A Wake Up Call in Croatia: Ute Deseniss-Gros

Sleep proved impossible for me. Heavy firing went on through the night. As I was in a war zone, perhaps this seems not so surprising. The surprise came in the morning when I learned that the shooting had only been a celebration in honor of a Coptic saint.

It was only my third day in Croatia. I had arrived in Zagreb as the new head of Croatia office in the middle of December 1994 and soon after found myself on the road to Knin, the headquarters of the self-declared Republic of the Serbian Krajina. The trip from Zagreb to Knin was only 300 kms but took us over 6 hours, due to heavy snow and constant stops at checkpoints.

Croatia had declared its independence on 25 June 1991, the second of former Yugoslavia’s provinces to do so as the country broke apart. In Croatia itself however the minority Serb population felt rolled over, and so quickly declared their own independence from Croatia. In August 1991 Serbs started military action from Dubrovnik in the south to Slavonski Brod and Osijek in the north, in the process capturing about one-third of Croatia’s territory.

Krajina - Serb held parts of Croatia

I was in Knin partly to broker the transit of a humanitarian convoy to Bihac, a Bosnian town totally encircled by the breakaway Serb republic. This was the story all over former Yugoslavia, a ‘Russian doll’ patchwork of breakaways inside other breakaways inside of still other breakaway ‘republics’.

When we arrived for the meeting with local officials, we were stopped and questioned every 10 meters. Once inside, there was a frightening array of guns and soldiers everywhere.

After explaining the reasons for my visit, the officials made it clear that they considered themselves completely independent from Croatia. I was instructed by his staff to call the military leader of the area as ‘Prime Minister’. I decided instead to simply address him as ‘Your Excellency’. He and his staff set out a long list of what they expected from UNICEF - medicines and equipment for the hospital, vaccines (so long as they had not been produced in Croatia), school books printed in Serbian. I made no promises, explaining that I had just arrived and that they should send an official request to our Area Representative.

We travelled back to Zagreb by a longer but easier coastal road. The trip had introduced me to both the beauty and the complexity of Croatia, and to the magnitude of problems we in UNICEF needed to deal with - not simply the suffering of children on all sides of the war, but also the bitter antagonism between Serbs and Croats who had not long before been neighbors.

My arrival a few days earlier in Zagreb had come at a good moment as it coincided with an all-day meeting with all of our government counterparts for a review of the 1995 Plan of Action. I followed up on this meeting in January with a round of courtesy calls with my project staff to each of the government partners.

Ute as Head of UNICEF Croatia

I recall my surprise, or perhaps I should say ‘shock’, that some officials questioned why UNICEF was still in the country. Despite the fact that the war was all around them, and one third of their country was occupied by Serb forces, in their view the war was over. “Concentrate on Africa, or other places where your assistance is really needed,” they said. “In our country every child goes to school, we have no illiterates, all our children are vaccinated and we even produce the vaccines. UNICEF is wasting its time here.”

Having by then seen much of the country and the conditions in which many families lived, I was shocked by the ignorance of some officials to the realities outside the capital. Clearly some of our partners were continuing to live in their former socialist bubbles of reality with a great deal of self-satisfaction.

All that arrogance disappeared quickly in May when rockets started hitting central Zagreb. The skyscraper building housing both the UNICEF Area and the Croatia Country office became a target, but so did the Children’s Hospital ‘Klaiceva’ and other key institutions in the center of the city. Other Serb attacks hit many of the frontline cities with terrible damage to schools and hospitals. The worst was in Vinkovci.

Like many in former Yugoslavia, Croats were accustomed to head for the beaches along the Adriatic in summer. Not that year! In July Dubrovnik and its surroundings were bombarded.

The response came in August when Croat forces overwhelmed the Serbian enclaves. One result was that some 150,000 ethnic Serbs fled the area to Serbia and Serbian held parts of Bosnia. In turn 20,000 Croats were expelled from Vojvodina and Vojic. The country was already groaning under the load of 400,000 earlier refugees from parts of Serbia and Bosnia.

UNICEF had provided emergency assistance since the war began 1991, but now the government partners were desperate. They turned to UNICEF for everything. In the areas previously held by the breakaway Serbs, public services had completely stopped. There were no equipped health facilities, schools were closed, and no one could find a job.

Fortunately UNICEF and its partners were there and did provide emergency supplies, surgical equipment, psychosocial kits for children and care providers, schools in a box, and a mine awareness program. Of course, we and our partners had to completely rewrite the 1995 Plan of Action to cover the dramatic new needs of the ‘liberated’ areas.

On 21 November 1995 in Dayton/Ohio the countries of former Yugoslavia finally reached agreement on a peace treaty. The period of ‘Peace without Bullets’ had finally arrived.

Ute Deseniss-Gros was the Head of UNICEF Office in Croatia from December 1994 - Dec.1998