ABSTRACT: The testimony of the Radical senator Lorenzo Strik Lievers: "against a patent act of aggression, we intended as believers in nonviolence to take part in the defence of the city and share, without arms, in the situation and the dangers experienced by its inhabitants and its defenders."
(THE PARTY NEW - N. 5 - FEBRUARY 1992)
Sunday, 5 January 1992
I have just returned to Milan from Osijek after seven days on the front in Croatia with other members of the Radical Party: Marco Pannella, Roberto Cicciomessere, Lucio Bertè, Sandro Tessari, Olivier Dupuis, Sandro Ottone, Renato Fiorelli and Josip Pinezic. We received a final salute from the ex-federal army the night before our departure on 3 January, with a continuous bombardment of mortar and cannon fire over the centre of Osijek. Bombs rained on the main square, where we were staying in Central Hotel.
According to the Croatian authorities, the bombs were probably intended to strike our hotel. But this, after all, is why we were in Osijek, which after Dubrovnik and Vukovar has become the symbol of the tragedy being played out in Croatia, on our own doorstep. Against a patent act of aggression, we intended as believers in nonviolence (a nonviolent person does not maintain a neutral position between the aggressors and the victims of aggression, he takes sides) to take part in the defence of the city and share, without arms, in the situation and the dangers experienced by its inhabitants and its defenders. The idea, if anything, was to be an advance force of new "international brigades" of nonviolence, in the spirit of an appeal and of dialogue with the Serbian soldiers who are forced to kill and to be killed.
We leave Trieste on 27 December. In Zagreb we are met warmly by Tomac, the Vice-President of the Croatian Government (a member of the Radical Party, like many other Croatian Ministers and parliamentarians, including Greguric, the President of the Government, and Stjepan Mesic, the last President of the ex-Yugoslavia), and by other authorities. The Chief of the General Staff of the Croatian army illustrates the difficult military position of his improvised forces against adversaries formed of almost the whole of the ex-Yugoslavian army.
We arrive in Osijek on 30 December. The atmosphere is ghostly: rubble and damaged buildings all around, very few wary people in the streets, front doors protected by sandbags. Two Christmas trees stand at the far end of the main square: one is "normal", with flashing lights, the other decorated with the debris of war. Its bare branches are hung with shrapnel and bullet cases, broken weapons and helmets, almost like a symbol of the passage of war which destroys everything in its path, including Nature. Beneath the square is a large shelter with shops, the press centre, and offices. The population meets here. Many spend their days here and end up leading a few hours of inevitably "normal" life in the streets or in their homes, knowing that u2e. the next attack might come at any time. This, day after day, is the way people live and die in Osijek. This effort of dangerous abnormality, borne with striking courage, is perhaps the way in which the ordinary people demonstrate their desire to resist and make their re
asons and their rights felt.
We are not here simply to visit. We immediately join the defence forces. Without weapons, of course. And in order to make clear the sense of the presence of this "band of ex-prisoners for crimes of conscientious objection and anti-militarism" (as Pannella quite rightly defines us), two of the group put on the Croatian uniform: Pannella himself and Dupuis (who has served eleven months of prison in Belgium for refusing to wear his own country's uniform).
We spend New Year's Eve, from 11 until 3 in the morning, in the trenches on the front line, together with the Croatian soldiers. The trenches are a few kilometres, sometimes only a few hundred metres, from the centre of Osijek. The city itself is on the line of fighting, surrounded on three sides by the federal army and the ........ Continually under fire, the city is half-deserted: only 30,000 of the 120,000 inhabitants remain. The enemy fire often takes its toll: during the long siege, 650 people have been killed and 3,500 injured, over half of them civilians. Most of the soldiers in the trenches are, in any case, citizens of Osijek who have taken up arms. And the others, those who are still at home, are here in spirit, united in their determination to defend the city to the last. On the front line, the impression is strange and disturbing: it's like going back in time to the First World War, more than seventy years ago - trenches dug into the mud full of soldiers waiting anxiously to see where the next sh
ell will fall. In reality, however, life in the centre of the city is exactly the same - continuous uncertainty. Right through the night, the Serbs send up "fireworks" of tracer bullets, accompanied, however, by real artillery fire.
On the last evening we meet up with a group of people from Osijek, members and supporters of the Radical Party. Together we draw up an appeal, which we all sign, and which is being circulated in the city for further signatures, to invite European observers to come and see what is happening here. During the night, we see for ourselves what is happening: towards two o'clock a continuous bombardment commences. On anxious alert, we wait to see if the cannon fire is getting nearer to our hotel-cum-shelter. Soon the explosions begin to set the windows rattling, and finally a shell falls directly on the square. The bombardment continues, on and off, right through the night and the following morning.
As we leave - on the day we had planned - the bombs continue u2e. to fall on the city and on those who have stayed to suffer this ordeal, waiting for the world to stop this senseless tragedy before it is too late.
