Plitvice Lakes incident
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The Plitvice Lakes incident of March 1991 (known in Croatian as "Plitvice Bloody Easter", Krvavi Uskrs na Plitvicama / Plitvički Krvavi Uskrs) was a clash between security forces of the Republic of Croatia and armed Serb separatists. It resulted in two deaths – one on each side – and contributed significantly to the worsening ethnic tensions that were to be at the heart of the subsequent Croatian War of Independence.
| Croatian War of Independence |
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| Plitvice Lakes - Borovo Selo - Vukovar - Gospić - Otkos 10 - Orkan 91 - Miljevci - Maslenica - Medak Pocket - Flash - Storm |
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[edit] Background
In May 1990 the HDZ party led by Franjo Tuđman won Croatia's first post-communist multi-party elections. Tuđman pursued a strongly Croatian nationalist course, advocating independence from Yugoslavia. Much of Croatia's large Serb minority was opposed to Tuđman's policies, regarding him as anti-Serb, and sought to remain within Yugoslavia. Following Tuđman's election, Croatian Serb nationalists in the Krajina region of Croatia (bordering western Bosnia and Hercegovina) launched an armed uprising in which Croatian government officials were forcibly expelled or excluded from a wide area of the Krajina. Croatian government property was seized throughout the region and handed over to the control of local Krajina Serb municipalities or the newly established "Serbian National Council" led by Milan Babić (later to become the government of the breakaway Republic of Serbian Krajina). The process did not happen overnight but took a considerable amount of time – well over a year – to complete.
The Plitvice Lakes are a scenic area and national park of Croatia, located in the Croatian Krajina near the Bosnian border, about 150 km south of the Croatian capital Zagreb. Prior to 1995, the surrounding area was primarily Serb-populated and the lakes were on the edge of the area controlled by the Krajina Serbs. The national park was, however, principally under the control of Croatians loyal to the Zagreb government.
[edit] Conflict at Plitvice
On 29 March 1991, the Plitvice Lakes management was expelled by armed Krajina Serbs, allegedly supported by paramilitary volunteers from Serbia proper under the command of Vojislav Šešelj. [1] The region itself is relatively sparsely populated and there was no obvious threat to local Serbs. It has been suggested that, instead, the Serb seizure of the park may have been motivated by a desire to control the strategic road that ran north-south through the park, linking the Serb communities in the Lika and Banija regions. [2] The loss of the national park was a serious blow to Croatian national pride and the government's strategic position in the Krajina. Tuđman's government decided to retake the park by force.
On Easter Sunday, 31 March 1991, Croatian police and paramilitary troops from the Croatian Ministry of the Interior (MUP) entered the national park to expel the rebel Serb forces. Serb paramilitaries ambushed a bus carrying Croatian police into the national park on the road north of Korenica, sparking a day-long gun battle between the two sides. During the fighting, two people – one Croatian and one Serb policeman – were killed. Twenty other people were injured and twenty-nine Krajina Serb paramilitaries and policemen were taken prisoner by Croatian forces. [3] [4] Among the prisoners was Goran Hadžić, later to become the President of the Republic of Serbian Krajina. [2]
The violence was greeted with alarm by Yugoslavia's collective Presidency, which met on the night of 31 March to discuss the situation at Plitvice. At the insistence of Serbia's representative on the Presidency, Borislav Jović, but against the wishes of Slovenia and Croatia, the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) was ordered to intervene to create a buffer zone between the two sides and end the clashes. The JNA units – commanded, ironically, by a Croatian colonel – moved in the following day. [5] The Serbian parliament also met in emergency session, treating the clashes as a virtual casus belli and voting to offer the Krajina Serbs "all necessary help" in their conflict with Zagreb. [2]
On 2 April, the JNA ordered the Croatian government's special police units to leave the national park, which they did. [6] General Andrija Rešeta, in overall command of the operation, told the media that his men were "protecting neither side" and were there only to prevent "ethnic confrontations" for as long as was necessary. However, the Croatian government reacted with fury to the JNA move. Tuđman's senior aide Mario Nobilo claimed that the JNA had "told us quite literally that if we do not evacuate Plitvice they will liquidate our police" and Tuđman himself gave a warning on Croatian radio that if the army continued its activities it would be regarded as a hostile army of occupation. [2]
Although the JNA's intervention successfully brought an end to the fighting, it had the effect of consolidated the front lines in the region and preventing any further Croatian operations against the rebel Serbs. A few months later, the outbreak of full-scale war resulted in the national park falling firmly into Krajina Serb hands, this time fully and overtly supported by the JNA. Government control of the Plitvice Lakes was not finally restored until after Operation Storm in August 1995.
[edit] Consequences
The Plitvice Lakes incident had important consequences for both Serbs and Croats. The fatalities were among the first in the Serb-Croatian conflict and contributed to radicalisation on both sides. Nationalist hard-liners and extremists cited the clash as indicating the need to adopt radical solutions, while moderate politicians arguing for negotiations and non-violent solutions lost influence. [7]
The dead on both sides were treated as martyrs by their respective populations. Josip Jović, the Croatian policeman killed at Plitvice, was feted by the Croatian media as the "first victim of the Croatian Homeland War", while his dead Serb counterpart Rajko Vukadinović was similarly feted by the Croatian Serbs and the Serbian media as having died to defend Serbian land from the Croatian "Ustashas".
The incident had wider political and military consequences as well. On 1 April 1991, partly in response to the events at Plitvice, the Krajina Serb authorities unilaterally declared the self-declared "Serbian Autonomous District of Krajina" to be independent of Croatia and announced that it would join (or, more precisely, not leave) Yugoslavia. In other Serb communities around Croatia, barricades were erected to block any Croatian attempts to reassert government control. In eastern Slavonia, this led to a series of events that was to culminate in the notorious Borovo Selo killings two months later.
[edit] References
- ^ International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, The Prosecutor against Vojislav Seselj: Indictment, 15 January 2003
- ^ a b c d Tim Judah, The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, p. 175-76, 244. (Yale University Press, 2001)
- ^ Ivo Goldstein, Croatia: A History, p. 220. (C. Hurst & Co, 2000)
- ^ Mihailo Crnobrnja, The Yugoslav Drama, p. 157. (McGill-Queens University Press, 1996)
- ^ Christopher Bennett, Yugoslavia's Bloody Collapse, p. 150. (C. Hurst & Co, 1995)
- ^ Viktor Meier, Yugoslavia: A History of Its Demise, p. 171. (Routledge, 1999)
- ^ Hannes Grandits & Carolin Leutloff, "Discourses, actors, violence: the organisation of war-escalation in the Krajina region of Croatia 1990-91", p. 36, in Jan Koehler, Potentials of Disorder: Explaining Conflict and Stability in the Caucasus and in the Former Yugoslavia. (Manchester University Press, 2003
