Marcus Tanner, "Thousand-Year-Old Dream," from his Croatia: A Nation Forged in War, Yale Univ Press, New Haven, 1997, pp. 275-298.

In January 1992 I took the road from Belgrade to the hilltop town of Ilok, on the easternmost tip of Croatia, which was then under Serb control. United Nations peace-keepers had not yet been deployed in 'Sector East', as the Serb-held portion of Slavonia and Baranja would be called, and what used to be the Croatian border was marked by a perfunctory booth manned by a couple of bored-looking Yugoslav army troopers.

The approach to Ilok was depressing, the villages on the way disfigured with bent steeples, and burned and half-demolished houses. the vineyards decayed and desolate. Ilok had been famous for its tine white wine, but the vintage of 1991 had not been harvested. From a distance the town itself looked as quaint and peaceful as ever, the spires and battlements of the baroque monastery and castle piercing the winter sky from a thicket of trees. Ilok had not been bombed; on 17 October the previous year the Yugoslav army had simply ordered the town's 3,000 or so Croats to leave without delay. A handful remained, alongside about 1,500 Slovaks, descendants of the grand colonisation programmes of Maria Theresa.

Ilok looked the same, but was not. Inside the town, all authority had passed into the hands of the Republic of Serbian Krajina. The few Croats who had chosen to remain, mostly elderly women, were tearful and afraid for their safety. Their lives were closely supervised. Even telephoning their relatives outside the town was almost forbidden. One woman told me she had waited three months to get permission to phone her son in Switzerland. It was as if they were trapped in prison. 'Only the Serbs are allowed to move in and out of the town. We "Croatian Fascists" have no rights,' she said. 'The authorities are angry we have not left. People phone me at night and say they will kill me if I don't hand over the keys. We cling to the church. It's all we have left.' One insisted. 'Look, we've even left their photographs on the mantelpiece.' The invasion of Ilok appeared to have been partly organised and partly spontaneous. For several months the Serb refugees had been camping in sports centres and hotels in the nearby town of Backa Palanka, a mile away in Vojvodina. Then the word got round that there were houses for those who wanted them in deserted Ilok. The Yugoslav army helped. A local commander told me the army had made a list of all the empty properties and had handed it over to the new Serb authorities of eastern Slavonia.

The Serbs' new statelet covered 15,000 sq. km, 26.5 per cent of Croatia's territory. In parts of it the Serbs had been a majority before the war, in others not. In Banija, Kordun and eastern Lika, Serbs made up 69 per cent of the pre-war population: in western Slavonia 57 per cent, in northern Dalmatia 55 per cent and in eastern Slavonia only 35 per cent.

Croatia had paid by far the highest price for independence of any of Catholic priest had been allowed to stay at his post to minister to the remnant of his former congregation. But Brother Marko said many of the Croats who had remained avoided him. 'People are afraid to have the priest visit them. It might mark them out to the police,' he said.

The winding streets beneath the hilltop castle were full of cars with Croatian numberplates. But the drivers were not Croats but Serbs refugees who had fled the Croat offensive in western Slavonia in the autumn of 1991 and who had been living ever since in refugee centres in Serbia. Now they were in search of new homes. The cars rumbled along the narrow cobbled streets at a snail's pace, stopping and starting to let the passengers get out and peer through the windows of the houses to see if they were empty. 'If we like the look of one, we just kick the door down and walk in,' one of the Serbs said cheerfully. In one house I encountered two families from Grubisno Polje, in western Slavonia. They were defensive about their decision to take over someone else's property. 'We haven't changed a thing, 'the woman in charge the newly recognised states in Europe or the former Soviet Union. Thousands of people had been killed. Officially, 6,651 deaths were accounted for. But another 13,700 were 'missing', the majority of whom were rotting corpses in the rubble of frontline or Serb-held towns. Vukovar accounted for 2,642 of them. Some thirty-five settlements had been razed to the ground. Hundreds had been badly damaged by shellfire. About 210,000 houses had been destroyed, some 12 per cent of the entire housing stock in Croatia. The government calculated that 30 per cent of the republic's industrial infrastructure had been destroyed or lost. The war had severed vital communications routes. The loss of the Maslenica bridge cut off the last land route between Zagreb and Dalmatia, and left the region dependent for communication on a single ferry route to the island of Pag. Slavonia was better off, though the Bratstvo i Jedinstvo (Brotherhood and Unity) motorway and the Belgrade-Zagreb railway line were both severed by the Serb- held chunk of western Slavonia. Altogether 37 per cent of Croatia's railway lines were out of action or in Serb hands; the Serbs had also made off with 92 railway engines and 475 coaches. The loss of potential earnings in the tourist industry, the main source of livelihood in Dalmatia, was incalculable .

The cost to culture from the war was enormous. During the fighting, the Serbs had rarely resorted to infantry attacks to advance their frontlines, preferring to inch forward after saturation shelling of Croat positions. The worst casualty was Vukovar, where the heart of the town was destroyed beyond recognition, including the imposing eighteenth century chateau of the Eltz family. Churches were targeted in a deliberate campaign to erase the physical records of the Croats' presence. Altogether 479 ecclestiastical buildings were badly damaged or totally destroyed. Many were not irreplaceable from an artistic point of view. But the late-gothic church of Vocin, in central Slavonia, which had been extensively restored in the 1970s, was a sad loss. In Drnis, in northern Dalmatia, the mausoleum of the great sculptor Ivan Mestrovic had been broken into and damaged.

The Croatian government was burdened by 330,000 refugees from eastern Slavonia, Banija, Lika, Kordun and northern Dalmatia. In the spring of 1992 their ranks were swelled by a trickle, and then a flood of Croat refugees fleeing Vojvodina, where the community, almost 100,000 strong, was soon reduced to a fraction of its former size.

A typical story was that of the village of Hrtkovci, in the province of Vojvodina. Before the war it had been a prosperous community of several thousand farmers, most of them Croats.' In March and April 1992 a few hundred Serb refugees from Croatia descended on the village, after discovering that it was easy to intimidate Croats into surrendering their homes. But the real trouble only began on 6 May when the Radical Party leader, Seselj, and his rowdies held a rally in the village to celebrate the formation of a Radical Party branch in the area., In the middle of the main square Seselj read out the names of seventeen well- known local Croat families, whom he declared were traitors. The named families duly obliged by clearing out in days. Between May and August about 450 Croat families followed them into exile, leaving the village almost entirely 'cleansed'. In many cases Serb refugees from western Slavonia had simply invaded homes and ordered the owners out. Some offered the keys of their empty homes in Croatia to the locals in exchange. Others pinned advertisements on a noticeboard in the main street, giving details of their old addresses and offering an exchange. The new Yugoslav Prime Minister, Milan Panic, protested against this outrageous bullying when the clamour from Hrtkovci reached his office in July, but by then it was too late; and Milosevic said nothing, which was interpreted as a sign of support for Seselj tactics. In July the new Serb settlers renamed the village Srbislavci - place of Serbs. The pattern established at Hrtkovci was repeated in Novi Slankamen, Peterovaradin, near Novi Sad, and in the other Croat settlements in Vojvodina. In Croatia the arrival of Croatian refugees from Vojvodina was scarcely noticed. They were few in number compared to the tidal wave of a quarter of a million refugees from Bosnia, Nevertheless, it was the end of a historic community.

