Free Blood and Belonging by Michael Ignatieff

Everywhere in Krajina, the democracy of violence rules.
    At night, the Serbs of Krajina sit in bunkers at the entrance of their villages with their guns trained down the lonely roads, waiting for the Croats to come at them. It’s a village war, and the front line often runs right between two back gardens. One rainy night I went out to the front lines about thirty kilometers from Vukovar. With the faint glow of theCroat positions in Vinkovci clearly visible, I scuttled to the Serbian trenches under washing lines, over garden fences, past old discarded washbasins and newly hoed vegetable gardens. When I reached the safety of the Serb bunker, I could hear Croatian music from the other side, mixed with the grunting of Serbian pigs in the sty next door.
    From their positions, the Serbs can see the homes they were forced to flee; they can see their neighbors in their gunsights. One paramilitary called Chobi Chetnik, with a sign reading “Serbia: Liberty or Death” on his battledress, got on the CB radio at two in the morning to taunt the Ustashe a hundred meters away. This is a war where the enemies went to school together, worked in the same haulage company, and now talk on the CB every night, laughing, taunting, telling jokes. Then they hang up and try to line each other up in their gunsights.
    And so it goes, night after night, neither peace nor war, the two sides straining at the leash, taunting and testing each other, probing each other’s positions with small-arms fire and the occasional lob of a mortar or artillery shell.
    The Serb positions are defended by ex-Yugoslav army officers, Dad’s Army village volunteers, and wild Chetnik paramilitaries. Without the UN, they know, they would be quickly overrun. You can see their desperation in the way they drink, and in the listless fatalism that steals over their faces when the bravado of the bunker dies away.
    The Croat forward lines, which I visited at Osijek, thirty kilometers from Vukovar, look altogether more impressive. They are dug in behind a stretch of dynamited motorway, and they seem to be both more disciplined and more belligerent than the Serbs. They believe the UN is ratifying the permanent occupation of a third of their country, and themen in their flak jackets and helmets wave their Zastava automatics in the direction of the Serbian lines and tell you the Croatian flag will soon be flying over Vukovar. More front-line bravado perhaps, but I left both sides feeling that the cease-fire in eastern Slavonia hangs by a thread.
    The Serbs in their bunkers have a case that deserves to be heard. In Yugoslavia, they were a protected constitutional nation. In an independent Croatia, they were reduced to a national minority in a state with a genocidal past. Without a state of their own, the Serbs repeat over and over, they face extermination again. The Serbian war in Bosnia is designed to give them such a state, by providing a unified land corridor from Serbia proper, connecting up the Serbian lands in western, central, and southern Croatia. Without such a corridor, the Croatian Serbs know they will not survive, and until such a corridor is secure they live from day to day in a state of armed paranoia. There is a currency and there is a flag, but there is no state in Krajina, merely a jungle. And they have no sure protector. For all their bravado, they know they cannot count on MiloÅ¡ević. If the price of their defense becomes too high for Serbia proper, the Krajinans know they will be sold down the river.
    The Serbian case would be more convincing if they were less persuaded that the whole world, especially foreign journalists, is against them. After you have had your car commandeered by drunken paramilitaries, after you have been shot at and had your life threatened, a certain indifference to their cause tends to steal over you.
    The war zones of eastern Slavonia, and Vukovar in particular, leave behind an unforgettable impression of historical