SlAVENKA
DRAKULIC
Letter from Croatia
By now, thanks to live television broadcasting of the war in former
Yugoslavia, there is much less need to explain what or where Croatia is:
an independent state between Slovenia and Serbia, at the southeast end of
Central Europe. As Croatia was once a province in the Austro-Hungarian
empire, Croats themselves like to think they are culturally and tradition–
ally a part of Western Europe and that getting out of Yugoslavia naturally
means returning to Europe. But it seems that Western Europe is not
overjoyed at the prospect of widening the family with such a problematic
relative so soon: poverty, refugees, unemployment, lack of democracy,
poor prospects for profitable investment - all these are reasons for the
West to figure that perhaps it is still better to keep Croatia standing on its
doorstep like an illegitimate child. Provided with new passports - blue to
be sure, no longer Yugoslav red - Croats are now confronted with the
unpleasant faces of police and customs officers on the borders of Western
countries, most of which also require visas. The sad fact is that Croatia is
now identified with the pictures of horror that CNN, Sky News, and
other media dispatched to every corner of the globe almost every day last
winter; with pictures of Dubrovnik, this time shelled, surrounded, and
without water or electricity for months; with pictures of Vukovar, first
besieged and then almost erased from the face of the earth. Then Osijek,
Vinkovci, Gospic. . . . This is a country victimized by war and the
Serbian occupation of one-third of its territory, with over 6,000 people
dead and 20,000 wounded, several thousand missing, and more than
300,000 displaced persons of its own plus half a million refugees who fled
from Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is shaped like a half-moon, a banana
perhaps. To me, it looks like an apple-core bitten so thin in the middle
that I'm afraid it might one day break in two.
I am very happy when Americans visit this new state, especially if
they are here for the first time, although the truth is Americans don't
come in great numbers these days unless they happen to be journalists or
members of humanitarian organizations. Recently I listened to a
Washingtonian loudly admiring the food in a Zagreb restaurant: "It's so
delicious!" he exclaimed. "You wouldn't dream about such dishes any–
where in Moscow. And not only that, I've been walking around the city
today, and the people are so well-dressed; the shops are full of foreign