The deployment of peace-keepers proceeded in a relatively straightforward fashion after the ceasefire was signed on 3 January 1992. The UN had already entrusted Vance with the task of drawing up an agenda for UN intervention. The 'Vance plan' as it was called was completed just before Croatia's diplomatic recognition. It called for the creation of 'UN Protected Areas' covering one-quarter of Croatia's territory, overlapping with the areas in which Serbs had formed a majority or a substantial minority before the war. Serb-held territory outside the Protected Areas was designated a 'pink zone' and earmarked for eventual return to the control of the Croatian authorities. The Yugoslav army was to withdraw from Croatia and armed factions inside the UN Protected Areas were to be disarmed. Conditions were to be created for the return of the 250,000 or so refugees in government-held territory to the UN zones. The three parties - the Croatian government, the Serbian government and the Krajina. authorities - were given little time to discuss the Vance plan, which was adopted by the UN at the end of January and presented as the only choice available.

Serbia and Croatia both accepted the plan. Tudjman hoped the presence of a peace-keeping force would consolidate Croatia's international frontiers, aid the government's efforts to recover control over the third of Croatia in Serb hands and give the other two-thirds a breathing space. The biggest drawbacks for Croatia were, firstly, that ultimate sovereignty over the UN zones was not discussed, which left open the possibility that the Krajina might join Serbia; and secondly, the UN was not to administer the area but only to monitor the administration. This meant that the local Serb authorities remained in control of towns where they had seized power, even where they had driven out the elected Croat councils.

The Serbs had seized as much territory as they felt able to absorb, and Milosevic was more disposed to accept the presence of a UN force than one controlled by Nato. With the precedent of Cyprus (to which the Krajina Serbs referred often, and with hope) the Serbs calculated that a UN force would freeze the situation on the ground rather than reverse it. An important factor in the Serb leaders' calculations was the worsening situation in Bosnia, where Izetbegovic had decided to hold a referendum on independence in December 1991. As Bosnia's crisis deepened, it became imperative for Serbia to disengage from Croatia as fast as possible in order to concentrate its forces on its other neighbour.

Thus Belgrade and Zagreb accepted the Vance plan with opposing agendas in mind, The authorities in Knin did not accept it at all. Babic was convinced that the withdrawal of the Yugoslav army, the disarmament of local armed forces and the introduction of UN troops would lead to the eventual restoration of Croat control. Milosevic was ruthless in overcoming his opposition. After he had been summoned to Belgrade on 3 February, Babic and his aides were locked into a room for a fortyhour meeting with Milosevic Jovic and General Ad&, who browbeat the leader of the Knin Serbs in shifts. Babic complained afterwards that the Serbian Prime Minister had physically attacked one of his aides and that he himself had been threatened with physical liquidation. 'They said if I did not accept the plan, "We know what to do with you. You are not leaving until you sign this plan". 'Babic admitted he had signed the plan but claimed that his signature had been extracted when he fell asleep out of sheer exhaustion.

After failing to 'persuade' Babic of the virtues of the Vance plan, the Serbian President resorted to other tactics. Raskovic and Opacic were politically exhumed and put in charge of a revamped anti-Babic SDS. Opacic dutifully accused Babic of heading 'a diabolical plot' to start a civil war inside the Serbian 'motherland'. The Knin police chief, Martic, abandoned Babic So did Goran Hadzic, the local Serb chief in eastern Slavonia. Finally, on 9 February Milosevic convoked his own pet assembly of Croatian Serbs at Glina, which was much nearer to Belgrade than Knin. This 'parliament' obediently voted to accept the peace plan on behalf of Krajina.

With all three sides now nominally in agreement, the Security Council on 21 February passed a resolution authorising the deployment of 14,000 peace-keepers in the four designated sectors under a command centre located in the Bosnian capital. Although fighting had already broken out in Sarajevo after the Bosnian referendum on independence, the commander of the UN Protection Force (Unprofor), General Satish Nambiar of India, raised the UN flag in the city at the end of the month. As the situation in Bosnia worsened, Unprofor was forced to transfer its command centre on 17 May to Belgrade and Zagreb, alternating between one city and the other.

The optimism in Croatia attending the arrival of the UN troops turned to disenchantment when it became clear that their deployment would not disturb the status quo after the January ceasefire. For Zagreb's restauranteurs and those with apartments and houses to let, the arrival of the UN peace-keepers was a boon. Most other Croats forgot the desperate, almost hopeless, conditions they had endured at the height of the conflict in Zadar and Osijek. What they recalled was that the UN had appeared to promise the return home of refugees and had failed to act, To make things worse, the Russians and Ukrainians in Sector East fraternised openly with Vukovar's Serb conquerors and provided no protection to the region's remaining Croats. The banner that had hung for several months in the centre of Zagreb in Jelacic Square, are, reading 'UN come to Croatia', soon disappeared. The relatives of Croats who were missing and presumed dead in the UN zones built a 'wall of remembrance' outside the UN's Zagreb headquarters in which each brick was inscribed with a family name. There the refugees held regular candle-lit protests.

The Croats' anger increased as the UN failed to make any headway on the issue of returning refugees in the 'Serbian Republic of Krajina'. In Baranja, which I visited in September, the new Serb Mayor, Borivoj Zivanovic, appeared to be presiding over a reign of terror directed against the remaining Croats and Hungarians. The Belgian peacekeepers were in anguish but could do nothing to stop it. 'It ranges from throwing stones to cutting throats,' Colonel Jean-Marie Jockin said. 'You try to get a Croat out of his house and if he won't go you kill him,' was the description of another Belgian peace-keeper. 'To stop it we would need two guards on every Croat house.' Zivanovic was unrepentant, predicted that Serb rule over Baranja would last 'a thousand years' and said the Belgians were 'worse than the Ustashe. Only the swastika is missing.' The new order had been forced on baranja a with much more ferocity than in Ilok. Every Catholic church had been blown up or thoroughly desecrated. Again, the roads in the villages were full of people on the move, this time Bosnian Serbs from Bugojno, in central Bosnia, many of whom had been bussed into Baranja by the Belgrade authorities.

