War In Croatia Research Articles

The Alphabet War: Language, Collective Memory and National Identity in Contemporary Debates over National Minority Rights in Croatia

ABSTRACT This paper discusses a crisis regarding Serb national minority rights in the city of Vukovar. The crisis was caused by the government’s attempt to introduce Serbian language and Cyrillic alphabet in the official use in Vukovar. The paper examines which symbolic meanings of the Cyrillic alphabet were used with the aim of consolidating national identity and collective memory of the war in Croatia. The paper argues that the use of a minority language and script was discursively framed as a means of aggression of one ethnic community over another, rather than as an issue of minority rights. The paper is theoretically grounded in Michele Foucault’s theory about the ‘discourse of perpetual war’.

Normative Data for Blood Pressure in Croatian War Veterans: A Population-Based Study.

Purpose: The current study aimed to investigate the normative data for blood pressure. Materials and Methods: From 2017 to 2020, 2032 men and women classified as ‘war veterans’ were recruited (mean age ± standard deviation (SD): 60.97 ± 7.98 years; mean stature: 172.50 ± 9.10 cm; mean body mass: 90.25 ± 36.45 kg; mean body-mass index: 29.66 ± 5.59 kg/m2; 29.9% women). Their systolic and diastolic blood pressures were measured three times. The procedure was carried out according to the American Heart Organization. The sex-specific and age-specific normative data for the 5th, 25th, 50th (median), 75th, and 90th percentiles for systolic blood pressure (SBP), diastolic blood pressure (DBP), pulse pressure (measured as SBP-DBP) and mid-BP (the average of SBP and DBP) were presented. Results: The men had higher SBP (p < 0.001), DBP (p < 0.001), pulse pressure (p < 0.001) and mid-BP (p < 0.001) compared to the women. The age-specific differences showed that older individuals had higher values of SBP (p < 0.001), pulse pressure (p < 0.001), and mid-BP (p < 0.001), while no significant differences for DBP (p = 0.496) were observed. Conclusions: This is the first study providing sex-specific and age-specific normative data for blood pressure in war veterans.

Operation Storm: Ending Humanitarian Disaster and Genocide in Southeastern Europe

Operation Storm was the single-most decisive battle of the Croatian War for Independence (1991-1995). Launched by the Republic of Croatia in August 1995, it was the largest European land battle since the Second World War. Outnumbered, outgunned, but not outmaneuvered, this tiny new democracy prevailed in a David versus Goliath encounter, a moral as well as military victory. Storm ended a massive humanitarian disaster and genocide. It led to the liberation of one third of Croatian territory, and made possible the Dayton Agreement that brought peace to the region. Based on interviews conducted with the American Ambassador to Croatia during the war years, military and political principals in the battle, noted scholars, security and intelligence agency officials, humanitarian leaders and journalists, this social scientific qualitative study examines the political and historical origins of the war and its aftermath. The article documents the events leading up to the war and surrounding this extraordinary military operation, providing strategic and political insights into the need for cooperation between democratic allies.

Cultural texts, enemies, and taboos: autocommunicative meaning-making surrounding the “Ready for the Homeland” Ustaša salute in Croatia

ABSTRACT In Croatia, the war of symbols and the rise of hate speech has been manifested most prominently through Za dom spremni (“Ready for the Homeland”); the official salute of the WWII fascist quisling-state the Independent State of Croatia. The case that triggered a broad public dispute occurred in November 2016, when a memorial plaque containing the inscribed salute was installed near the WWII concentration camp Jasenovac by radical right-wing politicians and war veterans. As a consequence of being intertwined with the controversial legacy of WWII and the 1990s Croatian War of Independence, the salute on the plaque gave rise to an enclosed meaning-making sphere characterized by the invocation of existing cultural texts and the creation of new ones, the reinforcement of the us-them boundary, and the strengthening of existing taboos. In line with the abovementioned, the overarching aim of the study is to place the Croatian WWII Ustaša salute into a broader theoretical meaning-making framework while demonstrating the importance of cultural functions of the salute and nationalistically fueled hate speech more widely.

