Walking in the Wake of War: Letter from Dubrovnik

The faces stare straight ahead in an empty gaze that conveys an unanswered search for meaning. The photos are black-and-white and arranged in even rows, headshots of the kind that appear in actors’ portfolios. They circle the walls of a small room just inside the entrance of the Sponza Palace in Dubrovnik, Croatia, a room dedicated to the residents of the city who died defending it from the Serb and Montenegrin forces that bombarded it in 1991 during the Croatian War of Independence. None of the faces assumes greater importance than any other, and none can, since they share a single characteristic that overcomes all differences: they are all victims of war.

Complicated circumstances produce wars, but wars are not complicated matters. Wherever, however they occur, the motivation that drives them can usually be reduced to a simple lust for domination, power, and often resources. The war in Croatia was a war within a much larger war. All of the former Yugoslavia was disintegrating—and not quietly. The reverberations were felt far beyond the borders of Europe, as images of shell-riddled urban centers as well as of families fleeing destroyed villages in overloaded cars and horse carts appeared on television screens around the world. But, as the tales of torture, rape, and summary executions found their way into the news coverage, it became clear that this smaller war could not escape the barbarity of the larger one. Years afterward nato, the Western powers, the United Nations, and any other force that could have intervened were pilloried for diffidence and inaction; but, if one were to find the dimmest of silver linings in one of the darkest clouds of a very dark century, this might have been a good thing, for it allowed us to see what the forces driving war can lead to when left unchecked. So, rather than being reduced to a footnote of history, the Croatian war offers a study of the nature of war itself.

Like most cities of the Mediterranean, Dubrovnik’s history is lengthy. In the seventh century citizens of nearby Epiphaus, fleeing attacks by the Slavs, found refuge on an island near present-day Dubrovnik. Under Byzantine rule Dubrovnik was known by the Italian name Ragusa and grew into a prosperous trading center, second only to Venice among the increasingly wealthy and cosmopolitan ports of the Adriatic. Byzantine control eventually passed to the Ottomans, but Dubrovnik continued to rise in prominence. Modernity came to the city long before the modern era. In 1301 it established a medical service, and in 1317 the first pharmacy in Europe appeared near the entrance to the Franciscan monastery, where it still stands as the longest-operating pharmacy in Europe. A few decades later the city opened the first hospital to quarantine patients suffering from infectious diseases, and later established an orphanage. In 1418 Dubrovnik abolished the slave trade, and at the beginning of the sixteenth century the city’s atmosphere of tolerance attracted Jews fleeing Christian persecutions in Spain and Portugal.

Dubrovnik reached its peak of prosperity in the sixteenth century, and for two hundred years it was one of the most vibrant commercial centers of the Mediterranean. In the nineteenth century the city fell under the control of the Hapsburg Empire of Vienna, and after World War i it was absorbed by the newly formed kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. This period of relative freedom from foreign domination would last only seventy years. The collapse of the Yugoslavian state in 1991 again set the cycle of aggression and conquest in motion.

As an isolated enclave at the southern tip of the Dalmatian Coast, Dubrovnik had long been vulnerable to attack. Fearing that the presence of armed forces would drive away the tourist revenue that the city generated, the Yugoslav authority in Belgrade had declared the area a demilitarized zone twenty years prior to the war. When the six federal republics of Yugoslavia began to splinter after the fall of communist systems throughout eastern Europe, Dubrovnik was an easy target for neighboring nationalists who claimed that the thousand-year...