If Baranja was bleak, the presence of the Belgians at least ensured it was better than Vukovar, where the local Russian garrison had the cosiest of relationships with the Serb militants. A year after 'liberation' Vukovar remained a desolate, windswept ruin through whose blackened and burned-out streets prowled gap-toothed Chetnik crazies still hunting for Ustashe spies and their papal agents. The anniversary party in November 1992 was a gruesome get-together of ne'er-do-wells and fanatics. Colonel Veselin Sljivancanin, the Yugoslav army commander responsible for the slaughter of several hundred patients of Vukovar hospital, strutted around the cemetery, where the Orthodox clergy were holding a service of remembrance. There were sinister volunteer fighters who swapped jokes about which towns they had helped to 'cleanse' in Bosnia. I asked one fighter what had brought him back to the town. 'I fought in the Vukovar front last year,' he said cheerfully. But on being asked what connection he had had with Vukovar before the fighting, he answered, 'None. I never knew anything about it. But I came to fight as soon as I heard the Croats had built catacombs under the town where they tortured Serb children."' Even the suave diplomats of the UN were unable to pretend the situation in the 'Protected Areas' was not disastrous. Cedric Thornberry, the head of the civilian side of the UN mission, admitted it was one of 'anarchy' .

The Serbs who had remained in government-held territory had paid a stiff price for the violent policies of the Serbian Republic of Krajina. During the war there were few racially motivated murders in the main cities of government-held Croatia. In the bitter fight for western Slavonia dozens of villages had been burned to the ground. in Sibenik and Zadar compulsory 'loyalty oaths' had been forced on Serb workers, echoing the Serb practice in enterprises in Kosovo after 1989. The town of Gospic, in Lika, experienced a genuine pogrom, in which about eighty local Serbs were killed under the auspices of Tomislav Mercep, a Herzegovinian who had lived in Vukovar.

But the Gospic, murders were not typical. What destroyed the Serbs of Croatia was more the general animosity they experienced after the war - an almost universal conviction that they were collectively guilty for the war and had no right to remain in Croatia.

Milorad Pupovac, the leader of a moderate Serb political group in Zagreb, described the pressures facing the Croatian Serbs in an article in 1992. 'Over the past two years Croatia's Serbs have been wedged between the anti- Serb policies of Zagreb and the anti-Croat policies of Belgrade,' he wrote.

Many Serbs had left their homes during the war to fight for the Yugoslav army or for the Serb militias, expecting to return to their old homes as conquerors. When the frontline froze in January 1992, they found themselves stranded. Others left because they would not fight for anyone's army, like one young former teacher I met in Belgrade. Born in Vukovar to an army family, he had worked as a sports instructor in a secondary school in Borovo. He would not fight for the Croatian army, but would not take up arms against them either. He had returned once to Vukovar after 'liberation', but only to visit the grave of a dead Croat friend. When I encountered him in Belgrade he was selling his gold signet ring - his only possession - to buy a ticket to Cologne. He wished never to return.

Many flats and houses belonging to retired officers of the Yugoslav army were taken over, especially if their owners were not in them. So were thousands of holiday homes on the coast owned by the wealthy middle classes of Belgrade.

The Serbian Orthodox Church practically ceased to exist outside the Krajina. The seats of the bishops of Zagreb, Pakrac, Karlovac and Sibenik all lay in government territory. Metropolitan Jovan of ZagrebLjubljana and Bishop Lukijan of Pakrac had noisily supported the Serb war effort, and their return from exile in Serbia was out of the question; on the walls of Pakrac there were posters of Lukijan denouncing him as a war criminal. Orthodox churches were blown up, though much less comprehensively than their Catholic counterparts in Krajina. The baroque Orthodox cathedral and cemetery in Sibenik fortunately were spared, as was the nineteenth-century cathedral in Zagreb.

Inside the Krajina the Serb population also declined, paradoxically enough. This was not the case in eastern Slavonia, where new Serb settlers were bussed into the lush flat farmland from western Slavonia and Bosnia. But there were no settlers in the barren and windswept heartland of the Krajina. Instead there was an exodus. By September 1992 the Belgrade daily Politika was complaining that that Serb emigration from Krajina was reaching 'drastic proportions'. The newspaper laid part of the blame on the endemic corruption of the Krajina officials, many of whom used their new positions of authority to buy homes in Belgrade or Novi Sad.

Cut off from Croatia's towns, and almost cut off from Serbia after the fighting started in Bosnia in 1992, Krajina's local economy shrank. There was little to do in Knin, once the railway. which had supported a large number of employees, ceased to run. The Krajina authorities had hopes of reaping a fortune from tourism in the Plitvice national park, but the war in Bosnia put paid to that.  Grandiose plans to open a university in Knin and rebuild Vukovar in Byzantine style had to be dropped when the hoped-for funds obstinately failed to appear. What might have saved the Krajina was the reopening of economic ties with government-held territory, but neither Zagreb or Knin could agree on the terms. Croatia suffered also as a result; Dalmatia, in particular, endured constant electricity shortages, as the hydro-electric dam at Peruca, north of Sinj, was in Serbian hands. But the Krajina Serbs suffered most.

While Krajina withered, Croatia slowly recovered. Wages remained at a fraction of what they had ben before the war, industrial production was about 40 per cent of the pre-war level and inflation rose. The Dalmatian tourist industry remained in a coma. But there was no mass unemployment, and economic activity in the Zagreb region, which contained about half of Croatia's pre-war industrial plant, picked up steadily. The influx of refugees and the trauma resulting from the loss of territory did not lead to the rise of Fascism or a hunger for authoritarian rule, as many domestic and foreign observers had predicted. The Tudjman government made concessions to the extreme right of a symbolic nature; the Square of the Victims of Fascism was renamed Trg Velikana - the Square of Croatian Great Ones, infuriating the country's tiny Jewish community. The Croatian dinar became the kuna; although the word dated back to the Middle ages, it was better known as the name of the currency under the NDH. Pressure increased on independent voices in the media, such as the Zagreb-based magazine Danas and the Split-based satirical paper Feral Tribune. The HDZ tightened its grip around the country's economic, political and cultural life by ensuring that HDZ supporters took the lion's share of the important jobs. Nevertheless, there was no return to the totalitarianism of the Communist or Ustashe eras.

As the economy spluttered into life and UN-brokered negotiations between Zagreb and Knin got nowhere, the Defence Minister, Gojko Susak, busily amassed weapons in preparation for a military solution. The whole of Jugoslavia had been under a UN arms embargo since 25 September 1991, but it was feebly enforced. The authoritative Belgrade daily Borba reported that Croatia was "high on the list" of buyers of parts from the former East German arsenal. The Croats did not deny it, though they insisted they were now capable of producing most of the arms they needed at home. "We produce our own cannons, mortars, machine guns and even tanks," Ivan Milas, the deputy Defence Minister, boasted. As the Belgrade magazine Vreme noted, Croatia ws scarcely unusual in buiying arms in the summer of 1992. "Everyone is buying," it noted. But the arms spree evidently lent Tudjman greater self-confidence in his dealings with Belgrade and Knin in the autumn of 1992.

