Vucic, Dodik Lay Wreaths at Petrovac Road Massacre Site

President of Serbia Aleksandar Vucic and SNSD leader Milorad Dodik laid wreaths today at the memorial cross near the village of Janjila, in the municipality of Bosanski Petrovac, at the site where a convoy of Serb refugees was struck from the air 31 years ago. Petrovac Road is not, for Serbia, a place measured only by the number of dead: four Croatian officers are being tried in absentia in Belgrade over the attack, and Zagreb has already made clear it will not extradite them, so the wreath laying at Janjila also serves as a reminder that one court case has gone nowhere.

Interior Minister of Republika Srpska Zeljko Budimir joined the wreath laying at the memorial cross. The tour began this morning at Rmanj Monastery in Martin Brod, which we reported on earlier, continued in Drvar, and ends at a gathering in Sitnica near Ribnik.

What happened on Petrovac Road on August 7, 1995

Three days after Operation Storm began, a Croatian air force jet attacked from the air a column of civilians moving from the Republic of Serb Krajina toward Banja Luka. Twelve civilians were killed, four of them children, and more than 50 people were wounded, most of them children.

At the memorial cross, Vucic named the families wiped out that morning:

Whole families died here: Drca, Dubajic, Kovacevic, Vukovic, Stjelja, when a Croatian MiG-21 came in, first strafing with unguided rounds, then, once the pilot had spotted the convoy, he circled twice, scouted it all out, came back, and when even that was not enough, he dropped a bomb as well.

Among the identified victims were:

• Darinka Drca (68), her grandson Jovica Drca (6) and granddaughter Mirjana Dubajic (21)
• Nevenka Rajic (11) and her brother Zarko Rajic (9)
• Krstan Vukovic (44) and his son Darko Vukovic (13)
• Branko Stjelja (72) and his son Mirko Stjelja (34)

Danijela Vukovic, who lost her father Krstan and her brother Darko that morning, wrote down her memory of the day like this:

Let it be remembered that justice never came. I was sitting outside our building. I was eleven years old. I did not know it was the last time I would sit there as a child. Tractors kept passing by, slowly, heavily. People were not looking at us. They stared straight ahead, into nothing, as if they already knew. That day I watched a neighbor kill a neighbor. Without a word. Without an explanation.

Her brother Darko was not yet thirteen. The truck their father was driving, carrying other people, was among the vehicles hit.

Why has no one answered for the Petrovac Road killings?

Because no court, not The Hague, not Croatia, not Bosnia and Herzegovina, has ever brought the attack to a verdict. The case against the four Croatian officers is being heard in Belgrade, but with no defendants in the courtroom. Vucic recalled today how Zagreb reacted the last time he raised the case, saying the message back then was that the Croatian officers were safe in Croatia and that nothing would happen to them.

Dodik shifted the focus to the question of territory, which matters legally because it determines who had jurisdiction over the convoy at the moment of the attack:

The refugee convoy had left Croatian territory and was in the territory of Republika Srpska when it was bombed.

The SNSD leader described the attack as treacherous. He said the Croatian pilot had coldly fired on the defenseless, on the elderly, women and children, and that this, in his words, speaks to a pathological hatred among Croatian soldiers and within the Croatian system toward Serbs.

A memorial chapel that cannot be finished

The memorial at Janjila was partly funded from the Serbian state budget, but construction has stalled. Vucic explained that the chapel cannot be completed because that stretch of land is earmarked for a planned expressway, and he said he would ask the local bishop to allow the memorial to be moved about a hundred meters. It is a concrete administrative snag rarely mentioned on days of remembrance, yet it will decide whether the memorial site stays on that route at all.

The numbers behind a single day

Figures from Veritas show the scale of the wider operation. Operation Storm and its aftermath killed or left missing 1,904 Serbs, 1,250 of them civilians, with roughly three quarters of them over 60 years old. More than 220,000 Serbs from Krajina were driven out of Banija, Lika, Kordun and northern Dalmatia. Petrovac Road, in other words, was one hour inside an operation that lasted for days, yet it remains its most recognizable image.

A message about military strength, delivered at the memorial cross

At the same site, Vucic spoke about relations in the region and said today’s Serbian Army is many times stronger than the former Yugoslav People’s Army:

We are not touching anyone, we are not attacking anyone, but we will always be able to protect ourselves, our country and our people. That is all. And that is why I am certain there will be peace, because we do not want to attack anyone.

Asked how certain peace in the region is today, he said there would be no war precisely because of that strength:

God knows who might want it, the way they talk about it in the cafes, about a second half, but that will not happen because we are far stronger now than we used to be, you will notice, across the territory of the former Yugoslavia.

A sentence like that, spoken at a memorial cross, carries different weight than the same sentence from a podium in Belgrade, and that is how it will be read in offices in Zagreb and in Brussels as well. Vucic said he would not apologize for having stopped on Petrovac Road to lay down a flower.

The central commemoration of the Day of Remembrance for the victims of Operation Storm is set for August 4 in Mrkonjic Grad, where the president of Serbia has said he will strike a different tone and speak, in his own words, about the mistakes made by the Serbian side as well. Until then, Petrovac Road remains what it was this morning too: a place with a wreath, with names, and without a verdict.