Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
weaponsandtodestroyallremainingmilitaryinstallationsastheywent.WhentheYugoslav
People's Army cleared out, they left the Slovenes with their freedom.
In April of 1990, a retired general and historian named Franjo Tu
đ
man—and his highly
nationalistic, right-wing party, the HDZ (Croatian Democratic Union)—won Croatia's first
the HDZ wanted more autonomy from Yugoslavia. But Tu
đ
man's methods were more ex-
treme than those of the gently progressive Slovenes. Tu
đ
man invoked the spirit of the
Ustaše, who had ruthlessly run Croatia's puppet government under the Nazis. He removed
mention of the Serbs as equal citizens of the new nation. He reintroduced symbols that had
been embraced by the Ustaše, including the red-and-white checkerboard flag and the kuna
currency. (While many of these symbols predated the Ustaše by centuries, they had become
irrevocably tainted by their association with the Ustaše.) The 600,000 Serbs living in Croa-
tia, mindful that their grandparents had been massacred by the Ustaše, saw the writing on
the wall and began to rise up.
The first conflicts were in the Serb-dominated Croatian city of Knin. Tu
đ
man had de-
creed that Croatia's policemen must wear a new uniform, which was strikingly similar
to Nazi-era Ustaše garb. Infuriated by this slap in the face, and prodded by Slobodan
Miloševi
ć
's rhetoric, Serb police officers in Knin refused. Over the next few months, tense
negotiations ensued. Serbs from Knin and elsewhere began the so-called “tree trunk re-
volution”—blocking important Croatian tourist roads to the coast with logs and other bar-
riers. Meanwhile, the Croatian government—after being denied support from the United
States—illegally purchased truckloads of guns from Hungary. (A UN weapons embargo,
which was designed to prevent the outbreak of violence, had little effect on the Serb-dom-
inated Yugoslav People's Army, which already had its own arsenal. But it was devastating
to separatist Croatian and—later—Bosnian forces, which were just beginning to build their
armies.) Croatian policemen and Serb irregulars from Knin fired the first shots of the con-
flict on Easter Sunday 1991 at Plitvice Lakes National Park.
By the time Croatia declared its independence (on June 25, 1991—the same day as
Slovenia), it was already embroiled in the beginnings of a bloody war. Croatia's more than
half-millionSerbresidentsimmediately declaredtheirownindependencefromCroatia.The
Yugoslav People's Army (now dominated by Serbs, as many Croats and Slovenes had de-
fected) swept in, ostensibly to put down the Croat rebellion and keep the nation togeth-
er. The ill-prepared Croatian resistance, made up mostly of policemen and a few soldiers
who defected from the People's Army, were quickly overwhelmed. The Serbs gained con-
trol over the parts of inland Croatia where they were in the majority: a large swath around
the Bosnian border (including Plitvice) and part of Croatia's inland panhandle (the region
ofSlavonia).Theycalledthisterritory—aboutaquarterofCroatia—the
Republic of Serbi-
