AN ARMY IN SEARCH OF A STATE

Anne McElvoy finds it hard to know which is worse — Serbian brutality or Croatian stupidity Zagreb THE grandmothers of eastern Croatia are an incongruous sight, trapped in the fake luxury of the Intercontinental Hotel. Black scarves tightly knotted, skirts billow- ing behind them, they hug their bulky cardigans tight around them as if to ward off the memory of what has been and what is yet to come. One has hung her handbag over the lumpen abstract sculpture in the lobby and perched herself at its foot. Here she takes out her knitting and clicks away furiously, pausing only to wipe away a stray tear. On the notice board, which in other days channelled foreign businessmen to their respective conference halls, the `Guests from Vukovar' are bidden to breakfast in a back room, away from the rest of us. A pointless segregation: the Intercontinental's clients now consist solely of refugees and journalists: no surer indi- cation that a country is at war.

If we needed any further reminder, a note from the management in every room begins, 'Unfortunately, our country is being severely attacked by the "Federal Army" by all weapons from land and air . . .' and proceeds with instructions on keeping to the black-out rules at night: `Otherwise we shall feel obliged to discon- nect your electricity.'

The first refugees arrived a few days after the fall of Vukovar in mid-Novem- ber, transported from cellars, where they had spent weeks cowering from the army's attentions, through the ruins of their town and into this strange haven of chrome chandeliers and haughty receptionists, whose pursed lips make clear that they never thought they would have to dispense rooms with a view to peasant families from remote areas near the Serbian border. Since then, they have been joined by oth- ers from Zadar on the Adriatic coast, and Slunj, a medium-sized town south of Zagreb, from where the entire population fled and which is now being repopulated by Serbs.

These are the fortunate ones: their accommodation is warm and food is pro- vided. Those arriving later are sent to coastal hotels, many without heating and scarcely any cooking facilities. Even here, the children are pale, their mothers fraught with anxiety and their fathers morose. They have lost everything. Vuko- var is in ruins. It is Croatia's Carthage, a triumph of destruction.

Alen Voric, aged eight, sits close beside his mother and recalls his last day in Vukovar: 'We came out of the cellar and went in a bus and it went to our house but it had fallen down,' he explains. Asked who is to blame, he replies, 'The men with beards,' and adds that when he grows up, he will fight Serbs.

The grandmothers, at first sight pitiable, are in fact the most resilient. Amalia Josipovic is 78 and fled the village of Svin- jarevci near Vukovar, together with three elderly friends, when the army rolled in. `We heard the tanks coming and ran for the fields,' she says. 'They shot at the peo- ple trying to leave by car so we went five kilometres through the cornfields on foot.' She has no relatives to look after her in Zagreb and has been told that she will be resettled on the coast, at which thought she displays the first sign of fear. She has lived in the village all her life and has never seen the sea.

Svinjarevci has had a mixed Serb-Croat- ian population since the Germans were driven out after the war. 'If the politicians tell you that we could not live together, they are lying,' she said. 'We shared our plots of land, looked after the fowl togeth- er. Now they have fled to Serbia where they have nothing and we have fled to Zagreb where we have nothing. So no one is at home and no one is happy. What is the point?'

It is a question asked with increasing fre- quency on both sides in the conflict. Croat- ia's hapless president, Franjo Tudjman, who has long lost touch with the feelings of his people (if he was ever in touch to start with), has prosecuted a strategy of incom- petence threaded with steely cynicism. President Tudjman is an old man in a hurry, and he tried to gain in a few weeks for Croatia the independence it had sought for eight centuries. He led the country into a war for which it was materially and men- tally unprepared, against an enemy whose aggressive capability and will were already well documented. Against the warnings of his strategic advisers, he tried to fight a defensive war, from the start banking on early intervention by Europe which did not come.

Croatia's president has thrown the lives of many of his country's young men away for a rash dream of independence without concern for the price involved. His popu- larity has ebbed drastically in the last weeks — in the front-line areas, they snarl at the very mention of his name. His television addresses are fiascos, paranoid ramblings about Serb infiltration accompanied by rhetoric about the blood of the dead nour- ishing a new Croatia. He is kept afloat by the war, but his rule is already considered by most of his population to have been a failure. Ten thousand dead, half a million refugees and a third of the republic's terri- tory controlled by the enemy — an appalling balance with which to end the year. The manner in which Croatia has fought for its independence will probably have lost it territory for ever. As one wit here remarked, a future film of President Tudjman's life could well be entitled, `Honey, I Shrunk the Country'.

While covering the war over the last six months, one of the most depressing specta- cles has been Zagreb's slide from a proud and smart Habsburg city, its fashions, atti- tudes and attentions turned towards the West, into a militarised Balkan strudel of endless conspiracy theories and gun-cul- ture, while at the same time averting its gaze from the true plight of Dalmatia, Slavonia and even the nearby central front.

At the Saloon Bar disco, favoured by the nearest thing here to the jeunesse dot*, in their Italian jackets and mock-gold ear- rings, national guardsmen are politely requested to leave their rifles in the cloak- room. There, each rifle has a raffle ticket stuck to it to avoid confusion. The fighters from the ultra-right Croatian Defence Force whose hand-grenades dangle from their belts, clanking like Christmas tree baubles, swagger into the cosy bars of the old town demanding attention. Zagreb has not been mobilised, so this is more style than substance. The wearers are in their late teens, boy-men in black bandanas, outsize crucifixes and layers of co-ordinat- ed combat gear. Here Narcissus goes to war only sometimes and preferably not on a Friday night. 'You don't like dancing and kissing better than war-talking?' enquired one reveller, jiving away unself-consciously in the uniform of the Black Legion special fighters.

