Series Fortress is undoubtedly one of the leading topics among critics and laymen. Reactions are mostly good, with some artistic objections. Those remarks will not be considered in this text. Works of art influence public opinion with their messages, not only with their artistic reach. Especially a work that deals with the recent past. In this way, and the series Fortress it became an instrument of building a collective memory related to the war in Croatia. Therefore, this text does not deal with the question of the artistic value of the series, but with the way it contributes to our culture of memory: what messages it sends, what it suggests to us to remember and in what way, and what to suppress or forget.
Fortress deals with the first half of the 1990s in Knin, the period of war in Croatia and the repercussions on the lives of young people from a multi-ethnic relationship. The messages the story sends are varied and touch on numerous aspects of historical memory, but four sets of narratives stood out to me. These are the attitude towards the war and war actors, the attitude towards Yugoslavia, attitude towards Croats and attitude towards Serbia. The authors are explicit that there is no historical character in the series and that they used artistic freedom, which is undoubtedly their right. However, the city where the drama takes place is not fictional, just as the great historical events of that period are not fictional. That fact logically directs the viewer to see in the characters those who held those positions at that time.
When it comes to the attitude towards war actors, the series is one of the few that deals with the well-known training center for police units in Golubić near Knin. The center for the training of special forces from which many units on the Serbian side will later develop, from the "Martićevci" to JSO, was founded by Dragan Vasiljković, better known as Captain Dragan, at the behest of Franko Simatović. No matter how much they run away from historical figures, the authors of the series still cannot run away from the fact that they modeled the character of the commander on Dragan Vasiljković, including the recognition that until then he worked for money, as a mercenary.
ROMANTIZATION
The romanticization of both the unit and its commander is present from the very beginning. Thanks to the caricatured JNA officer, this difference stands out even more. It goes so far as to talk about Vasiljković as someone who did not lose a single fighter. The readiness of the unit, their discipline, military demeanor and the like are emphasized. Captain Dragan is on the verge of tears when he hears that the Serbian DB trades with the Croats and even kills the boss DB because of that. It could be said that this series reaches the level of parody, but this unit is far from all laughs, and even from parody. This is one of the darkest events of the Yugoslav wars. The bloody traces of the unit, which was conceived then, dragged from Glina, and in 1991, through Vukovar, the Bosnian battlefields, Kosovo, until the murder of Zoran Đinđić. One of the characters who was then in Knin, Živorad Ivanović Crnogorac, today threatens us from Ćaciland, one would say the natural origin of this unit and the politics behind its creation.
It is interesting how adjustments to historical circumstances also reveal the needs of the authors of the series to send one of the messages. The scene of the conflict on the Plitvice Lakes is significant in this regard. Based on historical facts, we know that at the end of March 1991, Serbian units occupied the administrative facilities of the Plitvice National Park and expelled the legal management, Croatian police were sent to restore order. They encountered resistance from the Serbian TO and armed locals, and policeman Josip Jović, who is officially considered the first casualty of the war in Croatia, and member of the Serbian forces Rajko Vukadinović were killed in the shootout. Croatian police briefly regained control of the national park and on that occasion more than 20 Serbian rebels were captured, including Goran Hadzic, a future war leader from Eastern Slavonia. In the series, this looks completely different. First, Captain Dragan's unit, which did not even exist then, goes to Plitvice. Second, the Serbs win the battle and capture a busload of Croatian policemen. And thirdly, most importantly, the character who should be Captain Dragan, receives an order from Belgrade to release the prisoners. That scene was very important to the authors. They show the disappointment and even the brief resistance of Vasiljković to such an order. The importance is also shown by the return to that situation when one of the fighters says: "Everything went wrong in Plitvice when they ordered us to release the prisoners".
The importance of this scene is clear, which once again confirms the unquestionable truth of the landing Dobrica Cosic that Serbs lose in peace what they gain in war. For the wars in Yugoslavia, this message is often translated into a lament over the alleged withdrawal of the army after taking a place or with the simple belief that the army could have defeated Croatia, but the politicians did not give it to them. It is certain that there is no adult who has not encountered these famous arguments at least once. However, historical facts are inexorable. The armies under the command of Slobodan Milošević never retreated because of a politician's decision, but only because of military defeats. There is not a single place in Croatia that the forces of the JNA and the Serbian Territorians occupied and then withdrew from. Moreover, the JNA was defeated in its original plan to cut the Croatian territory into several parts and to reach Zagreb from two directions - from the south and from the east. The southern column was stopped near Dubrovnik, and the eastern one at Vukovar and in front of Osijek. Attempts to cut through Croatian territory failed due to the defeat of the Knin Corps at Šibenik. The Serbs did not lose anything at the green table, moreover, the complete collapse of Republika Srpska was finally prevented precisely at the green table in 1995.
