Vukovar Film Celebrates Peace in Post-Conflict Croatian City

On the anniversary of the day in 1995 when the last territory occupied by Serb rebel forces in Croatia's Baranja and Eastern Slavonia region during the war was finally returned to government control, a film screening was held in the city of Vukovar to mark the peaceful reintegration.

The film, 'I Choose Vukovar' ('Biram Vukovar'), produced by Croatian Radiotelevision, HRT, directed by Hana Gelb with a script by journalist Barbara Matejcic, who has also written for BIRN, was shown at the European House Vukovar on Sunday.

It features interviews with residents of Vukovar, which lies in the Baranja and Eastern Slavonia region, about the reasons why they returned to the city after the war or decided to move there for the first time, and how they see life today in this post-conflict, multi-ethnic environment.

Matejcic said that HRT decided to make the film based on a publication she worked on for the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, 'The Faces of Peaceful Reintegration - Stories of Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times', which was also produced to mark the anniversary of the peaceful reintegration.

"The idea was to look at the big narratives and the big political agreements, something that is later read as history, through the micro-perspective of people and citizens," she explained.

Photo: Barbara Matejcic.

Although the war ended in 1995 and the Baranja and Eastern Slavonia region was reintegrated into Croatia in 1998, ethnic divisions remain in Vukovar, which was violently besieged for three months and then seized by the Yugoslav People's Army and Serbian paramilitaries.

Issues like the use of Cyrillic script by the Serb minority, who make up just under 20 per cent of the local population, have sometimes caused...