The people of eastern Croatia cherish their swaying seas of corn, verdant orchards and modest vineyards spread out beside the Danube river, and they are glad these former killing fields can now give refuge thousands fleeing war.
“We understand completely what this means for these people, what it means to be a refugee,” says Robert Martinkovic, who was wounded three times leading a reconnaissance unit that lost eight of its men, in some the toughest battles of Croatia’s 1991-1995 war for independence from Serb-dominated Yugoslavia.
Twenty years on, Martinkovic now sees tens of thousands of migrants passing through a still battle-scarred eastern Croatia, where vivid memories of their own war are inspiring local people to help these victims of distant conflicts.
"Yesterday, locals came down here with 20 cars full of food and water," Martinkovic says, as he helps fellow volunteers clear up a makeshift transit camp near the Croatia-Serbia border for asylum seekers, predominantly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Croatian war killed about 20,000 people, most of them Croats, and displaced more than 200,000 people from both Croat and Serb communities.
Eastern Croatia suffered the worst atrocities and destruction of the conflict, and the biggest massacre occurred at Vukovar, formerly a prosperous, multi-ethnic riverside town, facing Serbia across the broad and fast-flowing Danube.
For three months in 1991, a couple of thousand lightly armed Croats defended Vukovar from more than 35,000 Yugoslav troops, as Serb commanders pounded the city with tanks, heavy artillery and bomber aircraft.
Barely a building was left undamaged, and families hid in basements as flying shrapnel and sniper fire menaced anyone who ventured out; Vukovar’s resistance and suffering earned it a glorious place in the nation’s history, and monikers to match: “Croatia’s Stalingrad”, it is often called, and “Croatia’s City of Heroes”.
Shelter
Some 22,000 people fled Vukovar, and about 1,700 Croats were killed before Serb-led military and paramilitary groups finally overran the city, on November 19th, 1991. When they did, hundreds of people sought shelter in Vukovar’s hospital, from where they hoped to be evacuated.
Instead, the Serbs transported about 250 wounded fighters and civilians to a nearby pig farm at Ovcara, where they were beaten, tortured and shot dead. Their bodies were later found in a mass grave not far from the city.
Just 15km from a memorial centre that now stands at Ovcara, Croatia, a new state-run reception and transit camp for migrants was officially opened on Monday to end chaotic scenes witnessed over recent days at nearby Tovarnik train station.
The area is now on the main thoroughfare for migrants travelling from the Middle East to western Europe, since Hungary last week completed construction of a 4m high fence along its border with Serbia, blocking the previous favoured route.
Dozens of buses now run daily from the south of Serbia and its capital, Belgrade, to the border crossing between the Serb town of Sid and Tovarnik.
Croatia is now bussing migrants directly from the border to the Opatovac camp, where they are registered and given food, water, medical care and a chance to rest. Then they are taken back to Tovarnik and put on a train to Hungary and, potentially, Slovenia, as they move on towards western Europe.
The Opatovac camp, which can accommodate several thousand people in rows of large military-style tents, will be partly operated by the Red Cross and other humanitarian organisations, taking the pressure off local volunteer groups.
War
“In our region people have been working hard to help,” says Sasa Bjelanovic of the Vukovar-based organisation Youth Peace Group Danube.
"Locals here remember the war and remember how it was to be a refugee – lots of them have relatives still living in Austria and Germany. "
Bjelanovic and other members of the youth group are volunteering with the Croatian Red Cross, which is now transferring workers and supplies from Tovarnik station to Opatovac, where tens of thousands of people are expected to arrive in the coming weeks.
“Croatia is really showing empathy for the refugees, especially this region,” said Ead Becirevic, senior officer for disaster management with the Croatian Red Cross.
“We are so close to Vukovar here; this is a region that was destroyed, so people understand the situation of the refugees that are coming here now.”
Martinkovic, the former soldier, praised the response of ordinary Croatians but was sceptical about the state’s intervention, suspecting the well-stocked Opatovac camp to be a belated government PR effort and potential source of corruption.
“The conditions there for the refugees look all right, but they are still being kept behind wire,” he said. “They see men in uniform, police, a military-style response, and they are enclosed by a fence: for people fleeing war, that’s not good.”
