
Croatia: The Haunting Of War Missing 25 Years On
November 22, 2016 by 27 Comments

Being in Vukovar on the 25th anniversary of horrid atrocities committed against innocent Croatian people by the Serb aggressor was a sombre, sad, gut-wrenching experience for over 120,000 people who visited there on 18 November and vividly remembered the horrors once again as my last post read. For those who were unable to be there, here is a close-up journal of what Connor Vlakancic’s eyes saw in the day leading up to that big day, on the day of Remembrance itself and the day after; what he felt as any of us might in the same place; he came from the US to be there.
“It is now 03:01, I can’t slumber, I must search about. The sky black of overcast and haze at ground level in the streetlights. The temperature is brisk and a breeze is up. An autumn morning that would have 99% of families asleep so to wake-up for a typical workday. But on this day 25 years ago, nobody blissfully slumbered in Vukovar and so it is every year on this date. And I have been here many times.
Vukovar is dear to me, I was married here in the Church of Philip and James (Svetog Filipa i Jakova) in September 2001, also the first year of the Vukovar Remembrance.
The holes dug into the bottom of all the stone and mortar columns, which the retreating JNA army (Yugoslav Army) would fill with explosives intending to even obliterate survivors’ memories (a hero had prevented their detonation) were all visible with a single candle in each.
On this date the church was long yet to be finished renovated, wounds in the walls and marble floors painfully still obvious, yet the bell in the reconstructed tower [the first work accomplished] was rung for 24 hours.
At 06:00, shortly after daybreak, the buses start arriving at the bus station (autobusni kolovador) the passengers walking to the hospital where the Remembrance Walk will start the five-kilometer march to the Vukovar Memorial Cemetery. As has been every year starting 2001. Me too.
I stand waiting in the hospital South side courtyard. I am up several steps of an alternate side building, watching, and my camera busy, overlooking the area as it fills with people. Veterans of every city, town and village, each it seems with their own municipality regimental flag, such a number of them 1,000+ I can believe.
Following the dedication ceremony commencement and memorial song, the Remembrance Walk commenced shortly after 10:20. With flags flying unfurled, it took 45 minutes for the leading line to reach the cemetery, yet people were even then still just departing from the hospital and so it was for nearly two hours more and another hour for the march to finish for all walking. The time is now 14:00 and memorial flowers and wreaths are placed at the central statuary. I can’t get near. I must return tomorrow to see this up close.

Procession starts at Vukovar Hospital
and continues to Memorial Cemetary
18 November 2016
Photo: Connor Vlakancic
This day commences familiar renewed for me, upon walking back toward ‘center’. Along the return route, again I stand and look up at the Vukovar water tower that stands on a ridge overlooking the Danube River. Built in 1968, it held 2200 cubic meters of water and had a restaurant at the top. It survived an estimated 600 direct hits from JNA bombardment. Many are the pictures of its suffering. I walk to encircle the water tower. There is no fear of walking around and under it. Years ago it was encircled with scaffolding (150 feet tall), all loose bricks were removed and all remaining were made secure. Now, these 25 years past, there are ongoing plans (the financial means accumulated) to renovate it into a new life.
Walking to an adjacent neighborhood, I visit my fondest dearest friends in Vukovar, Vilma and Ruzica. These two heartfelt people embody and mentor all that is Vukovar. Vilma, indispensable to the life flow of Vukovar, has again prepared her specialty, sarma (cabbage roll), enough to feed the Croatian army. Many people come, it is built into our remember. Ruzica is the curator of the baroque Eltz Palace that contains the Vukovar museum.
Soon enough, it is 18:00+ and pitch black. I go with Vilma and Ruza to see what I have not previously witnessed, one thousand candles, each on a tiny boat, one each for all persons missing, not accounted for, disappeared, ‘gone missing’. The Danube flows past Vukovar, a river of history and mystery. A thousand candles for the unforgotten because we remember for them.
One candle each for the thousand persons who are unaccounted for, yet here again, we remember for them. Deposited upstream from three boats, the thousand candles drift downstream longer than a kilometer. My camera cannot adequately capture their breath. The moon, since last extraordinary display event ‘super moon’ in 1948, is in bright display. Yet, its light fails to illuminate this solemn Remembrance. Many people watch, nobody speaks, and a young mother nurses her baby. Tomorrow more will be revealed.