By then the war in Bosnia had accelerated and was consuming more and more of Belgrade's attention. After the referendum in March Bosnia declared independence on 6 April. As in Croatia, the local Serbian party, the SCS, was able to draw on the services of the Yugoslav army to carve out its own territory. But in Bosnia the results were more striking. Within a few weeks the Bosnian Serbs held almost 70 per cent of the republic's territory. In spite of an enormous quantity of heavy weaponry, however, the Bosnian Serbs failed to gain control of the Bosnian capital. In the meantime the steadily accumulating reports of atrocities committed against Muslim civilians in eastern Bosnia, and the pictures of civilian casualties from the Serb shelling of Sarajevo carried on CNN, led to demands for economic sanctions against Serbia and Montenegro along the lines of those introduced against Iraq after the invasion of Kuwait. On 26 May the European Community approved a package of sanctinos, including an embargo in the sale of oil, and a similar package was then adopted - in spite of Milosevic's shrill protests - by the UN Security Council on 30 May, significantly with the support of Serbia's traditional ally, Russia.

At first the wave of international anger over Bosnia was directed entirely against the Serbs. But, although Croatia recognised Bosnia immediately, the relationship between the two victims of Serb aggression was less smooth than it first appeared. One problem was the deep split within the 750,000-strong Croat community in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The majority were scattered in pockets throughout central and northern Bosnia and in Sarajevo itself, where they made up only 7 per cent of the population. They tended to support a unified Bosnian state and a strong alliance with the Muslims as the best guarantee for their communities' survival. Their spokesmen were the leader of the Croat Party in Bosnia, Stjepan Kljuic, and the Archbishop of Sarajevo, Vinko Puljic.

But the conditions in Herzegovina, in the south of the republic, differed from those in Bosnia proper. There the Muslims were fewer in number, confined mainly to the region's capital, Mostar, and to a few towns in the Neretva Valley, which bisected the region. The 200,000 Croats in Herzegovina disagreed with the agenda of the half-million Croats of Bosnia. The west of the River Neretva they lived in compact, wholly Croat communities. For example, of the town of Grude's 16,000 inhabitants in 1991, some 15,990 were ethnic Croats and the ratio was similar in the neighbouring districts of Posusje, Ljubuski, Neum, Citluk, Siroki Brijeg, Tomislavgrad and Livno. These districts adjoined Croatia proper and were economically and geographically closer to Dalmatia than to the rest of Bosnia. The Croats of western Herzegovina were rural folk. The clan system was still very strong among them; as was the Catholic Church. In their culture and habits they resembled the rural Bosnian Serbs more than the urban Muslims and Croats of Bosnia. From the start of the conflict they were more interested in unification with Croatia than with becoming part of an independent, Muslim-dominated Bosnia.

Many Herzegovinian Croats had fought in the war in Croatia in 1991, especially in the Dubrovnik campaign. After the January 1992 ceasefire they returned to their home villages as seasoned fighters, to prepare for the second round with the Serbs in Bosnia. They were far better prepared for the fighting that broke out in Bosnia in the spring of 1992 than the Muslims, both psychologically and in terms of organisation and supplies. On 8 April 1992 they set up their own militia, the Hrvatsko Vijece Obrane (Croat Defence Council) or HVO, as the military arm of the HDZ. After the fighting started, President Izetbegovic concentrated all his forces on retaining control of Sarajevo. In the rest of Bosnia, the government had to rely on the HVO to stop the Serb advance.

But Tudjman could not make up his mind whether to support the integrity of the Bosnian state or to go for a partition, as many of the Herzegovinians wanted. The opposition parties in Croatia, on the left, centre and extreme right, agitated for a united Bosnia; but Tudjman's heart was not with them. He belonged to a generation that had grown up before the creation of a separate Bosnia in 1945, and long before the recognition of Muslims as a distinct nationality in 1968. Both during and after the 1990 election he had returned to the theme that Bosnia and Croatia formed a historic and geographic unit. Then there had been the secretive meeting with Milosevic in Karadjordjevo in March 1991, where he was reported to have discussed Bosnia's partition.

A sign of Tudjman's intentions was the removal of Stjepan Kljuic, the first leader of the Bosnian HDZ, and his replacement with Mate Boban, a Herzegovinian. The changeover in the leadership of the Bosnian HDZ took place at a party congress in winter 1992 in Siroki Brijeg, in western Herzegovina. Although Tudjman was not present, he was widely seen as the sponsor of this change of direction. With his portly profile and old-fashioned bowties, Kljuic was every inch a representative of Sarajevo's old middle class. Alone of the three Bosnian leaders, he was a born Sarajlija. His agenda was to ensure the survival of the Croats in Sarajevo and central Bosnia, which meant cultivating close ties with the Muslims. Boban, a former supermarket manager, was from Herzegovina and hankered for union with Croatia.

The HVO was only nominally linked to the Bosnian government army. In fact it operated independently and looked on the Muslim-led army with contempt. As one of the Herzegovinian leaders put it: 'They don't have an army in Sarajevo, so how can they expect us to place our forces under their control?' On 15 June the HVO achieved a great victory in the Bosnian war with the recapture of the eastern bank of the city of Mostar, which for two months had been under Serb control. But the victory in Mostar was the start of a real crisis. Once the Serbs had been driven out, thousands of Muslim civilians began to pour back into the town. They were followed by many Muslim refugees from other towns in Bosnia which had been overrun by the Serbs.

The Croats did not like this change in the ethnic balance, and tried to ban Muslims from moving into the city. Nor did they like the fact that in the winter of 1992 Muslim men began drifting out of the HVO and joining units of the Muslim- led Bosnian army, which was beginning to acquire supplies of its own from Croatia.

On 5 July, the new hardline Bosnian Croat leadership under Boban proclaimed a Croat state within a state, the Croat Union of HercegBosna. Like the Serb Krajina in its early stages, the new statelet officially was only 'autonomous'. In practice, it claimed authority over its own police, army, currency and education and insisted on the right to rule several districts with Muslim majorities. The only permitted flag was a modified version of the Croat flag; the only currency was the Croat kuna; the official language was Croat and the Croat curriculum was imposed on the schools. It also declared that its capital was in Mostar, a city where Muslims had (narrowly) outnumbered Croats in the 1991 census. Boban's government was not democratic. He ruled by flat from his base in the Croat bastion of Grude in the heart of west Herzegovina, not far from the shrine town of Medjugorje.