Колабораціонізм русинів й українців Хорватії під час сербсько-хорватської війни (1991–1995)

Колабораціонізм русинів й українців Хорватії під час сербсько-хорватської війни (1991–1995)

Imposing an ideology: cultural trauma and political taboo in Nebojša Slijepčević’s Srbenka

The present paper analyzes Nebojša Slijepčević’s documentary Srbenka from a political and cultural perspective, from the point of view of political taboo and cultural trauma. By tackling the murder of the Zec family during the Croatian War of Independence, the film reflects on the situation of the Serbian national minority and the conflictive situation it has to confront due to the national narratives that the Croatian state has developed, which are a representation of political taboo. This situation provokes and reinforces an almost impossible to solve cultural trauma inside the Serbian community, whose population, as a result, reacts by hiding their ethnic origin in the public sphere, in a behavioural pattern known as unacknowledgeability. The reconstruction of the murder will allow me to analyze witness traumatization. In the end, a study of documentary theory, based on Nichols six modes to categorize documentaries will be developed, in order to analyze how cinema, and also the arts in general, can be used as vessels for the exposition of struggles and the development of empathy.

Hybrid warfare case studies - Croatia and Ukraine

Croatia’s Homeland war and aggression to Ukraine are clear examples that can be described with term Hybrid warfare. Different phases during conflict and war (every conflict is not a war; every war is a conflict) has a lot of similarities, but also has a difference. It is important to make deeper analysis to provide better and efficient lessons-learned preventive and active measures for future conflicts. This article starts with a short overview of Croatia’s Homeland war and continues with short overview of Ukrainian experience. It contains lessons-learned tools and suggestions for future activities.

Natural Language Processing for the Analysis of the Political Characterisation of Migration in the Croatian Political Discourse

This paper tackles the issue of analyst bias in performance of comparative political analyses on political discourse, by leveraging data and machine-learning over human prior knowledge. The case studied is characterization of the issue of migration in the Croatian political discourse, which was chosen arbitrarily. We developed a machine-learning system that identifies most prominent features in the Croatian political discourse, with regards to migration and were interested solo in comparative political analysis in political science. This system does not rely on human judgement on the part of the researchers, and can be thus considered to be “objective”, short of possible sampling or selection bias. It is replicable. If provided, the same dataset and algorithm used, same conclusions should be reached by any scientist. This result was achieved by creating a text corpus from news items and press releases extracted from the websites of Croatian political parties currently represented in the Parliament. Available and collected data consist of public announcements mainly from IDS (Istarski Demokratski Sabor / Istrian Democratic Assambly), SDSS (Samostalna Demokratska Srpska Stranka / Independed Democratic Serb Party) and HSLS (Hrvatska Socijalno Liberalna Stranka / Croatian Social Liberal Party). Data analyzed suggests three dominant phrases of the research process. All political parties had similar political stand towards pointed out issues. Three most significant phrases were determined. First phrase is related to words “Demography” and “Reduction” and finding suggest that most analyzed articles relates towards migration of Croatian citizens in connection to economic hardships of some kind. Phrase two is related to words “Border” and “Croatia-Serbia” which strongly indicates relation to migration and is related towards inter-Balkan migration, mostly connected with consequences of the Croatian War of Independence from 1990’s, and is of most interest to SDSS, a Serb minority party in Croatia. Phrase three is related towards Marrakesh Agreement (Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration), where most of analyzed data shows that parties have a constructive but ambivalent stance towards migration from the third countries. Research conducted on available data, shows that wide spread international migration is not in the focus of most Croatian political parties, while topics and interest for inter-Balkan and Croatian economic/political migration dominates Croatian political spectre

Confronting recent history: forced mobilization in Serbia during the war in Croatia 1991–1995

However much interest the Yugoslav conflicts of the nineties seem to have sparked within the broader academic community, some relevant topics are still found to be missing or underresearched. The forced mobilization during the Milošević regime that culled men of almost all age in order for them to fight for their country is one of them. With the recently published Untold stories of the victims of the forced mobilization, some new light has been shed on the cullings of the 1990s. This article explores those stories, including recently emerged transcripts from the governmental sessions discussing them, and puts them through a historical lens.

