VukoWAR
Looking out across the water, it seems like a peaceful world. But look the other way, towards the old city, and the war comes into focus. The department store destroyed by grenades that no one bothers about. The twisted steel of grand houses that did not survive the relentless mortar fire.

"Everything here was destroyed in no time," says Ruza Maric, director of the city museum in Vukovar. Ms Maric fled when Serb soldiers and militiamen attacked Vukovar in the autumn of 1991. The city on the Danube, where for centuries Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, Jews, Hungarians and Ruthenians lived together, fell to the Serb forces in November 1991 after a siege lasting months. Around three thousand Croats died and the baroque city centre was left in ruins. Vukovar became VukoWAR, the Stalingrad of the Balkans.

"After the war, when we returned, relations between the Croats and Serbs from Vukovar were strained for a long time," says the museum director. "Now we're working together again, but privately we're divorced."

In the late afternoon the first boats full of tourists leave the city quay heading for Otok, the island in the Danube which has formed the border between Croatia and Serbia since 1998. The two countries are still arguing about who should own Otok.

Forgetting
"The question is irrelevant to us," says 18-year-old Nikola Luketic, a member of the Vukovar punk band Borovski Stakori. The name of the band ‘Rats from Borovo’ refers to the neighbourhood where Nikola and his friends grew up in post-war Vukovar. Nikola and the ‘Rats’ find forgetfulness on the island.

"It makes no difference here whether you're a Croat or a Serb. Our band is mixed. Four Croats on guitars and vocals and one Serb on the drums."

Sanctuary
In the bar on the island, Igor Rakunic is studying the programme of the Vukovar Film Festival which starts soon. "Like everyone in Vukovar, I lost everything during the war," he says. After the war he left for the capital Zagreb, but he returns to his hometown every year.

"The island means everything to me. I feel better and freer here than on the Adriatic coast with its hordes of tourists."

On the forecastle of a boat, punk musician Nikola of the Borovski Stakori stares across the water. "There's no decent work to be found in Vukovar," he grumbles.

"But the mentality is getting better. People are nicer to each other. There's less talk about the war."

*RNW translation (imm)