The formation of Herceg-Bosna sowed great dissent between the Muslims and Croats of the HVO. Muslims resented the fact that in the districts under HVO control, the Bosnian fleur-de-lys was nowhere visible and that Croats held the key offices. They objected to the way that the HVO often took a large percentage of the weapons passing through their checkpoints on their way to the Bosnian government and which the Bosnians had paid for. In Travnik and Zenica, bearded Afghan mujahedin volunteers began to make their unfortunate appearance, alongside homegrown 'Islamic legions' with green flags and medallions bearing inscriptions from the Koran. The tension between the Croats and the Muslims was made worse by the string of successes of the Bosnian Serb army under Ratko Mladic, the former Yugoslav army commander in Knin and Sarajevo. As Mladic, blasted a trail through northern Bosnia to secure an open road between Belgrade Banja Luka and Knin, a drive known as Operation Koridor, Muslim streamed south in ever increasing numbers towards the HVO-ruled regions of central Bosnia. In Bugojno and Travnik, Croats found them selves reduced practically overnight from just under half the local population to a small minority.

Throughout the autumn of 1992, Croat-Muslim tension was largely ignored by the international community. Izetbegovic derided attempts to equate the HVO's activities with the carnage committed by the Serbs in eastern Bosnia. Western governments and aid agencies were also aware that Croatia was shouldering the burden of some 279,000 refugees from Bosnia, many of whom were Muslim. They were afraid that imposing sanctions against Croatia might mean the expulsion of the Muslims into the rest of Europe.

Tudjman used the almost universal condemnation of the Serbs' war in Bosnia to test the defences of the Krajina. Without warning on 22 January 1993, about 6,000 Croat troops overran the UN demarcation lines around Zadar. It was a three-pronged operation, aiming to recapture Zadar airport, a hydro-electric dam further inland at Peruca and the vital Maslenica bridge linking Dalmatia with northern Croatia. Two French peace-keepers were killed in the attack. Although the Security Council condemned the operation and ordered the Croats to withdraw on 2 5 May, the Croat army took all three strategic objects without incurring sanctions or more than a squawk of protest from Belgrade. To the Serb authorities in Knin, the loss of the Zadar hinterland proved that their objections to the Vance plan had been well founded. As a reprisal, the Krajina Serbs took back the heavy weaponry that had been handed over under the plan to UN supervision.

The recovery of the Maslenica bridge boosted the morale of the Croatian army, and enabled Tudjman to counter domestic accusations that he was weak in his dealings with the Krajina Serbs and the UN. For all that, the offensive was of limited practical use. The Serbs were still close enough to the destroyed Maslenica bridge to stop the Croats building a new bridge, as a result, the Croats could only build a pontoon bridge, which few car drivers were willing to cross. The same went for Zadar airport, which remained far too close to the Serb frontline to be reopened to regular traffic. The assault frightened the Krajina Serbs but not enough to prod them into opening negotiations on the return of refugees, let alone on Krajina's reintegration into Croatia.

As the Croats rolled over UN lines around Zadar, the Muslim-Croat tension in Bosnia boiled over into firefights between the HVO and the Bosnian army around Busovaca, the HVO's military headquarters in central Bosnia.

The fighting followed the publication of a new peace plan for Bosnia" drafted by the UN mediator Cyrus Vance and by Lord Owen, the recently appointed mediator for the EU. The Vance-Owen plan proposed to divide Bosnia into ten ethnically based provinces or cantons, two of which would be Croat and one mixed Croat-Muslim. Izetbegovic complained that the plan legitimised 'ethnic cleansing' and compared his position to that of Eduard Benes, the Czechoslovak President in 1938 . Sympathetic Western journalists hastily concluded that the peace plan had encouraged the ethnic communities to fight for control over the proposed cantons. It was a simplistic judgment, as there were already plenty of reasons for a full-scale Muslim-Croat conflict.

The clashes around Busovaca spread like a bushfire down the Lasva valley of central Bosnia. But the fighting did not go the Croats' way. Instead, the Muslim government troops in the region, boosted by the influx of refugees, surrounded the Croat towns of central Bosnia one by one. The Croat commander in central Bosnia, Dario Kordic, decided to blast his own mini-koridor along the Lasva valley, to link up the five besieged towns of Kresevo, Kiseljak, Vitez, Busovaca and Novi Travnik. The casus belli came on 15 April, when the Muslims kidnapped and almost certainly killed the HVO commander in Zenica. Shortly after, the HVO attempted without success to blast the Muslims out of the Old Town area of Vitez, by detonating an enormous bomb in a van. The explosion ripped the centre out of the town, killed dozens of people and left many others to die a lingering death under the rubble. But it failed to achieve its aim, a couple of hundred Muslim fighters remained ensconced in the rubble-filled centre of Vitez.

The British commander of UN forces in central Bosnia, Colonel Bob Stewart, arranged a ceasefire between the Muslims and Croats to enable the UN's food and medical convoys to get on the road again. But while he was on patrol on the evening of 22 April he encountered a group of Muslim fighters who said they would never adhere to the ceasefire because of 'the massacre of the babies' in the village of Ahmici, a few miles south of Vitez. Stewart hurried to the scene the following morning with the television cameras in tow. The sight was shocking. Dogs lay shot in driveways. The doors of hastily evacuated houses flapped in the wind. in the schoolroom there was a half-completed sentence from an interrupted geography class on the blackboard. The massive minaret of the newly built mosque had been blown off its foundations and lay at right-angles in a field. But the most gruesome sights were in the houses themselves. Stewart recalled: 'On the steps inside the front entrance were two blackened corpses. One was obviously the remains of a man but the other looked like a teenage boy. Both were naked, their clothes having been completely burned off. The boy's arm was pointing in the air but the hand was a balled claw.' The cellar of the same house was 'a black and sometimes reddened mess. Here and there the outline of a body was recognisable.' Stewart later concluded that the village had been attacked by about seventy Croat fighters at 5am on 22 April, that 'each house was systematically taken out by squads of soldiers who killed anyone they found. ... after that the bodies were thrown into the houses as they were destroyed by fire'.

Stewart's forces uncovered 104 bodies in Ahmici and were convinced they averted another massacre when a UN patrol chanced on a column of 150 Muslim civilians being led out of the village by armed Croats. Several hundred other civilians fled to the British UN army base in Vitez - frightened, but angry with the Croats as well. Stewart stormed around in an attempt to uncover responsibility, although Kordic absurdly blamed the Serbs.

