Until 1995, Slobodana Radjen’s family lived a peaceful life in their big apartment in the Croatian capital Zagreb. Her father, a petroleum engineer, earned enough for occasional tourist trips and “a house full of toys”.

“We had everything in Zagreb. Our family of five lived an idyllic life there,” Radjen, 29, told BIRN.

As she was just a child when her family lived in Croatia, Radjen admits she doesn’t remember much about it. Some images are still vivid in her mind, while other memories are mixed up with the stories told by her parents and elder siblings.

However, the Radjen family’s serene life in Zagreb was over in 1995, when they were told to leave the apartment.

“One day, my parents started receiving threats. I don’t know whether it was Croatian policemen or soldiers, but they gave us a deadline to leave the apartment,” Radjen said.

Slobodana Radjen. Photo courtesy of Slobodana Radjen.

Several days later, the Radjens had quit their apartment and were in Lapovo, a village in central Serbia, close to the city of Kragujevac. A year later, they moved to Novi Banovci, some 30 kilometres from the capital Belgrade, where the family still lives.

“At least we had our own house and weren’t in such a bad situation like those living at refugee camps, where entire families were accommodated in one small room,” she said.

Slobodana Radjen and her family are among the 250,000 Serbs who left Croatia in 1995, according to the UN refugee agency.

Some 200,000 of them fled the country during and immediately after Operation Storm in August that year, which saw Zagreb’s forces seizing back 18 per cent of the territory which had been under Croatian Serb rebel control since 1991.

At the weekend, Serbian officials commemorated the anniversary of the offensive and President Aleksandar Vucic said that for the last 18 years, Serbia has been afraid to mark Operation Storm as a crime.

“Let me apologise to Krajisnici [Croatian Serbs from the short-lived Republic of Serbian Krajina wartime statelet] for the years of heavy silence. But silence is over in Serbia, be proud of that, be joyful in these days of sorrow because that is proof you will be safe in your house and forever safeguarded,” Vucic said.

Like Radjen and her family, the vast majority of those who fled found refuge in Serbia.

Her father started a tailor’s business soon after they settled down in Novi Banovci, and the entire family was helping out. But it is not her father’s store that comes to her mind when she thinks of these first years in Serbia; it is canned food provided by The Red Cross and “a lack of something sweet to eat, you know how kids like candies”.

She said that her parents suffered the most, however.

“I’ve always felt sorry about them. One moment you have everything, you travel the world, and the next you have nothing,” she explained.

“They worked their fingers to the bone in order to provide me, my brother and sister with a decent life and schooling,” Slobodana, who holds a BA degree in textile design, technology and management, explains.

Neither Radjen nor her parents ever went back to Croatia after 1995. She said she feels a certain distance towards Croats but admitted she would love to go to Croatia one day, especially to Knin, the town where Operation Storm began.

“My heart is in Knin because that is where we are originally from, where it all started centuries ago,” she said, but added that despite the connection she feels, Serbia is her home.

“When I look back, I can say that the word that marked our lives after the war is ‘struggle’,” she continued with a sigh.

“If there had been no war, our lives would have been much easier. But there’s nothing you can do, just move on.”

Fleeing at a moment’s notice

Serbians pay their respects to victims of Operation Storm on Saturday. Photo: BETAPHOTO/DRAGAN GOJIC/EV.

As he agrees to talk to BIRN, a 35-year-old man who lives in Belgrade but is originally from the town of Karlovac in central Croatia, asks not to be identified.

He works for a Serbian state company and fears he might lose his job. He needs a steady income to support his family, so asks to be referred to as Nikola.

Like many others, Nikola’s family is facing eviction from apartments that refugees from the Yugoslav wars squatted in 2008.

Back then, they were owned by Serbia’s Commissariat for Refugees but in 2016 they were given to different people than the ones currently occupying them. Both the refugees and Serbian protest groups are hoping the Commissariat will provide them with alternative housing as they have nowhere else to go.

