It's No Accident

Lipovac is a tiny village near the Serbian border where my Croatian in-laws live (the Bosnian Serb in-laws mostly live in Canada).

When the Serb-dominated "Yugoslav" Army advanced here in 1991, the entire population fled. It was effectively a no-man's-land for the duration of the war, and was gutted and destroyed. When Croatia took it, the government decided to rebuild it as a sort of model village, situated as it is so close to the Serbian and Bosnian borders. Understandably, the few Serbs who had lived here before the war decided not to return.

Elsewhere in Slavonia and Krajina, the war had the neighbor-against-neighbor quality that was soon to characterize the bloodier fighting in Bosnia. When Croatia declared independence, Croatian Serbs largely welcomed the invasion of the Serbian army and allied paramilitaries. On one drive last night -- from the larger town of Vinkovci to this remote village -- we passed a schoolhouse that was once the regional headquarters of Arkan (nom de guerre of Željko Ražnjatović, arguably the most psychotic of Serb war criminals). The conflict in Croatia soon developed into a stalemate as the two sides awaited the outcome of the Bosnian debacle, and when everything was settled in 1995, the Croatians expelled virtually all Serbs living in Slavonia and Krajina -- an estimated 200,000 people.

Village life now is the kind of rural idyll that intellectuals throughout history have longed for until they got bored with it. Marina is anxious that we not take a walk in the garden for fear that there might be landmines, and she's probably right. Even though this is a well-populated area and supposedly cleared, there are active minefields just outside of town with skull-and-crossbones signs to warn the unwary. Rain and soil erosion are bound to move some of the unexploded mines, and it seems inevitable that there will be a few unhappy accidents a year from now until the end of time. Other than that, though, there's an absence of excitement, and I'm sure people here are grateful for the quiet. This year the family pig had a prodigious and adorable brood, though the nearby smokehouse presages their eventual fate, since it houses the (tasty) remains of their relatives from last year.