Now Saturday (19 November) morning at 07:00, sleeping a bit longer from physical and emotional exhaustion, I return to Center. The open market has returned to normal typical activity, and much surprise to me too…
I drive past a long tented area. Yesterday it encompassed a great many tables with adjacent food preparation. Feeding 100,000+ people requires such and many more. This morning, even so early, the tables are gone but with human waste of empty cups and paper plates littering the ground.
Onward I drive, returning to the Vukovar Memorial Cemetery to capture 25 years plus one day in pictures. The pavilion (that yesterday you could not get close to as Mass was being celebrated) stands empty with the canvas cover [roof] now lowered to disassemble position. There are a few, actually several, people coming and going that perhaps could not come yesterday because they were service staff working to feed the 100,000+ people that returned to Vukovar Remembrance.
Now about 10:00 in the morning, the cemetery area has been picked-up of human trash, collected in black plastic bags to be disposed of, perhaps in earthen burial pits. Twenty five years ago black plastic body bags were not required for disposing of ‘human litter’!
The day after twenty-five years ago, human litter was human beings. Of the perpetrators, certainly for some of them, I am prayerfully for some of them, the enormity of the deprivation of human life wrought while they were drunk and disorderly, invaded their mind with revulsion for what they participated in and thus captured as the chronicle of their lives.
November 19th, 1991 [be there in your mind] and Remember all of Vukovar murdered heroes. They don’t remember, we must Remember for them.
I returned to the memorial cemetery at dusk. The votive candles, individually lit one-by-one each deposited by an individual person that Remember. By now the temperature has fallen to about 13 degrees with a slight breeze. Yet, as I stand downwind of certainly thousands of candles, the air temperature is 22+ degrees, a LOT of candles. I reflect as this is the warmth of the spirits of the dear departed giving their gratitude to we who come to Remember the chronicle of innocent victim lives.
Grave-sites of those who were ‘eliminated’ between August and December 1991 are adorned with every flower and candle that our Remembrance can enshrine. Here too, the thousand of lost ‘gone missing’ are remembered in an array of 36 by 28 stone crosses. Each Remembered with flowers and votive candles but where are they, dumped in mass graves … somewhere … nearby.
So, that is the point of this Vukovar Remembrance of 25 years ago, the missing are still missing! With 25 years of Remembering, the 25 years of Croatian governments have failed to achieve, even failed to try to achieve, secretly know grave-sites in villages around Vukovar.
For the families of the victims of the JNA executioners, where are the missing buried. This question is foremost what these families remember for all these 25 years!,” Connor Vlakancic
American Croat With Big Plans
November 9, 2016 by 14 Comments

Translation of article by Dusan Miljus, published online at Jutarnji List, 7 November 2016 (slightly different to the printed version published 6 November 2016 – Nedjeljni)
Translation by Ina Vukic
Should Hillary Clinton win she will have the support of the Democrats in the Congress, and the Republicans will be her opposition. Should Donald Trump win, besides the Democrats being his opposition he could also have against him half Republicans in the Congress who believe that he is a bad choice for president. This clearly shows who would have greater control in the Congress.
This is how Connor Vlakancic thinks about the elections. He is an American of Croatian origins, a candidate at the extraordinary elections for the American Congress for the state of Illinois and has behind him two attempts at being elected for the Senate. (September 10, 2015 for the replacement Illinois 18th Congressional District, US Representative, he was a write-in Independent candidate. Registered early 2016 to be the US Senator [Independent] candidate in Illinois.)
And while the election campaign enters its final stage, and given that the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails had “lifted” Donald Trump and increased his chances of becoming the 45th American president, even if some polls do say Hillary Clinton has advantage over the Republican candidate, Vlakancic sent Trump a letter last year asking him to support him as an independent candidate for the Congress.
“I sent him a letter in which I reminded him of the situation in 2000 when the presidential election results were decided by electronic votes from Florida in George Bush’s favour. I think this could be repeated again and that the support from independent candidates could actually be decisive if it happens that votes from independent candidates in Congress get to cast the deciding votes. I received a thank you letter from Trump’s election campaign camp but I think that Trump did not read that letter not did he have the time to consider my proposal,” says Vlakancic.
The story of this American of Croatian origins, 73-year-old businessman and an eager Chicago Cubs fan in whose checkered T-shirt he arrived at this interview, is not a typical story of the Croatian Diaspora in the United States that nurtures links with the old homeland of second generation immigrants and their contemporaries. His story is specific and almost unbelievable and was not known to the Croatian public, except for an article published in the Croatian Heritage Foundation Journal.