If this happens, it will be the latest in a series of moves that Nikola’s family have made since they left Karlovac in 1991.

“We knew the war would be terrible, my mum knew. Already in 1991, a lot of Serbs were threatened in Karlovac, and I remember seeing army vehicles around,” said Nikola, whose father was a Yugoslav Army soldier and died during the war.

The family left their apartment in Karlovac at a moment’s notice, Nikola recalled, as a cousin who worked for the police offered to drive them all the way to Serbia. But they had to be quick.

“We didn’t bring anything with us. We left behind a flat full of new furniture, high-quality home appliances, nice pottery,” he said.

In the years that followed, the family of three constantly switched cities and towns.

“If only you knew how many locations we’ve changed so far! We’ve lived in Belgrade, Novi Sad, Novi Banovci, Jagodina, Kragujevac. Sometimes we were moving out because we had no money to pay the rent, sometimes because we were staying at cousins’,” he explained.

Like Slobodana Radjen, none of them has ever returned to Croatia. Nikola said that he is not attached to Karlovac, but would like to visit the family graves and the places where his mother grew up.

Decades after the exodus of Serbs from Croatia and the end of the Yugoslav conflict, Nikola said that he now understands how war happens: “If someone wants it, a war is inevitable and ordinary people have nothing to do with it.”

He said that the war also helped him learn more about people – about Serbs and Croats, but about his fellow refugees as well.

“But I don’t blame anyone for anything. We [his family] are guilty for not going abroad when we could [before the war], to seek a better life. I am only mad at myself,” he concluded.

Return to an uneasy peace

The children of the Vukobratovic family. Photo courtesy of the Vukobratovic family.

The Vukobratovic family left their hometown of Vukovar in Croatia in 1997 in search of a better life, and opened a store in the Serbian city of Smederevo.

But when the business struggled, they decided to go back and live in a cousin’s apartment which had been renovated after the war in Vukovar – a town that was besieged and devastated when it was taken by Serb forces during the war.

When they returned, their eldest son Bojan said he couldn’t tell the difference between Vukovar and Smederevo.

“It all looked like Smederevo; I followed a Serbian programme in school, I talked in ekavica [a type of pronunciation characteristic of Serbia], there was no difference,” Bojan Vukobratovic, who now works as a chef in the coastal city of Rijeka, told BIRN.

Adapting was easy for a 12 year-old boy like him, as Vukovar was small and people mostly knew each other.

But what was not easy back then was the fact that everything was ethnically divided between Croats and Serbs – kindergartens, schools, even cafes. The legacy of the siege and its aftermath had left a remaining impact on Vukovar and its people.

“From time to time there would be scuffles on Saturdays or in front of schools,” Vukobratovic recalled, adding that luckily, such incidents are now rare.

“Now the situation is a bit better. People ignore such [nationalistic] stories and slowly they are realising that politics is poisoning them,” he argued.

Today, 23 years after the war ended, Bojan takes a dim view of huge anniversaries like last weekend’s Operation Storm commemorations. The anniversary of the operation is celebrated as a victory in Croatia, but in Serbia, the commemoration mourns the Serbs victims of the military offensive and the refugees who were displaced by it.

“[Operation] Storm, [Operation] Flash, the fall of Vukovar [to Serb forces] and other events are only used to cover up decisions that politicians don’t want citizens to learn about. With those anniversaries they poison people even more and incite [hate speech], also distracting them from what is happening in the country,” Vukobratovic claimed.

His 20-year-old sister Jovana was born in Smederevo in 1998. Not knowing much about the war and living in a divided town made her apply for a youth camp aiming at fostering relations between children from former Yugoslav countries.

“I wanted to know how I would feel among people of different nationalities and religions,” she told BIRN.

“I will never forget those 12 days, we are like a huge family because wherever I go now, I have someone,” she added.

For Jovana Vukobratovic, who was born after the Yugoslav wars ended in a family displaced from their original home, the conflict appears pointless.

War, she said, is nothing but “a nonsense created by people in which no one wins; everyone is a loser”.

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