Living with Dangerous Spaces: Ruins in Vukovar Britt Baillie
Conflict in Cities: Europe and the Middle East
In 1991, the multi-ethnic city of Vukovar was besieged by the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) and Serb paramilitary forces in the first major urban battle of the wars which forcefully unmade the former-Yugoslavia. Approximately 60% of the city’s built environment was completely destroyed and an additional 30% sustained heavy damage. Of the Croat inhabitants of Vukovar, 1,556 were killed, 22,062 were expelled, and approximately 10,000 were taken to prison camps. By the end of the siege 13,852 houses and flats in Vukovar had been destroyed. Twenty years since the war— thirteen since (re)integration into Croatia—Vukovar remains littered with architectural carnage, physical reminders writ large of the destruction and loss that happened here. Today, inter-ethnic rivalry is entrenched, even mired, in the physical realm. The ruins of Vukovar are now entirely new places, retaining only shadows of, and allusions to, their former selves. Ruins puncture the comforting ideological constructions of the residents of Vukovar. They are paradoxical, simultaneously signalling the loss and the endurance of the past. They are therefore dangerous places, both for those who seek to remember and for those who seek to forget. This photo-essay explores the changing role of Vukovar’s ruins.
From the end of 1991 to 1996, Vukovar was under control of the self-proclaimed Republic of Serbian Krajina (RSK). Serbian news agencies staged tours of the mass graves and ruins which they claimed were the work of ‘Croatian fascists who created havoc in a town ... liberated by the Serbs’. Colonel Milan Gvero told the journalists he was guiding through the city, ‘I want you to remember what a town looks like after the ‘Ustaše’ have been here’. Shortly after the ‘liberation’, a tour company from Belgrade began Tours of Warning—showing visitors how the ‘Ustaše’ fighters had forced the JNA to destroy Vukovar. An RSK official claimed, ‘Vukovar will be reconstructed in such a way that it’ll be more older and much prettier than before’.
‘I wrote our first radio report on my knees in my car. The report started with ‘This is Free Serbian Radio Vukovar’ [we broadcast] which streets were de-mined, where to buy milk and food, where to get clothes which were sent from Serbia. We also informed [listeners] on where dead bodies found in the ruins were collected ... It was impossible to move around the city because sometimes the rubble was a metre high. It took two months for the military to clear the main roads. There was no need for them to build any kind of shelters because there were the same number of untouched houses as the number of civilians who remained ... Nobody knew at that time if the war would go on and nobody wanted to build anything. Everything was made to meet military needs ... People reconstructed their houses with the free building materials available on the streets.’
‘We called it "The Twilight Zone" it wasn’t Vukovar [anymore]… we had to write essays like “Krajina my homeland”… [The teenagers from high school] would drag power to the abandoned buildings and have parties there... I wasn’t sure that I could feel normal anymore [after having lived in Vukovar].’ ‘People did not have the money to rebuild... We lived between things. We were waiting to be called to serve as border control or waiting for the Croats to attack.’
‘Now—and before our very eyes—a great city has turned into a great necropolis… leaving behind the skeleton of Vukovar’ Bogdanović 1994. In Vukovar the debris of the conflict became a part of the ecology, the topography and the daily life of the city. The ruins in the city became counterparts of the dead. They consist of shards and fragments of dead matter, material culture violated and left to rot. Just like the dead, ruins repel. While the dead cannot be fully cast away from one’s mind, the skeletons of buildings too are an inescapable presence in the streets of the city. The ruins are saturated with intangible history, with memories of architecture both built and unbuilt. Like a silence in a conversation, these ruins, or voids in the fabric of the city, are empty of sound but resonant with meaning—and just as hard to ignore. Here, there is a sense that the ‘Other’ and the chaos embodied in the ruins must be expelled. In Krajina Vukovar, the ruins reminded the governing Serbs of the Croats they had expelled. Therefore the ruins had to be remade into something more palatable, something habitable, something ethnically homogenous—better to fill it with a fiction, than to admit that it was a void. Under the RSK, plans were developed to ethnically homogenise the city by reconstructing it either in a Byzantine style reminiscent of the architecture of the cradle of Serbia (e.g. Kosovo) or in the spirit of Serbian Baroque.
‘We can’t speak about ‘looting’. Everything that was valuable had been taken by Croats before the war. The things that were found in the ruins were taken by the Serbs. When the Serbs left Vukovar [during the siege] everything was looted by the remaining Croats. When we came back [from Borovo Selo] everything was demolished and burnt down ... only things that were necessary like furniture were taken from houses ... I entered my flat. It was completely burnt down. On the way to it I went over rubble and dead bodies. Then I went to the Hotel Danube, found a bottle of tequila. I sat on the riverbank and got drunk and fired my weapon into the air. Expressing in that way my sorrow.’
The Erdut Agreement (12th November 1995) declared the reintegration of Eastern Slavonia into Croatia. By 14th February 1996 an estimated 15,000 ethnic Serbs had fled to Serbia. In 1998, the exodus continued with 25–30 Serbs leaving Eastern Slavonia a day. Many Croat refugees felt unable to return. Today, the absence of many pre-war families and individuals can be sensed in Vukovar at night—plots with ruined houses, to which families have not returned, show up as dark voids between the inhabited houses.