This was not the end of the bloodshed in central Bosnia. On 10 May Croat civilians in Novi Travnik stopped an aid convoy named the 'Convoy of joy', organised by international Muslim organisations for the relief of Tuzla, and murdered eight of the drivers. The atrocity at Ahmici and the bloody assault on the Convoy of joy were widely reported in the West and caused the HVO immense bad publicity. They did nothing to shore up the Croat position in central Bosnia. Some of the Muslims had already reached the conclusion that, if they could not regain territory from the Serbs, it would be more profitable to turn on the Croats instead. The Ahmici atrocity strengthened their hand and over the following six months most of the fighting in Bosnia was between Muslims and Croats, with the Croats losing heavily. A week after the clash at Novi Travnik the HVO was driven out of Kakani, Travnik and Kraljevska Sutjeska, forcing about 60,000 Bosnian Croats to flee towards the already overcrowded Adriatic cities. At the end of July, the HVO lost control of Bugojno, triggering the flight of another 15,000 Croats.

The worst of the Croat-on-Muslim fighting was in Mostar, the city that the two communities had successfully recaptured under the HVO's banner in June 1992. The Muslims staged an uprising on the east bank, but were unable repeat the pattern of Travnik and Bugojno and drive the Croats out entirely. On the west bank the Croats remained in control. They then expelled the Muslim population from their sector. Women and children were simply ordered out of their homes and herded at gunpoint over the bridge into the east. Thousands of men were taken away to improvised camps, of which the most notorious was a former heliport near the village of Dretelj. Both sides then settled down to shell and snipe at each other, although the Croats' heavy weaponry enabled them to reduce east Mostar to a ruin over the next year, while the Muslims were able to wreak only superficial damage. The culmination of the campaign was the demolition by Croat artillery of Mostar's famous medieval bridge on 9 November 1993, an act of cultural vandalism which inevitably flew on to the front pages of most Western newspapers.

By the autumn, the Croat presence in central Bosnia had been reduced to a few beleaguered pockets, and about half the region's Croats had fled. Several of Bosnia's most famous monasteries, which had survived centuries of persecution under the ottomans, stood empty and vandalised. Western liberals who sympathised with the Muslims were outraged. Western conservatives, who had never wanted an independent Bosnia or Croatia in the first place, derived grim satisfaction from the fact that their warnings about 'tribal warfare' had been confirmed. Croat ministers pleaded that they deserved sympathy for taking in hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees, but international opinion homed in on Mostar's ruined bridge, the blackened corpses in Ahmici and the grim secrets of Dretelj. Tudjman was castigated as a hypocrite, and a willing accomplice in Milosevic's partition plans. In Croatia, public opinion was bewildered by the attempt to target the Muslims as the Croats' real enemy. 'From being victims in 1991 and 1992 we have turned into small and unsuccessful aggressors in Bosnia and lost support around the world,' grumbled Zlatko Kramaric, Osijek's liberal mayor .

To quell the surge of discontent at home, Tudjman launched another assault on the Krajina Serbs in September, in the 'Medak pocket' south of Gospic. But this offensive was a failure. The Croats captured a few villages, and then caused an uproar by executing at least eighty villagers who had not fled in time, many of them elderly women. The Krajina Serbs tired long-range missiles from sites in Banija at Zagreb, which caused considerable damage in the southern suburbs. The UN ordered the Croats to withdraw from Medak, which they did, after blowing up many houses.

Covered in obloquy, the President's prestige hit an all-time low, In October a group of Croat intellectuals, including Ivo Banac, Krsto Cviic, Slavko Goldstein and Vlado Gotovac, wrote an open letter to Tudjman calling on him to resign: 'In the name of an alleged national reconciliation you have permitted an invasion of Ustashe symbols and songs, the renaming of streets and institutions, the revision of history, chauvinistic manifestations and acts ... your occasional anti-Fascist declarations are looked on as an unconvincing screen. They fail to allay serious sus picions on many sides of a possibly Fascist development of the Croatian state.' They added: 'Only new policies and new men can return to Croatia her lost credibility in the eyes of the world and at home.' The letter was followed by another public remonstrance on 29 October from leaders of Croatia's small Jewish community, calling on the President to reverse the decision to rename the Croatian dinar after the kuna, not transfer the remains of those killed at Bleiburg to Jasenovac and to stop municipalities from renaming streets and schools after Ustashe leaders such as Budak. 'We are worried by the repeated attempts ... to rehabilitate tate the Ustashe Independent State of Croatia,' they said.

If Croatia's disastrous intervention in Bosnia caused a certain grim satisfaction among pro-Serb circles in France and Britain, the reaction was pure dismay in Bonn and Washington. Public opinion in the US had been powerfully affected by the Serb massacres in eastern Bosnia and the day-by-day, mindless shelling of Sarajevo, US policy towards Yugoslavia had done a 180-degree turn from the days when Baker had toured the Yugoslav capitals in the spring of 1991, lecturing the Croats and Slovenes on the perils of independence. In April 1992 Washington had recognised Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia simultaneously, and since then the new Clinton administration had lobbied consistently for a hard line against Milosevic, a stance that irritated the French and the British, as the US had refused to commit troops to the UN force in Bosnia or Croatia.

The Americans were appalled by the way the Croat-Muslim conflict played into the hands of the Serbs, and applied a great deal of pressure on Tudjman to get him to change his Bosnia policy. They tried to bring the two sides together in September 1993, but the attempt at reconciliation was sunk by continued fighting in central Bosnia and Mostar and by the fact that the Muslims were then not really interested in peace. In the summer of 1993 Milosevic evid and Tudjman took advantage of the collapse of the Vance-Owen plan to put forward their own peace proposal for a loose union of three republics. Izetbegovic leaped at the idea of a purely Muslim statelet, on condition that it comprised at least 30 per cent of the territory of Bosnia and enjoyed access to the Sava and the Adriatic. Serb intransigence wrecked this plan, as it had the previous scheme; the Muslims wanted 30 per cent, while the Serbs were not willing to concede much more than 24 per cent. While the threerepublics plan was on the table, Croats and Muslims had a strong incentive to fight for the borders of their future mini-states.

But by the spring of 1994 both Croats and Muslims were ready to talk seriously about peace. The plan for a 'three- republic' Bosnia was dead, while the threat of UN sanctions now hung over Croatia. On I February that year the Secretary General reported that between 3,000 and 5,000 regular Croatian troops were in Bosnia. Two days later the Security Council condemned Croatia's involvement and threatened 'serious measures' if it failed to end 'all forms of interference' in the republic.` At the end of the month the Bosnian Prime Minister, Haris Silajdzic, his Croatian counterpart, Mate Granic, and a leader of the moderate faction among the Bosnian Croats, Kresimir Zubak, met in Washington. Under strong American pressure, they agreed to form a Croat-Muslim federation in Bosnia. Boban and the HVO hardliners were forced to resign and Herceg-Bosna was put in mothballs, although the Croat regions of Bosnia continued to run themselves and Mostar remained a divided city. With a tenuous ceasefire on the ground, UN aid convoys once again were able to trek into central Bosnia from Croatia.