Recovery of a vandalized canvas painting our Lady of the Rosary from Vrlika (Croatia)

This study is related to the major recovery project of an 18th century oil painting on canvas depicting Our Lady of the Rosary, the patron saint of the parish community of Vrlika and its surroundings. During the Croatian War of Independence in 1992 it was taken off the main altar and vandalized by the paramilitary units. This resulted in termination of a century long tradition of annual feasts in Vrlika in which the painting was publicly displayed and carried by the townsmen. Based on the available visual materials: a high resolution old black and white photograph and the low resolution coloured one, respectfully, using the computer colorization algorithm, and also relying on detailed visual analysis of the original paint layer, a major reconstruction was carried out in 2017. This research has demonstrated that the recovery of the artworks with dramatic losses is an extremely complex social phenomenon difficult to characterize by any general factor or based on any general approach.

Planned Villages as Rural Heritage in the Function of Sustainable Development: Case Study of Gornji Vrhovci in Slavonia, Croatia

Although cultural values are the subject of an increasing number of officially adopted documents, at international as well as on European level, elaborations of planned villages’ values are rare. In 1990, the term cultural landscape was confirmed in several international texts as a concept related to the protection and heritage (World Heritage Convention, 1992; Recommendation on the Integrated Conservation of Cultural Landscapes Areas as Part of Landscape Policies, 1995). From the beginning of the 21st century, the concept is dispersed into several disciplines and the focus shifts to the side of natural values, visual values of the landscape, built structure, heritage values, elaborating the concept of the cultural landscape more widely and at the same time clarifying its components more in depth. The paper analyses the values of planned rural settlements in the context of the cultural landscape and the values of the rural heritage. The importance of planned rural heritage as a tourist attraction and potential destination is examined through a spatial multi-level research of the regional area on the example of the area of Western Slavonia, Croatia. Since the middle of the 18th century, in the area of Slavonia, there is the largest number of planned and regulated villages that have been integrated into the landscape, contributing to the spatial diversity and consequently the spatial identity. Therefore, the question arises whether their planned spatial structure can be recognized as a heritage and whether this part of heritage can be used in the function of rural tourism development. This paper explores the historical urban - architectural reconstruction of the village Gornji Vrhovci (1945-1948) after its damage during World War II, and reconstruction (1995-1998) after the damage during the Homeland War. Since the architects led both reconstructions of the village, the paper explores whether the recognizable spatial structure of the village can serve as a contribution to the development of a model for the development of rural tourism. The paper concludes that, despite the need for the development of rural tourism in Croatia, the identity of spatial structures of the village are neglected by the development plans both in the sense of heritage and resource sustainable development.

Investigation of WWII/postwar mass burials in Croatia—The implementation of the Croatian model of searching for the imprisoned and missing persons

The search for victims of World War Two (WWII) and the immediate aftermath period (postwar) in Croatia started together with the search for Homeland War victims in 1991. It continued through years, most often sporadically and in a non-homogenous way. It was just with the adoption of the Law on Research, Arrangement and Maintenance of Military Cemeteries, Cemeteries of Victims of WWII and Postwar Period in 2013 that the search became more structured and gained a formal governmental body responsible for the organization and supervision of the activities related to it. It was then that the well-established model of searching for Homeland War victims, based on many years of field work and research, started to be implemented in the search and analysis of WWII/postwar victims. The model represents a continuously growing and developing project which encompasses a wide variety of steps and procedures, from the investigation of alleged burial locations to the analysis and reburial of recovered mortal remains. From its implementation in 2016, it allowed the successful investigation of 1300 alleged burial locations, 484 field surveys, 42 exhumations and the recovery of remains of more than 1600 individuals. Besides, care for military cemeteries, marking of mass burial sites and arranging of international treaties are conducted in order to guarantee proper handling, relocation and repatriation of all those that perished during WWII and the postwar period.

