the Croatian Danube basin by the end of 1997 seems to be unrealistic -- at least because of the financial means needed and the practical obstacles to building during the winter months.

2 According to Croatian officials, all the mines in Eastern Slavonia could be removed in about ten years and two years would be needed for the very town of Vukovar -- if there was enough money (Vjesnik of Aug. 23, 1997, p.6).

3 As already noted, sociological surveys from 1996 (cf. Društvena istrazivanja 1997) show that only a half of the displaced Croats agree with the Plan for Peaceful Reintegration. Almost 90% of all the displaced Croats surveyed would not return in case of Serbian local authority, and more than 63% in case of UN local authority. However, almost 61% of the displaced encompassed by the surveys in 1996 stated that they would return in correspondence with the Plan for Peaceful Reintegration is completely implemented. More than 90% said that they would return regardless to the Plan on condition of complete implementation of the Croatian control in the Croatian Danube basin (cf. Rogic & Sakic 1997).

4 In October 1997, after a meeting with the angry representatives of the associations of the families of missing soldiers which was closed for the press, the vice-president of Croatian government made a short public statement: "The Program of Establishing Trust will certainly be the most difficult to realize with the associations of the families of missing soldiers, for the destiny of their relatives is still their first priority" (Vecernji list of Oct. 29, 1997, p.3).

5 In Croatia, the minority language and script is in official use together with Croatian in every municipality in which the members of the minority form more than half of the population.

6 In the meantime, it has been decided that the schools with the majority of Serbian pupils have a Serbian director and a Croatian deputy. It will be reverse in the schools with the majority of Croatian pupils, i.e. only if the majority of displaced Croats really return to Eastern Slavonia. (The Serbs in Vukovar already decided to establish a separate Serbian kindergarten.) The parents could decide in which language their children will be educated. So, at the moment, in Vukovar-Srijem county in which 16 elementary schools are situated, 4.013 pupils chose , 216 chose Croatian, 18 Slovak, 3 Rusinian and 1 chose Hungarian as the language of

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education (Vecernji list of Sept. 6, 1997, p.2). According to the 1991 census, the region of the Croatian Danube basin was inhabited by 44,5% of Croats, 34,9% of Serbs, 6,7% of Hungarians and 13,9% of other ethnic groups (Sakic et al. 1997, 237) In 1997, 90,7% of all the persons displaced from the the Croatian Danube basin are Croats.

7 As in the pre-war months in early 1991, once again Croatian national symbols (the flag and the coat of arms) were getting focal position in the newspaper reports from the Croatian Danube basin in late 1997. At several occasions, boards on post-offices and schools were damaged, supposedly because of being only in Latin script and not also in Cyrillic script used by the Serbs.

8 A similar ambivalence could be traced in the mushrooming of official bodies and plans in charge for home-return to the Croatian Danube basin (of Croats still displaced in other parts of the country) and from that region (of Serbs wanting to return to other parts of Croatia), esp. in their long, descriptive names, such as "The National Committee for the Establishment of National Trust", "The Committee for the Realization of Reconciliation in the Town of Vukovar", or "The Working Group for the Acceleration of Return to the Danube Region and From It" that works on the realization of "The Operative Agreement on the Return of Displaced Persons".

9 Some profound emotional obstacles are left unconsidered in political negotiations. They are definitely not solvable by legal acts. Here is but one example (from a personal narrative recorded for my dissertation mentioned in footnote 10). Although he never was a Croatian soldier, a tailor from Vukovar in his late fifties was taken prisoner to a Serbian war-camp a day after the fall of the town in November 1991. He had a Serbian irregular's gun pointed to his head twice on his way to the camp: he says that he wasn't shot by mere chance. Together with some other people, he was exchanged for Serbian soldiers a month later -- he lost 12 kilos in that period. Since early 1992, he lives in a hotel in Istria sharing a room with the rest of his family, having two warm meals a day and a possibility to earn some money by mending clothes for his fellow-citizens staying in the same hotel. He was doing fine when I interviewed him in 1993 -- he even wanted to talk about his worst experiences. Like the majority of displaced persons, he said that he wanted to return home, too. According to his daughter, he was doing fine until Spring 1997, when it became certain that the time has come to start planing the return to Vukovar. (The internal refugees lost their refugee-status in Croatia on September 1, 1997. They had to apply for the returnee-status if they wanted to keep the state- support.) Since then, he is falling into pathologically long sleep, regardless to the time of the day. After eventually waking up, he doesn't known where he is. His daughter believes that these "blackouts" happen for his lack of energy needed for an entirely new start, as well as for the lack of emotional strength to confront his Serbian neighbors who stayed behind. They shared the shelter with him and his family in the months of siege, but helped the Serbian militaries who conquered the town to sort out the Croat civilians by pointing their fingers at them.

10 This important psychologists’ insight is confirmed by the refugee children's autobiographical essays quoted in Prica & Povrzanovic 1996, as well as by the personal narratives (from Dubrovnik and Dubrovnik region, Vukovar, Zupanja, surroundings, , Zadar, Sibenik and Zagreb) I collected from 1991 to 1996 for the purpose of my dissertation entitled "Culture and Fear: War-time Everyday Life in Croatia 1991-92".

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Contact Information: Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research Kralja Zvonimira 17, P.O.B. 287, 10 000, Zagreb Croatia E-mail: [email protected] c/o Department of European Ethnology, University of Lund Finngatan 8, 223 62 Lund, Sweden E-mail: [email protected]

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