“This is not a documentary about Vukovar 15 years later.  It is much more: it is the attempt to return to the scene of the crime, even to the same situation, they who committed and sustained a crime.  We do not serve any political purpose, we are in the service of the truth.  We are only interested in the story of Vukovar, because it represents a part of our lives.”

To share the pain. These are words from the drafting of B92, the historic Serbian network founded in 1989 as a radio broadcast, but through the years developed into a television channel and internet website among the most viewed sites in Serbia and abroad, also for the reputation of free broadcast which it earned in the field.  In fact, Milosevic’s regime, in the last years of its power, was controlling such an important source of information, but it permitted, working in secrecy, the opposing journalists to resist and to earn themselves esteem.  And this line of independence is at the base of B92’s latest initiative: the documentary Vukovar, the final cut.  “The documentary is an attempt to stabilize a truth shared by Serbs and Croatians with respect to that which happened in 1991”, explains the press release of the Serbian broadcast, “because we believe that 15 years is a sufficient amount of time to try to realize an inquiry on these facts which does not divide, but unites”.  In short, we remember the events.  It is May, 1991.  In Borovo Selo, in the immediate vicinity of Vukovar, 14 Croatian policemen are killed.  This is how the attack on the city of Vukovar begins and in the region of Slavonia, at the border between the Serbo-Montenegrin  Federation and Croatia, but at the time this area was part of ex-Yugoslavia.  The villages are besieged, occupied and the non-Serbian population is deported.  Vukovar is bombed and, according to those who have studied the conflict, the Army (which must have been the army of all the Yugoslavians) would have consisted of 20 thousand men, 300 tanks, rockets and mortars, striking the hospital, the union building, the Catholic Church and the aqueduct.  The city is besieged, defended only by a small group of volunteers who courageously resist, the battle makes up its mind when the irregulars arrive, like the men of Zeliko Raznatovic, said Arkan, commander of the Serbian voluntary guard: it will be them who do the “dirty work”, to drive out militiamen and inhabitants from the labyrinth of basements.  The popular Yugoslavian Army (by now controlled by the Serbs) enters the city, after a three-month siege, on November 18th, 1991.  Vukovar is occupied and soldiers of the Serbian army and irregular militiamen dirty themselves with brutal crimes against the civilian population.  Some mass graves would be discovered months later by foreign journalists near Ovcara.  Furthermore, five thousand people would be deported and put in prison camps in Serbia.  Many would never again return.  

The direct witnesses. The importance of this documentary is evident: these are Serbs themselves who do not approve of a crime committed by people from their own country.  And they work side by side with some Croatians.  One of the most serious aspects of the post-war situation in the Balkans was that of the unshared memories.  The school children study history manuals that seem more like an incitement of racial hate than scientific reflections.  And it is really this idea on which the authors of this documentary have worked.  “The first Serbo-Croatian co-production on a theme such as this”, explains B92, “realized by journalists and researchers, it wants to make possible the existence of a critical and shared point of view about the events that took place on the two banks of the Danube, where the people lived together for years and then massacred each other.  We wanted and needed to make it in the first person, without using foreign contributions.  The contributions of these journalists who occupy themselves with war and pass from Iraq to the Balkans in one day did not interest us – we wanted to do it in the first person.  Many of those people who worked on this documentary were in Vokuvar in those days”.  It can be difficult to explain the massacres that took place for weeks in the small baroque town of Slavonia with the only strategic importance of the city, despite the big industrial complexes and the fact that the area became part of that natural corridor, the Danube, which flows to the border with Vojvodina, an independent Serbian province.  “What we want to understand is why, while the Serbian and Croatian politicians were still debating, the cannons began to fire upon Vukovar, the town that for years was an example of the cohabitation and civilization, a symbol of Yugoslavia itself and the coexistence of its people”.  It is probable that it was attacked for exactly this reason, to destroy the idea itself that a united and peaceful Yugoslavia could exist.  The authors, in their work, made use of thousands of direct witnesses on all levels: politicians, military men, civilians and journalists.  They furthermore consulted all the amateur film makers of the time and all the images in the archive of the main Serbian and Croatian television broadcasts of the time.  “We used the images from the networks of the time”, the authors explains, “to render the idea of the criminal role as told by the media in the conflict as repeaters of hate and of the directing of power.  But our documentary is a contribution to the dialogue, which must start with the return to working as a group in order to share a memory.  In particular, that of the common people”.  Simple people, such as Zelijka Juric.  At the time of these events, she was only a baby and, while she was interviewed by the authors, she really worked to understand the reason for her presence in a BBC film, made during the siege, in which one sees a terrorized baby who pulls her little blue coat together tightly, among the bombs.  That baby is Zelijka and, it is to people like her, whether they are Serbian or Croatian, that this documentary wishes to give the opportunity to be heard.