‘We don’t mind the ruins. We mind the Četniks [Serbian nationalist paramilitary soldiers]!’ ‘[When we returned] we knew that there were killers among them… We did not know who was a normal Serb and who was a killer Serb... if you do something with the other nation [ethnic group] you are a traitor to your nation... It is not easy to live surrounded by ruins. It is not easy to come back because you can’t see the illusion of the future.’
‘Monuments evoke respect and ruined houses evoke horror... Such buildings [ruins] evoke or release tough and sad memories. I [knew when I] returned home, [it would be] a kind of sacrifice and defiance... Nobody wants to see his house completely demolished and we are not Americans who simply take their suitcase and an old car and head towards the west. We still have strong feelings about our homes. In our culture we have a strong and prevailing sense of home.’
‘That is where my house stood. Now there is nothing left, no memory of my childhood home… I call my generation ‘Gone with the Wind’… Because our past is gone, we have no jobs or life in the present and there is no real future for us… I grew up watching movies about the Partisan heroes. When the first JNA tanks rolled into city. I ran out smiling to greet them. It was only when my father smacked me across the face and dragged me into our house that I realised that something had changed… Later, on TV, I saw one of those JNA tanks point its barrel right at my house and blow it up… Let’s go, I don’t want to think about what my life would have been if there hadn’t been a war. You know, when I came back to Vukovar for the first time after living at my grandmother’s as a refugee for seven years, I couldn’t even recognise my house. There was only a pile of rubble. Nothing was the same, I couldn’t even find my way to my school from here and my father was angry because he saw his motorcycle at the neighbour’s house.’
‘The traces of war could be seen everywhere. I couldn’t believe that people lived in such conditions—like in the Middle Ages. There were trees growing from the inside of some houses. Rats were everywhere, snakes in the middle of city, wild dogs. The people looked like halfhumans, half-savages. I was astonished when I saw some of my acquaintances. It was like Mad Max movies.’
Suggestions to leave the city in ruin were quickly rejected. The returning Croat population of Vukovar was unwilling to accept the changes that the destruction and Serb ‘occupation’ had wrought upon their city. They returned to a space which had been emptied, awaiting the reinscription of meaning. For the returning Croats, the reconstruction of Vukovar became, according to the local conservation office, a question of national pride, but also a symbolic gesture which should in a recognisable way undo the crime of culturocide. A Franciscan friar captured the Zeitgeist when he stated that Vukovarians had become the ‘guardians of centuries-old Croatian historical-political, demographic, cultural, religious and ethnic Croatian and CatholicChristian heritage—that is, the entire Croatian identity, not only the city, but also the entire Croatian state’ (Spehar 2006).
Despite persistent reconstruction efforts over the course of the last twenty years at least one ruin can be found on almost any street in Vukovar. These ruins have become wild and untamed spaces—the antithesis of civilised cosmopolitan space. They are experienced as places to be avoided. Most remain empty, boarded up. Waiting for legal disputes to be settled or for owners to return and reinhabit them. In 2010 the Croatian army was brought on behest of the mayor to bulldoze and remove ruins which were deemed to be dangerous and unworthy of conservation.
This mosaic depicts the ruins of Lady Fatima church. This church was damaged during the siege and later blown up during the RSK period. The Croatian government funded the construction of a new church as the ruins of the old church were beyond repair. One of the friars is shown holding a depiction of the new church. Here the ruins of the old have been banished in favour of a new and grander building. Both the friars and refugees portrayed are shown glancing up at the statue of Lady Fatima which survived the destruction of church and now is seen as a symbol the refugees and their right to the city.
In Vukovar, only one ruin has been preserved in its ruinous state—the water tower. During the siege a Croat branitelji [defender] repeatedly climbed up to the top to place a Croatian flag on it despite persistent shelling by the JNA. Because this ruin has been elevated to the status of a monument its presence is tolerated by the Croat community as a reminder of the ‘Serbian Aggression’ and ‘Croat defiance’. It embodies the notion of ‘victory through victimhood’. However, the newly reconstructed houses which surround it, characterised by their exposed red ‘reconstruction’ brick facades in themselves serve as a new form of reminder of the siege.
People in Vukovar have learnt, to a certain extent, to live with and tolerate the ruins of their city. Here on the main road through the historic core bakeries, shops, and cafés operate on the ground floor of partially reconstructed buildings. People shop, socialise and go about their normal business on a daily basis. However, once a year on the 18th November, the street becomes part of the stage for the annual Remembrance Procession which marks the end of the siege. Thousands of Croats from across the country descend on the ‘Martyred City’ to pay their respects. For them the ruins are a stark reminder of the danger of the ‘Other’. Many local ethnic Serbs chose to stay indoors or to leave the city on this day to avoid any problems with right-wing extremist Croats.
During the Communist period, Vukovar was a thriving industrial city in the breadbasket of the former-Yugoslavia and home to one of its largest Danube ports. By 1990 , approximately 23,000 people were employed by the Borovo footwear factory. Many others were employed by agricultural and textile giants such as Vupik and Vutex. The siege paralysed the city economically. Factories were damaged and looted, and the surrounding fields were mined. Since (re)integration, the city has struggled to revive outdated and damaged industrial complexes due to shifting markets and competition from the manufacturing giants of Asia. In 2003, unemployment in the city officially reached 37%.
Conflict in Cities and the Contested State research project, supported by the ESRC (grant number RES-060-25-0015) www.urbanconflicts.arct.cam.ac.uk
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