NAIVE SERBS AND YUGOSLAVIA
You don't have to go too far and see where this leads. The problem is not that the war was caused, but that it was lost. Throughout the series, the war is treated as a meteorological phenomenon, as Dubravka Stojanović teaches us, wars are usually treated in Serbian textbooks. It happened as an inevitability, due to the impossibility of the common life of two peoples. The series skips all preparations for war. In the scenes that take place in August 1990, there is no sign of the revolution, undoubtedly the key event of that month in Knin and its surroundings. Besides Maksimir, only one other pre-war event is important - multi-party elections in Croatia. This is also an interesting scripting procedure. The emphasis was placed on Račan and how the Serbs voted for him, and then he voted for the Constitution that defines them as a national minority. That betrayal of the party is emphasized in the series by sending clear messages - the first, about the naivety of the Serbs, the second about the fraud called the party and Yugoslavia. The fact that SDS won in Knin, and not Račan's communists, did not fit into this message, so it was simply kept silent. Nor are the numerous moves by the Knin leadership clearly aimed at secession from Croatia and joining the imagined Greater Serbia. By the way, there are no civilian leaders of the Serbs in that part of Croatia in the series, and even the decision to send young men to the battlefield in Bosnia is rejected by the general of the JNA, without any participation of politicians from Krajina.
Yugoslavia is clearly presented in the series in accordance with the stereotype already established. In question was a state that brought injustice to the Serbs and is synonymous with, as nationalist historians put it, "the lost Serbian 20th century". The hero who is in charge of speaking great truths and popular folk wisdom in this work is a character played by Nikola Pejaković. There are a handful of such characters in Serbian cinematography, and they rely on the tradition of populist literature by Dobrica Ćosić, Danko Popović and Vuk Drašković. The hero is the people and speaks the collective language through the mouth of one person. At one point, Pejaković's character utters: "Nothing from the Serbs or from Serbia until that beast grows stronger", referring to Yugoslavia. After all, one of the creators of the series, Mirko Stojković, says that Yugoslavia "does not deserve to be remembered well" because it ended with the ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Croatia. It is strange to place the end of Yugoslavia in 1995, since that country disintegrated in 1991, but in that year the victims of ethnic cleansing were slightly differently distributed by nation.
Yugoslavia is also symbolized by its army, which is also presented stereotypically in the series, so much so that it seems that we have returned to one of the SPO rallies in 1991, when they were looking for a Serbian army instead of the incompetent, communist JNA. This is not, of course, a new point of view. In front of drugstores all over Serbia, as well as at the aforementioned celebratory tables, there is regular lamentation over the communist officers and generals who were unable to win the war. And in the series, one of the key roles at the beginning was played by the colonel, and then the general from the JNA. We know the historical facts. A general was in Knin and commanded the Knin Corps in 1991, and his name is Ratko Mladić. Nothing in the character from the series resembles the real Mladić. Again, no matter how much they refer to artistic freedom, it is clear why they conceived the character of the general in this way. Through him, they needed to tell the aforementioned Slavic wisdom about the lost war, which was the fault of incompetent military leaders. The facts once again disturbed the created collective memory, so they were simply eliminated.
Dramaturgically, it is expected and justified to change historical facts in order to enhance the effect of the main story, which in this series is undoubtedly love. It would therefore be expected that the events in the background of the story become even more intense, to emphasize the strength of love against the hatred that reigns around the couple in love. However, the authors do the exact opposite. Knin from 1991 was presented as a place where a Croatian woman may have been fired because of her nationality and where Croats live almost normally, with an incident committed by a drug addict, who was physically punished for it. The character of Nikola Pejaković says to his Croat neighbor: "Not a hair was missing from your head" and that is the message that accompanies the whole image of Knin from the series.