Tudjman's partial rehabilitation by the international community was symbolised that autumn by the visit of the Pope. John Paul II had been harshly criticised by the opponents of Croatia's independence for stoking the fires of confessional rivalry in the Balkans with his strong support for granting diplomatic recognition in 1991. Since then the Vatican had adopted a low profile, beyond uttering unobjectionable pleas for an end to ethnic strife in Bosnia. In fact the Church in Croatia had become critical of Tudjman as Croat- Muslim fighting escalated in Bosnia in the autumn of 1992 and the spring of 1993. The Pope's visit, therefore, was bound to be seen as a form of blessing on the government's change of policy in Bosnia, however much Church officials in Rome and Zagreb insisted on the visit's purely pastoral nature.

Tudjman could not resist the chance to turn the occasion into a state visit, and devoted his welcoming speech to the Pope to a long account of various papal communiques to Croat kings, starting with John VIII's letter to Prince Branimir in 879, the coronation of Tomislav, and Leo X's famous message in 1519, in which he had declared: 'Let everyone e know the head of the Church will not let Croatia founder for it is the sturdiest of shields and the ramparts of Christendom. '

At, the height of the Muslim-Croat. conflict, the West European papers depicted Tudjman man as a bungler who shared Milosevic's ambitions without the skill to realise them. The recreation of the Muslim-Croat alliance proved that he was a cannier operator than his detractors made out. That was certainly the opinion of the EU negotiator, Lord Owen. 'In 1991 he held out against the Serbs and, with one-third of his country as he saw it occupied, accepted the Vance ceasefire agreement in January 1992 only as a way of gaining a pause to build up Croatia's military strength and to hit back against the Serbs,' he wrote.

The Krajina Serbs failed to take account of the change in the balance of regional power brought about by the American-sponsored MuslimCroat federation. Babic and Martic cut themselves off from Belgrade and ignored Serbia's hints to negotiate an arrangement with Croatia that would preserve the substance of their struggle. They drew closer to the Serbian Orthodox Church, which was disappointed with Milosevic's new-found moderation. And they drew closer to Karadzic and the Bosnian Serbs, who had lost favour with Milosevic following their refusal to agree to the latest international peace plan." The Bosnian and Krajina Serbs made a great deal of noise about a proposed union, holding referendums in the Krajina and issuing importantsounding proclamations about welding together the two military command structures. In practice nothing happened at all. The emptiness of the agreement was displayed in May 1995, when the Croatian army launched its third operation against the Krajina since the January 1992 ceasefire.

The Croat attack on UN Sector West, in western Slavonia, came out of the blue. The UN had just reopened the old Bratstvo i Jedinstvo motorway, including the thirty-five-kilometre stretch running through Serb-held territory around Okucani. But on the night of 29-30 April 1995 a Croat refugee from the village of Smrtic in west Slavonia shot dead a Serb from the same village, Tihomir Glagojevic, after meeting him at a petrol station outside the Motel Slaven, inside the Serb-held zone." The Serbs closed the road, but agreed to reopen it the following day. The following night, however, some Serbs opened fire at Croat vehicles passing through the UN sector, killing a couple of drivers. Only hours after these killings, at 2.30am, Croatia told UN troops to withdraw from exposed positions. Three hours after that, 3,500 troops backed by about twenty tanks attacked the triangular-shaped zone from the north, east and west. Within hours the only town in the region, Okucani, was in Croat hands and thousands of Serbs were pouring across the bridge at Stara Gradiska into northern Bosnia.

In spite of frantic appeals for help to Pale and Belgrade, the Bosnian Serbs did nothing to defend the Serbs in western Slavonia, nor was there more than a mumbled complaint from Serbia. The Krajina Serbs fired several rockets at Zagreb on Tuesday and Wednesday, destroying a large number of parked cars and killing eleven people. But the rockets only infuriated the international community. They made no difference to the military outcome. Within thirty-six hours the Croats had overrun the pocket.

The fall of west Slavonia showed that the fanfare about union between the Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia was a hollow boast. But the Knin authorities ignored the lesson. After four years of rejecting any compromise, and expunging all traces of Croat history in their domain, they would not alter course. The Europeans, the US and Russia did not ignore the lesson. Keen to forestall another Croat incursion, they drew up a special peace plan for Croatia, which was intended to rectify the loopholes in the Vance plan. The 'Z4 plan', as it was known, attempted to reconcile Croatia's insistence on preserving the integrity of its frontiers with Serb insistence on self-determination. Krajina was to keep its flag and have its own president, parliament and police - even, perhaps, a separate currency. Tudjman agreed to it gingerly, though only as a starting point for discussions. Milosevic supported the agreement. But Martic and Babic rejected it outright.

The Republic of Serbian Krajina was wrecked by the folly of the Krajina authorities and their Bosnian Serb allies. After the startling success of the Croat army in May, it was clear that the Croatian Serbs would stand alone if, or rather when, the Croats attacked a second time. It was a moment for Milan Martic and the Knin leadership to be cautious. Instead they plunged into another military campaign, against the Muslims in Bihac.

The fuse was lit in the first week of July, when the Bosnian Serbs attacked and overran two of the three UN- proclaimed 'safe areas' in eastern Bosnia, Srebrenica and Zepa. The offensive encountered no resistance. On 6 July the bombardment of Srebrenica began. On 8 July the Serbs were in possession of the town. About 48,000 civilians were expelled from the enclaves. Between 4,000 and 8,000 were never accounted for, but were almost certainly killed on the orders of General Mladic. In spite of the arsenal of weapons at the disposal of Nato, which, theoretically, the UN might have called on to defend the enclaves, nothing was done to stop the Serbs after two 'pinprick' bombings failed to dissuade them.

The fall of the enclaves marked the high tide of the Serb campaign in Bosnia, and, as soon as they were dealt with, Mladic. despatched several thousand fighters to attack Bihac. from the east, while the Croatian Serbs pounded away from the west. Once again, the West dithered over its response, even though Bihac. was also a 'safe area'. But this time Croatia acted with determination. 'Following the fall of Srebrenica and Zepa, we could no longer afford to wait and see something similar happening in Bihac,' Susak said. 'We spent several days in preparation: we submitted a report to the supreme commander [Tudjman] which said we were capable of doing it, and he made the decision and signed the order.'

Croatia's diplomatic position was now much stronger than it had been at the time of the offensive around Zadar. Disgust in the US over the Europeans' conciliatory stance towards the Serbs helped Croatia. American sympathies lay most of all with the Muslims. But the Bosnian government's failure, or inability, to build an effective fighting force against the Serbs left Croatia as Washington's only alternative partner. The Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, feared a Croatian offensive might create many more refugees. On the other hand, he felt it might make a new balance of power in the former Yugoslavia, which might pave the way to a peace settlement. 'It always had the possibility of simplifying matters,' he admitted.

