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.

The city’s scars remain. Some locals say that Vukovar hasn’t been completely rebuilt or recovered in order to serve as a reminder of the war. However, the biggest reminders of this ethnic war aren’t the bullet hole-riddled buildings or prominent memorials and graveyards, but the segregation that remains between the Croatian and Serbian population.

Children go to either Croatian or Serbian schools; cafes are exclusively Croatian or Serbian; people ignore acquaintances of a different ethnicity. It is not a physically separated city, but the barrier is palpable.

“It is the unofficial system that is the worst part of being a divided city,” said Antic, a Serbian who describes himself as part of an ethnically mixed family. “A community that is so focused on the past cannot have a future.”

Every memorial honoring fallen soldiers has an ethnic tie, becoming an “off-limits” space for those of a different ethnicity. The Serbian population in Vukovar remains the minority, a status driven home by low visibility of their monuments. A huge Catholic cross memorializing “the victims for Free Croatia" looms over the Danube.

Though the cemetery for Croatian soldiers and civilians is huge, beautiful and well-kept, the graveyard for Serbian residents killed in the battle of Vukovar is small and wedged between two recently built Croatian homes. There are less than 50 graves here; the flowers on the tombstones are wilted and the grass around is brown.

On a national level, Croatia and Serbia are on good terms. Serbs have long been considered the aggressors in the war in Yugoslavia, but in a town where they, too, had to defend their homes from the attacking Yugoslav People’s Army, it is hard to understand why ethnic tensions still dictate the way of life in Vukovar.

For his part, Antic is working to ease those tensions in Vukovar one relationship at a time.

One wonders how people here can enjoy a casual lunch at a cafe overlooking the swiftly running Danube when the brick walls of the restaurant are still loaded with bullet holes. How they can have a conversation knowing that every word is judged to recognize ethnicity. How parents can refuse to send their children to school with Serbs, knowing it is this same ethnic battle that ripped their town to shreds, and spilled their relatives blood on these same streets.

“Politics are too focused on the past,” Antic said. “The future of Vukovar is a question of our choices in the present.”

This report comes from a journalist in our Student Correspondent Corps, a GlobalPost project training the next generation of foreign correspondents while they study abroad.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/study-abroad/091109/the-post-apocalyptic-balkan-border-town