(Archival) Records Acquisition Procedure of the Croatian Memorial and Documentation Center of the Homeland War and cooperation with public and state Institutions and NGO's

The paper deals with the Croatian Memorial and Documentation Centre’s procedure and praxis of the acquisition of the archival records from the archives, public and state institutions, non-governmental organizations and with various forms of cooperation with these institutions. Through several examples from praxis, the authors describe the importance, models and the results of the cooperation using literature and sources - primarily the Center’s annual activity reports. The Center has established cooperation with various related institutions so far for a more efficient execution of its planned tasks. Experiences and the methodology of that cooperation will be analyzed in the paper.

The Role of Perceived Social Support in Assessing Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Mental Health-Related Quality of Life in Veterans.

This study aims to establish the effect of self-perceived social support on the intensity of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptoms and Mental Health-Related Quality of Life (MHRQoL) in veterans more than two decades after exposure to trauma in the Homeland War in Croatia, which took place from 1990 to 1995. The sample comprised 259 Croatian Homeland War veterans diagnosed with PTSD, with at least 6 months of combat experience. Among them, 90 subjects had also experienced imprisonment in enemy prison camps (at least 1 month of captivity). The subjects were evaluated using the questionnaire on self-perceived social support, sociodemographic questionnaire, PTSD self-report checklist (PCL-5) and Short Form (SF-36) Health Survey questionnaire. A general regression model analysis was performed to determine whether social support affected patients’ MHRQoL and intensity of the PTSD symptoms. The obtained results showed that veterans who had a more positive perception of social support after the events of the war had less intense PTSD symptoms and better MHRQoL. Furthermore, captivity and socioeconomic status were shown to be important predictors of PTSD and MHRQoL. The nonimprisoned veteran group was more likely to develop more severe PTSD symptoms and have poorer MHRQoL compared to the group of former prisoners of war (ex-POWs). This could be due to better post-war care and social support, which ex-POWs received after their release from captivity.

Особливості правосуддя Республіки Хорватія у сфері військових злочинів (за матеріалами «миклушевського процесу»)

У статті розглянуто переслідування та покарання військових злочинців у Республіці Хорватія за підсумками сербсько-хорватської війни 1990-х років. Описано процес такого переслідування на прикладі матеріалів так званої «миклушевської справи». Висвітлено основні проблеми даного процесу. Виділено його особливості, характер і тривалість. Показано еволюцію даного судового процесу крізь призму зміни поведінки органів правосуддя Хорватії, заходи хорватської влади задля вирішення цих проблем. Проаналізовано долі головних учасників процесу. Встановлено, що «миклушевська справа» виявилась невдалою для тогочасного хорватського правосуддя, показавши його недосконалість. Показано значення цього процесу для сучасної України.

Reflection on the (Un)Power of Men in the Context of Post-war Everyday Life of Croatian War Veterans with Mental Disorders from World War I

U radu se raspravlja o resocijalizaciji hrvatskih branitelja s psihičkim smetnjama iz Prvog svjetskog rata. Analiza se temelji na istraživanju psihijatrijskih povijesti bolesti vojnika koji su se liječili u dvije hrvatske psihijatrijske bolnice od 1919. do 1924. godine. Proces njihove socijalne reintegracije u zajednicu nakon povratka s ratišta razmatra se u odnosu na njihovu nemogućnost ispunjavanja normativnih očekivanja vezanih za rodnu uloge muškaraca. Namjera je bila istražiti je li ta okolnost dijelom pridonijela razvoju osjećaja nemoći kod veterana te posljedično uzrokovala njihova asocijalna ponašanja zbog kojih su bili socijalno isključivani iz svoje matične zajednice.

Češi v „Domovinské válce“ – Slavonie 1991 – 1995

Professional article „Czechs in Domovinska war – Slavonia 1991–1995“ was created as a logical product of the work of the author, which deals with the Czech and Slovak minority in the former Yugoslavia and builds on his previous work looking into the involvement of Czechs and Slovaks to the fight of liberation of the peoples of the former Yugoslavia in World War II. The main theme of the article is the impact of the so-called Domovinska war in Croatia in the years 1991–1995 to the Czech minority in Slavonia and the involvement of the inhabitants of the Czech nationality in the combating in this war. When examining these issues, the author came from archival sources, primarily from materials stored in the archives of the Association of Czechs in the Republic of Croatia in Daruvar, from a few articles written on the subject, the study of contemporary newspapers and interviews and consultations with inhabitants of Daruvar and the surrounding area. The result of the work is not only presented in this article, but also in many other materials and incentives to continue working with regard to the entire Croatia, the Slovak minority and on the participation of Czech and Slovak soldiers in the mission UNPROFOR. From the perspective of the author, this is the „introductional“ work for extended research and publishing activities in the area, he chose.