US policy towards former Yugoslavia was complicated by the tussle between the Republican-led Congress, which favoured lifting the arms embargo on Bosnia, and President Clinton's desire to maintain at least an appearance of a common position on Bosnia between Washington, Russia and Europe - which meant keeping the arms embargo in place. As the assault on Bihac escalated at the end of July, the Croats decided on an all-out attack against Krajina. The nominal goal would be the relief of Bihac. Tudjman was certain he would not meet an armed response from the demoralised UN, or condemnation in Washington, where a quick Croat victory would solve the row between Clinton and Congress over the arms embargo. Tudjman's guess was correct. The US ambassador to Zagreb, Peter Gailbraith, merely handed Tudjman a message expressing Washington's 'concern' at the build-up of Croatian troops. Tudjman took that as a green light. He roared with laughter when he recalled the American note in an interview. 'I gave it serious thought but I didn't stop,' he said. 'I was confident we would win.'

The Bosnian army's inability to hold the Serbs back on the Bihac. front made a quick decision vital; within a week, a quarter of the Bihac pocket fell to the Serbs, who were close to capturing the only working airfield through which the Muslims received weapons from Croatia.

On 22 July, Tudjman and Izetbegovic signed a declaration in Split binding both sides to common defence against Serb aggression. Tudjman soon put his words into action. After a lightning attack, Bosnian Croat and Croat forces overran the towns of Glamoc and Bosansko Grahovo in western Bosnia, virtually closing the roads from Knin to Serb- held Bosnia. Even Martic and Babic were shaken by the ease with which the Croats stormed these traditional Serb bastions. So was the UN, which hastily convened new talks between Knin and Zagreb in Geneva on 3 August. Tudjman agreed that Croatia would take part, but the delegation of low-level MPs and translators he sent made it clear that the Zagreb government was no longer interested in the results of talks. The conditions he set amounted to a diktat. The Krajina had to be reincorporated in Croatia within twenty-four hours, the test being the immediate reopening of the Zagreb-Split rail link and the oil pipeline running through northern Krajina, Faced with probable annihilation, Babic caved in, and agreed to a deal proposed by Gailbraith, to reunite Croatia and Krajina in a peaceful fashion.

The outcome of the Geneva talks did not please Tudjman, who suspected that the Serbs were merely playing for time. His army was now mobilised and poised for an offensive. Some 200,000 men were ready to go into the attack, spearheaded by elite units and backed up by reservists and police. In a statement released at 5 am on Friday 4 August the President publicly authorised the attack, codenamed Operation Oluja (Storm). He called on the Serb army to lay down its weapons and for the Serb leadership in Knin to surrender. At the same time he told ordinary Serbs to remain in their homes and trust that their property and rights would be guaranteed.

From its new vantage points in Grahovo, and from inside Croatia, tile Croatian army attacked the Krajina at some thirty points, concentrating on a pincer movement aimed at Knin, which was shelled heavily in the early hours of the morning.

The Krajina army consisted of about 40,000 men with about 400 tanks. In the north of the Krajina, General Mile Mrksic, an officer supplied by the Yugoslav army, had reorganised the Krajina frontlines in Lika after the debacle of western Slavonia. But he had not started work on the south, where the Croats concentrated their firepower. The Croats' decision to head straight for the Krajina's nerve centre in Knin paid off and by 10am on 5 August, the second day of the operation, they had entered Knin and hoisted the chequerboard flag on Knin castle. By 5pm that afternoon Croatian Radio Knin was on the air. Casualties were minimal. As soon as the bombardment started the Serb troops fled the frontlines, provoking a panicked flight into Bosnia by thousands of civilians, who left their houses with washing on the lines and meals half eaten on kitchen tables.

The fall of Knin was the signal for the collapse of the Krajina Serb army. At 3pm that afternoon the Bosnian and Croat armies linked up west of Bihac. splitting the Krajina into two. Benkovac fell at 6pm. That evening tens of thousands of Serbs began to pour out of Croatia in a mass exodus through two gateways left open deliberately by the Croat army, at Srb in Lika and Dvor in Banija. In Zagreb, Tudjman and Susak joined the celebrations on the streets. By the following morning the whole of northern Dalmatia was in Croat hands and Tudjman was heading for Knin castle, to kiss the chequerboard flag flying from the battlements.

Martic fled to Bosnia after a brief stop in Srb, where on the following Tuesday he issued a futile call for a guerrilla war. Once out of the country, his appeal lacked seriousness. There was no attempt to withdraw to a defensible redoubt in the north, in the dense forests and mountains of Banija or Lika. There, the fighting went on for another two days. But as the Serb population fled en masse into Bosnia with their erstwhile leaders, it was clear that the fighting around Petrinja and Glina was only a holding operation, to enable as many civilians as possible to escape to Bosnia before the roads were closed. By about 6am on the morning of 8 August, Oluja was effectively over, and at 9prn General Zvonimir Cervenko, Chief of the Croatian General Staff, gave a press conference, at which he announced: 'The territory of the Republic of Croatia occupied by the so-called Republic of Serb Krajina has been completely liberated. There are only two areas, that is the area of Vojnic-Vrginmost, and this area to the right, where there are still encircled formations of the former army and the population who have fled these territories.'

Within the space of eighty-four hours the Serbian Republic of Krajina had dissolved, the only exception being the strip of land surrounding Vukovar in eastern Slavonia, which bordered on Serbia proper. Thousands of Croatian Serbs who had failed to escape in time were huddled in a vast open-air camp at Topusko, awaiting evacuation under UN auspices to Bosnia and Serbia.

The government in Zagreb insisted that Croatian Serbs who were not involved in 'war crimes' would be able to stay, or even return to their home once they had fled. In fact the departure of the Serbs from the Krajina was as final as the flight of the Greeks from Asia Minor in 1921, the Germans from Bohemia and Poland after the Second World War or the pieds noirs from Algeria in 1961. After demanding all, they had lost all. Within days of their departure, the returning Krajina Croats and Croat soldiers made a mockery of the government's public promises by burning down dozens of Serb villages and looting the Serbs' empty homes. For the Croat refugees, almost 200,000 in number, it was the day that they had hardly dared to hope for - a chance to return to what was left of the homes that they had been driven from so abruptly four years previously. For Tudjman, the sight of the Croat flag over Knin castle was a moment to savour, the apex of a career that had seen spectacular peaks and troughs. The 'thousand-year-old dream' of which he had spoken so often was a reality at last.

The world was impressed by Croatia's growth into a significant military power. Predictably, Britain, France and Russia condemned the entire operation. But Germany and the US did not. President Bill Clinton significantly said he was 'hopeful that Croatia's offensive will turn out to be something that will give us an avenue to a quick diplomatic solution'.