witness to the refugees that never made it down the hills, through the

town and over the border into Bosnia. In Kistanje only a handful of
people remained behind. It was said that Croats from nearby villages
had torched Kistanje in revenge for the razing of their villages by the
Serbs in 1991. But the Croats hadmanaged to preserve the nearby Krka
monastery, a fourteenth-century foundation which had police guards
posted at the gates. Inside everything was eerily untouched. On the
walls the portraits of Serbian saints and heroes looked down upon the
monastery’s new occupants. Here a returned Serbian émigré priest had
once preached the most virulent Serbian nationalism, and Krka itself
had over the last four years played an important role in bolstering
Krajina’s martial spirit. Now it appeared helpless, washed up hundreds
of miles away from the nearest inhabited Serbian settlements. It was
here that the historic tides of Serbian migrations had reached their
furthest extent, but in the last few days they had turned eastwards
again. In the eighteenth century the Dalmatian bishop Simeon
Koncˇarevic´ wrote a history of the local Serbs from about 1350; he said
of Krka, ‘God’s blessing was on this home; and since that time it has
always been, until the present day, the shelter for the suffering and the
fortification of our holy religion.’2
By preserving Krka the Croat message was that ‘unlike the Serbs’
they did not desecrate holymonuments.As thewater spilled froma lazy
fountain in the middle of the cloister, the sun began to set, bathing the
surrounding hills and rocky landscape in a strange pink twilight. ‘I was
almost taken inmyself,’ said a UNhuman rightsmonitor, ‘and then you
realise what a con it is. Krka may be fine but Kistanje has been
completely destroyed and there are almost no people left there.’
In the late 1980s, at the height of Serbia’s nationalist euphoria,
hundreds of thousands could be relied upon to demonstrate for ‘Serbian
Unity’ and ‘All Serbs in One State’. Now the Serbs faced defeat. Vilified
throughout the world as the people who had driven out hundreds of
thousands of Croats and Muslims in their drive to make their own new
Serb state, hundreds of thousands of Serbs were now refugees and
Serbiawas bankrupt. Ashamed, barely a couple of thousand Belgraders
came out to demonstrate against their government, which had turned
the Serbs into international pariahs and then nonetheless failed to hold
on to what most of them believed was rightfully theirs.
In 1986 a small group of intellectuals at the SerbianAcademy ofArts
and Sciences had written the so-called Memorandum which stated that
‘In the general process of disintegration which has encompassed
Yugoslavia, the Serbs have been hit hardest. . . . This process is directed
towards the total breaking up of the national unity among the Serbian
people.’3 This, added to the emigration (or ‘genocide’, as they put it) of
tens of thousands of the remaining Serbs in ethnicAlbanian-dominated