CULTURE-YUGOSLAVIA: Govt Returns Looted Arts to Croatia

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Dec 20 2001 (IPS) - Ten years after the destruction of the Croatian town of Vukovar in the war of disintegration of former Yugoslavia, the new era of relations between Croatia and Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) started with the return of works of art looted from Croatia in Dec 1991.

“The return of Vukovar cultural treasures is an encouragement for the development of good neighbourly relations between Croatia and FRY,” says the Croatian Minister of Culture, Antun Vujic.

Last week a convoy of trucks transported collections of art pieces worth millions of dollars to Vukovar, looted by FRY security forces a decade ago.

The trucks contained 1,500 paintings from the Bauer Collection, the famous private collection of Croatian painters of 19th and 20th century. The trucks also carried more than 50 sculptures to Vukovar.

Anton Bauer, the owner of the collection, did not live to see the return of the treasure to his native town. He died last year.

More than 500 paintings originating from the Vukovar Art Gallery were also returned, together with the religious golden artefacts belonging to the rich collection of the Franciscan Monastery of Saint Philip and Jacob.

“The list of the works of art that were taken away match what we got back,” says Ruza Maric, head of the Vukovar Museum of Arts. “The next artefacts to be returned belong into the category of archaeological collection and numismatics.”

Croatian art dealers say more than 30,000 small items belonging to Vukovar galleries have been missing since 1991.

Vujic and Maric, together with several top Yugoslav officials, attended the hand-over ceremony, unusual for the Balkans, where wars raged for years and the two neighbours, Croatia and FRY, were run by autocratic regimes.

Normalisation of relations was not the favourite phrase both in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, and in Belgrade in the 1990s.

But events have changed since last year. Croatian dictator Franjo Tudjman, who led the country into the war of independence from former Yugoslavia in 1991, died of cancer in Dec 1999, while Slobodan Milosevic fell from power in Oct 2000.

The new leaders in Zagreb and Belgrade wanted normalisation of relations between the two neighbours, but the obstacle created by the looting at Vukovar had to be overcome.

Situated 150 kilometres north west of Belgrade, Vukovar was one of the prime targets of Milosevic’s security forces in the war against Croats in 1991.

This unique town of 50,000, known for its specific baroque appearance and refined art collections, was almost levelled to the ground by Milosevic’s artillery, earning the gruesome nickname of “Croatian Hiroshima”.

Hiroshima is a city in Japan that was destroyed in 1945 when an American atomic bomb was dropped on it.

The round-the-clock shelling and three months of siege of Vukovar left nearly 5,000 people dead, and forced some 20,000 Croats to flee.

Vukovar’s pre-war population was half Serb and half Croat, but Milosevic’s propaganda machinery defined it as Serbian.

The destruction of Vukovar saw scavenging of its art treasures, too.

Truckloads of paintings, sculptures and religious artefacts were taken to neighbouring Serbia. Milosevic’s propaganda machinery described the looting as an attempt to “preserve Serbian cultural heritage”. Independent analysts, however, described the looting of the artefacts as “barbaric theft”.

The new regime in Belgrade described the return of the works of art to Vukovar as the first step of dealing with the terrifying memory of the destruction of the town and the legacy of war with Croatia.

Yugoslavia’s Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic began his first official visit to Croatia last week, as the trucks with precious goods arrived in Vukovar.

In talks with his Croatian counterpart Tonino Picula, Svilanovic offered condolences to Croatian civilians who suffered during the war.

“I deeply regret the suffering of Croatian citizens…in the last couple of years,” Svilanovic said.

The remark amounts to an apology, demanded by Croatia for a decade.

Politics and wars aside, there was a group of people who did everything they could to preserve the cultural treasure from Vukovar that fell into their hands on Dec 12, 1991.

They work in the Museum of Novi Sad, Yugoslav town closest to Vukovar, where the artefacts were taken by the security forces.

“We did not think about how and where the material came from,” says Zoran Vapa, manager of Novi Sad Museum.

“Our task was to take care of each piece as best as we could. We thought about the material as the unique cultural and historical treasure that deserved to be saved. And it was. We gave it back to those it belonged to and felt good about it,” he says.