The 'post-apocalyptic' bordertown

In a ruined Balkan city, determined locals work to heal ethnic wounds.

Nicole Wilke (Drake University)November 11, 2009 13:00Updated May 30, 2010 12:13

Much of Vukovar was literally pulverized by fighting during the early 1990s, when a newly independent Croatia fought off Yugoslavian troops. Still, locals from both ethnic groups remain in the city, making reconciliation difficult. (Nicole Wilke/GlobalPost)

VUKOVAR, Croatia — In this border town, scarred and pocked by battle, Srdjan Antic watches his Serbian neighbor walk her son halfway across town to kindergarten.

The single mother, a Serb, is resolute, says Antic, a Croat, that her son make the long trek to a Serbian school rather than learn beside Croatian children.

Determined to avoid rifts that turned to bloodshed in the Croatian war for independence, Serbian and Croatian community organizers in Vukovar are encouraging parents toward integration rather than segregation. Antic works with an NGO helping to create a new school where children of different ethnic groups can learn side by side.

The Nansen Center for Dialogue has launched an advertising campaign pushing the concept.

“Our research shows that most people don’t have a problem with unified schools,” Antic said. “It’s not something local politicians are working toward. But political opinion here is changing. It is much less about ethnic background.”

Only 320 miles to Venice, Italy, and a three-hour bus ride to the Croatian capital of Zagreb, the war-torn town of Vukovar still shows signs of when ethnically driven politics nearly destroyed it.

"The city looks post-apocalyptic," a blogger wrote on TripWiser.com after a visit in 2008. The city was "completely devastated" during the conflict.

"There are so many ruins even in the very center. The atmosphere was really heavy and sad, and Vukovar left me with so many tragic images."

On the banks of the Danube River, which separates mostly Catholic Croatia from Eastern Orthodox-dominated Serbia, the city was one of the first and hardest hit locations in the region’s war in the 1990s, and it shows.

Bordertown Vukovar has been one of the most ethnically mixed communities in the former Yugoslavia. When the Yugoslav People’s Army attacked the city in 1991, its population was 32 percent Serbian and 47 percent Croatian, and had the highest rate of inter-ethnic marriages in what is now the nation of Croatia.

Vukovar was also one of the first towns invaded after Croatia announced its independence from Yugoslavia. The town lay under siege from August 1991 until it fell (or was liberated, depending on your point of view) on Nov. 18. During this time, the Yugoslav People’s Army shelled the city constantly while its citizens cowered in basements.

Croatia, not yet a nation at that time, attempted to form an army to defend Vukovar, but found its small force overwhelmed by the better-equipped People's Army. When the city fell, about 80 percent of the buildings in the town were destroyed, according to Kruno Kardov, author of the book "Remembering Vukovar."

Frightened citizens who camped in basements for three months finally emerged to see their city pulverized by bullets, rockets, bombs and fires. Women and children were sent away from the city in buses. Croatian soldiers were sent to concentration camps, where most were killed.