THE DARK SIDE OF THE FORTRESS
And what did it look like in 1991? More than 600 Croats, mostly civilians from Knin and its surroundings, were detained in the JNA barracks in Knin and in the old hospital, later the RSK district prison. There they were beaten, starved, insulted. Among the torturers were fighters from Captain Dragan's unit, as well as volunteers from Serbia and local residents. Vojislav Šešelj also came to insult and threaten the prisoners. Among other things, the prisoners testified that they were forced to drink urine, to swear to the king and the fatherland, and there were also cases of sexual violence. Almost all Croatian civilians were expelled from the occupied territories, more than 200.000 of them. From the territory of the municipality of Knin, the Croats were directed to the town of Vrpolje, where a sort of collection center was formed around the local cultural centre. From there, they were deported to areas controlled by Croatia. Constant harassment of people, searches of Croatian houses for the alleged search for weapons, as well as the blowing up of shops owned by Croats, which started already in 1990, contributed to the expulsion. As Boris Dežulović noted in his famous reportage from Knin, published in May 1991, the city was full of demolished buildings "whose owners - by a strange coincidence - are all Croats". As you can easily tell, this is not the Knin we see in the series Fortress.
The Knin fortress itself is an interesting witness of time, but also a place of memory. The unit to which the movie hero Luka belonged at the beginning, although it had a training center in Golubić, very quickly took over the Knin fortress and installed its headquarters there. Captain Dragan also had an improvised prison in the fortress where his men held captive Croats in June and July 1991, mistreated and tortured them. Captain Dragan himself participated in the torture, for which he was convicted before the court in Split. The statements of the victims from the Knin fortress are available to the public and they are certainly part of the history of this fortress. Again, not in the series, which, although it bears the name Fortress, does not for a single moment look back on the dark role of this object in 1991.
photo: printscreenMULTIPLICATION OF THE STEREOTYPE: The fickle priest
There are, of course, Croats in the series, because it pleads to be some version of Shakespeare's drama of a multi-ethnic marriage in a hostile environment. However, see the devil, even that one Croat who, in addition to the main actress, has a more notable role, will turn out to be a Serb in the end. This author's trip to the waters known from Vuk Drašković's pamphlet-Huška work Knife, hardly worth commenting on. Perhaps the author's view of the Serbo-Croatian past is better illustrated by some smaller, but interesting roles. For example, Serbian pop music is wise, gentle, preaches about the fact that there are people and non-people everywhere. Catholic appears at the beginning, and it only serves to warn about the Serbs and their hostility and to spread hatred and fear. And the young Croat, the previous boyfriend of the female lead, is a coward who retreats in front of the brave Serbian young man. Croatian soldiers mindlessly kill everyone they come across, including a Croatian woman, who survived Serbian rule without a problem, only to be killed by her own army. All Croats, even in extremely episodic roles, remain within the stereotypes of Serbian nationalism.
UDBASH AND OTHER SPIES
On the other hand, the role of the Serbian state security was presented so negatively that it turned into a caricature, without any credibility. Dilparić is a combination of Arkan who has fun with a singer and Simatović who organizes a paramilitary camp. His son is, of course, a criminal, as he must be in the stereotypical perception of DB officials. The power of the service is timeless, so much so that it turns into an absolute force that governs human lives, kills a general (who, let's remind you, is Ratko Mladić in real life!), manages society, the economy, politics... As Dimitrije Vojnov wittily concluded in his post on Facebook, in the character of Dilparić, "all the columns of Miloš Vasić and Dejan Anastasijević embraced". The elucidation of the role of the Serbian DB in organizing the war was noted in many reviews as a plus of this series. And there is no doubt that it has its cathartic side and that it is important to open such a question. However, the question remains to what extent this completely unrealistic image of the service leaves the domain of fantasy and how much it helps to realistically see the problem of Milošević's government's participation in wars.