Names and behavior in a war

We implement a novel empirical strategy for measuring and studying a strong form of nationalism—the willingness to fight and die in a war for national independence—using name choices corresponding to a previous war leader. Based on data on almost half a million soldiers, we first show that having been given a first name that is synonymous with the leader(s) of the Croatian state during World War II predicts volunteering for service in the 1991–1995 Croatian war of independence and dying during the conflict. Next, we use the universe of Croatian birth certificates and the information about nationalism conveyed by first names to suggests that in ex-Yugoslav Croatia, nationalism rose continuously starting in the 1970s and that its rise was curbed in areas where concentration camps were located during WWII. Our evidence on intergenerational transmission of nationalism is consistent with nationalist fathers purposefully reflecting the trade-off between within-family and society-wide transmission channels of political values. We also link the nationalist values we proxy using first name choices to right-wing voting behavior in 2015, 20 years after the war.

Is it easy to kill in war? Emotions and violence in the combat zones of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina (1991-1995)

AbstractThe battlefields are spaces of death and destruction. In the combat zone soldiers fight and kill while witnessing the death of their comrades. These unprecedented life experiences are regularly shaped by strong emotional responses. In this paper I analyse the complex emotional dynamics of fighting and killing in the combat zone. I explore the war-time experiences of ordinary soldiers who fought in the 1991-1995 wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The paper is based on the interviews I conducted with the members of the Croatian Army and the Bosnian Serb Army who had direct experience of the battlefield. The focus is on the relationship between emotions and violence in the theatres of war with a spotlight on the personal experiences of fighting and killing. The paper challenges the existing interpretations of this phenomenon and argues that the killing in war is neither uniformly easy nor unvaryingly difficult but is context-dependent, variable and highly contingent. Furthermore, the acts of fighting and killing do not automatically trigger pre-existing and stable emotions but the violent processes themselves generate distinct emotional dynamics. Rather than simply following the violent actions emotions are in fact often made in the very acts of fighting and killing.

Fear, Humanity and Managing the Heritage of War

Using the concepts of affective community (Ahmed 2015; Hutchison 2016) and affective management of “war heritage” (Logan and Reeves 2009; Gegner and Ziino 2012; Lončar 2014; Stublić 2019), the article examines how social subjects in Western Slavonia – a microlocation with many places of memory and a dense accumulation of historical traumas within them – are constructed as resisting and/or conforming to the dominant hegemonic policy of remembering the Homeland War as the “cornerstone of reasoning” in Croatia (Blanuša 2017). The examples analysed range from the activities of a local “memory agent” and the founder of a digital archive of local history to the reception of a book of testimonies and a documentary on the humanity of Pakrac’s medics in the war (Lessons on Humanity, 2017 and 2019). Based on these examples, I identified different strategies of cultural, pedagogical and ideological re-presentation and re-animation of local war heritage in the social and digital environment. These strategies are different responses to the fear that the feeling of social connection to war events and veterans as symbols of national unity and pride has been ebbing away. However, there has also been a noticeable shift on the Croatian (semi-)periphery from a ceremonial commemorative culture to a digital culture of memory of war, fostered by affective communities which transcend local, ethnic and generational boundaries. The second shift is semantic – the tendency to replace victimological and triumphalist war narratives with those of “humanitarian heroism” and positive war stories about humanity, about helping and rescuing people from the “enemy side”. In conclusion, even though the Croatian “social framework of memory” (Halbwachs 2013) offers different models for transforming fear, pain, violence and the trauma of war into “cultural heritage”, only individuals remember and feel, and very few among them become memory agents and activists of “mnemonic resistance” (Molden 2016) with a significant role in the struggles over the meaning of the past.