Apart from the October air attack on the presidential palace, the capital has remained unscathed by the fighting. Thirty miles south along the Kupa river (the bor- der of 'Greater Serbia' up to which the army and Serb irregulars have advanced), ragged fighters blast back inadequate artillery at enemy rockets. It is a different world.

In the frontline village of Letivovac, the doctor bandages men, fills them with pain- killers donated in job lots from Germany, and watches them hobble back to the killing fields in the no-man's land on the far bank. 'They are not fit to fight,' he said. `But they must. If the Serbs come across the river here, they will be drinking wine in Zagreb in two weeks.'

There is nothing more incongruous here than the intrusion of normality. On the anniversary of Mozart's death, Zagreb's opera-lovers struggled through the sand- bags piled high outside the theatre for a game production of Figarov Pir — The Marriage of Figaro. It was not the most sta- ble of performances, which is scarcely sur- prising as 30 of the theatre's staff, ranging from lighting director to lead actor, have disappeared to the frontline; the bass and baritone who were hired from Serbia refused to stay once the fighting started.

Still, the music flooded our conscious- ness, driving out the ugliness outside. And then Cherubino was marched off to fight — 'What a glorious thing is war' — and the entire audience started uneasily from its reverie.

And what of the other side? Many Ser- bian mothers will not see their sons on the Orthodox Christmas of the 7th of January. Slobodan Milosevic has gone to great lengths to hide from his own people the extent of casualties. The number of pages devoted to death announcements in the back of Politika swelled in the autumn only to be suddenly and abruptly reduced again. What happens to those the distraught fam- ilies send in vain? They are, presumably, simply sent back or ignored.

So far the war is going Mr Milosevic's way, but it will not do so for much longer. He has turned Serbia into a war-machine but the young men show less and less incli- nation to be fed into it, especially now that the fighting is taking place well inside Croatian territory. Serbs, explained one Belgrade journalist who opposes the war, will fight to the death to defend their terri- tory, but deep in their peasant hearts they know that they are now being forced to do battle in the wrong place. Only a handful believe in the goal of a Greater Serbia. In Belgrade, many sleep in a different apart- ment every night to avoid the call-up. Female decoys are used to lure men to the door, claiming to be old girlfriends or long-lost cousins. When the unwilling con- script emerges, two recruiting officers emerge from the shadows and block his way back into the apartment.

The Serb irregulars have been widely portrayed as the murderous villains of the piece so far, steeped in a tradition of antipathy to Croatians, fuelled by the ghastly folk-memories of the Ustasha mas- sacres of the last war and as hard and unforgiving as the mountainous terrain they inhabit.

But it is Yugoslavia's National Army (JNA) which has bombed from the air, it is the National Army which has armed the irregulars, supplementing the weapons of an old ethnic feud with those of random destruction. It became involved in the summer, claiming to be a buffer force between the warring factions. A lot of blood has flown since then and it is now clearly in its interests, or rather that of generals, that this war continues.

Yet the first signs of disintegration are there. General Marjan Cad, commander of the JNA's 13th Corps, watched the last of his troops leave Rijeka in the largest peaceful pull-out from Croatia, at the beginning of the month. He is staying behind, in protest at the army's role in the conflict, ending a 40-year military career rather than accompany his troops to a new base in Bosnia.

The general is a vast map, every dimen- sion of his body seemingly half as large again as a human, encased in acres of blue serge uniform. And incapable, like a lot of men in mighty, old-fashioned armies like the JNA, of conversing in anything other than a parade-ground bellow. 'This is not the army I joined as a 14-year-old at mili- tary school,' he thundered. 'A man can choose only once in his life what he is to be_ I am a soldier and I always will be. But my task in this army is over. I want to leave it with my honour intact.'

Over his shoulder, a portrait of a youth- ful Marshall Tito looked down. I had not expected to like the general, but he was somehow irresistible in his isolation, torn between his individual conviction that the war was wrong and loyalty to the army which was the foundation of his moral uni- verse. His life was over the day his troops left. He would never denounce his army, but neither would he continue within it. He was a warrior through and through, schooled in Tito's doctrine of total defence against Nato and the Warsaw Pact. But this was the war he had never been trained to fight: the war against his own people. He will stay in Rijeka in retirement, earning grudging approval from the residents but few friends. It is not even certain whether his pension will arrive from Belgrade. `What would Marshal Tito have thought of the current state of Yugoslavia?' I asked him. His eyes filled with tears. There was no answer.

And I reflected that if the army's actions are too much for General Cad to stomach after 40 years of service in the JNA's ranks, we in Europe should blush with shame at our studied impartiality.

Yugoslavia is no longer a state which needs an army, but an-army in search of a state. Contrary to popular depiction, the interests of the JNA and Serbia are not identical; it just happens that they have coincided in the present exigency. There are few certainties at the end of 1991 in Yugoslavia except that Yugoslavia itself is dead.

Even if one proceeds from the unpalat- able assumption that the JNA secures a military victory in Croatia, it has an inglori- ous future as Greater Serbia's private army, defending territories in which guer- rilla warfare will thrive. It is an overblown force, employing some half a million peo- ple and unwilling to abandon the fat and comfortable living to which it grew accus- tomed under Tito. Meanwhile, the war is already making hefty inroads into the Ser- bian economy and barely a week goes by without the parliament in Belgrade approv- ing some 'loan' or other from the country's households to finance the war. Even dis- counting the inner political turmoil which comes of being headed by a retrogressive dictator like Milosevic, the country's eco- nomic future is grim. Already, we hear whispers of the next Balkan battle: the civil war inside Serbia.

Anne McElvoy is on the staff of the Times.

`It's a taste I think I can say I've acquired.'