Along with the Serbian DB, another mythical force that is happy to be admired for its glory has its place in the series. It is, of course, foreign intelligence services, and Germany, first of all. The German intelligence agent is presented as more powerful, not only than the character that we have already described as a combination of Franky and Arkan, but also from his boss, which means - Jovica Stanišić himself. In the manner of a children's program, he agrees with the top of the Serbian DB on a plan to present the Serbs from Croatia as smugglers, and then move on to demonizing the Republika Srpska. The conclusion is clear - the Germans are the ones who managed the events by controlling the most powerful people in the Serbian service. Again a familiar scenario, right? And here comes to the fore the incredible need of the author to caricature the characters to the end. The spy seems like a villain from a Hollywood B production or some parody. It is most reminiscent of how Serbian cinematography presented the investigators of the Hague Tribunal in another stereotypically charged work about the recent past - My cousin from the village.
These exaggerations have the role of emphasizing the difference between the evil centers of power in Belgrade and Berlin and the naive, deceived people of Knin. And the scenography of the two cities, Knin and Belgrade, further emphasizes that difference. Belgrade is presented as Sodom and Gomorrah, a city of crime, drug addiction, and prostitution in contrast to poor, but secluded and somewhat rustic Knin. At the same time, the hostile attitude of the citizens of Belgrade, but also the whole of Serbia, towards the people from Croatia is emphasized, through small details such as not knowing what a pack of cigarettes means or the border guard's insistence that the Drina is the border. These last details are not exaggerated and have their own meaning in the context of the whole story, but in general the story about Belgrade serves exclusively as decor for the story about Knin and Krajina. In the words of the main character - Belgrade is in "Kristal" (club), spending money from smuggling while the citizens of Krajiš are dying.
COLLECTIVE MEMORY
And when it comes to Belgrade, it's not only the evil Udbas who come from it, but also Croatian spies, which the government in Serbia has been constantly repeating for the past 12 months. And spies, no less, from Belgrade's "Borba", the most honorable newspaper this country had. The authors go so far as to put in the mouth of the journalist of "Borbe", a newspaper that consistently advocated the anti-war option from the very beginning, the words addressed to the Croat from Knin: "Your job is to sell war." This move represents the ethical lowest point of the script and clearly speaks to the ideology of the author. He is at the level of a scene from a movie Beautiful Village, Pretty Flame in which an anti-war activist deliberately trips a war invalid. Petty human vices like these say nothing about the anti-war movement in Serbia. They talk a lot about the authors.
Series Fortress is a monument to a specific geographical and cultural group, the inhabitants of Northern Dalmatia. It's a perfectly legitimate dramaturgical move and I have no doubt that many from that region will be satisfied, especially with the obviously well depicted daily life in 1990, including that speech, costumes, scenography. But she is not only that. Whether the authors want it or not, it is also a means of disseminating narratives that serve to create collective memory. The stereotypes we have listed are part of different ideological stories, as well as wars in the culture of memory. It must be a topic of conversation and this series is a good way to open the topic of how we remember the recent past to the public.
Finally, some Dalmatians with different names are part of that group, so faithfully presented. Those who lived on the left bank of the Krupa or in Drniš, Vrpolje, Nadin, Škabrnja, Bruška, Kiev... And who suffered quite a lot precisely in 1991. And there are none in this series. Just as there is no such large number of Serbs who did not participate in the rebellion, but fled the war or remained in the territories under Croatian control, often facing a very uncertain fate. It is my firm belief that it would be very useful for the group the series deals with not to forget that part of their past, however difficult it may be. Just as it would be healthy to reconsider the narrative about the naive people of Krajina who only defended themselves, seduced by the evil Belgrade and threatened by the evil Zagreb. All evil, and only us good, is rarely the truth, and even more rarely the basis for a mature view of oneself and one's own actions. Perhaps then we could more easily deal with the fact that the same policy that led to the tragic fate of the Serbs in Croatia now receives almost plebiscite support in the settlements where the refugees from Krajišnik live.
And finally - what did we have? A naïve Yugoslav, an incompetent Tito officer, an evil Udbas, a mysterious foreign spy who controls events from the shadows, an auto-chauvinist from an anti-war newspaper who is, normally, a Croatian spy, an evil Croat who is actually a Serb, an honest Krajina Serb who was deceived by the mythical "Belgrade", an honorable warrior who is not allowed to win the war, a faithful lover who waits for her hero and forgives his sins and, of course, a Serbian knight - of a tragic hero, who, how could it be otherwise, cheers for Red Star. If there's another stereotype that hasn't been used, don't worry. Anyway, the season of glory is going on, there will certainly be plenty of material.
The author is a historian from Belgrade
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