“In our house there were never discussions about ethnic origin. We were all raised as Americans. We wrote our surname as Vlakancic but pronounced it Vlakensik. As for my grandfather Constant the records for the state of Illinois say that he arrived in 1917 from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. He worked as a machinist in Aurora and had three children with my grandmother Ana. My mother was from a farming family of German origins that had property in northern Illinois and I spent my childhood there. My parents made it possible for me to achieve a high level of education so that after studies in Chicago and California I began my business career in the Silicon Valley in late 60’s,” Vlakancic reveals. In 1984 he founded a successful personal computers retail company and in early nineties a company for videoconferencing transmissions – Visitas Televideo. At the end of the last century he served as an advisor to entrepreneurs and investors in Silicon Valley, and was also on the boards of several companies. He has published professional articles, is active in the field of security issues in the communications industry, and the owner and manager of the company for the import and distribution of Croatian products, primarily food and alcoholic beverages in the US market.
In his youth he even met Ronald Reagan, the then governor of California and the future US president, who left a very strong impression on him.
“He was an actor and as such he knew and understood the importance of communication with people and its power in politics,” Vlakancic remembers the former US president and continues reflecting on the discovery of his own Croatian roots during late eighties. He considers that it’s Hillary Clinton’s bad communication after the investigation into whether in her private emails she used classified information, which FBI reopened at the later election campaign stage, that increased Donald Trump’s prospects for victory at the coming elections.
“It’s questionable whether the voters who have now found out about it and who had already made their decision to vote for Hillary Clinton, will remain with their decision to vote for her,” Vlakancic says among other things, and considers that many Americans will decide at the last minute to whom they will give their vote.
“ In 1987 I found in my mailbox a letter written in an unknown language to me. The only thing I understood in that language that was foreign to me then was that it was sent from the Croatian Catholic Parish San Jose, and the telephone number. I called that number and he asked me what my name was. Vlakenskik. ‘Vlakančić would be the correct way to say it. You are a Croat,’ replied fra Bono, who after arriving at the parish came across the Vlakancics through reading the telephone directory and wrote a letter to everyone he thought could be of Croatian origins. I came to mass the following Sunday and was among many people in front of the Croatian church in San Jose,” – Vlakancic remembers, as he at that time forged a strong emotional connection with the land of his ancestors who originate from the island of Cres.
He shared his discovery with his mother and asked her: “Did you know that grandfather was a Croat?”
“Of course I did,” she replied.
“Well, why haven’t you ever told me?” he asked her.
“Because you never asked,” she replied.
Although the real reason behind it is unknown to him, he says that there was never much talk about the family origins in their house. When he discovered his Croatian roots his first visit to the land of his ancestors soon followed – in 1988. He saw many grave headstones with Vlakancic name at the parish cemetery in Stivan, his grandfather’s birth place. He sat down and kissed the ground and cried and cried for a long time. From that time on, he often visits the homeland of his ancestors.
I met Vlakancic by pure chance, at the Samobor town square when the president of the town’s Lions club branch introduced me during a humanitarian action for raising funds for needy families. They were selling sweet rolls, Bermet sweet fruit and herb wine, pita bread with pork crackling at the stall and in the background there was a large pot in which pork cracklings were being made as cubes of pork fat melted inside it. These were the Croatian specialties that thrilled the would be American congressman who, although of the age at which many contemplate retirement, he, himself, has “American plans” with that as well as with other Croatian products.
“Hm, crackling, brandy (rakija), beer. They’re excellent,” he says as tasty cracklings melt in his mouth. During his visit to Croatia, where he intends to remain as he follows daily the developments in US presidential election campaigns, he contemplates new business and political undertakings while his peers consider peaceful days in retirement. Since the nineties he has been actively following Croatian politics, and, upon recommendation by the US Ambassador William Montgomery he acted as US State Department observer at the year 2000 elections. He met today’s president Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic in the US as well as the former president Ivo Josipovic, and also had the opportunity to meet the Croatian Prime Minister, Andrej Plenkovic.
Vlakancic was very critical of the time-frame between Christmas to just after New Year for the last presidential elections in Croatia as he considers that that time of the year should be devoted to holidays and family, not politics, and thinks that such practices should be changed. Although he failed twice at his bid to become a congressman, he is not giving up on the intention. He laid out to us his plan for the coming Congress elections at which he plans to be a candidate for the 18th District and he reveals his plan as to how he will win voters over. During the last elections he mentioned that his idol was Abraham Lincoln, who was first elected as congressman in that district of Illinois, and after that became the president of the USA.
“I will firstly turn to the Americans who have Euopean origins, of all ethnic groups. I will send them a message: I am one of you. I will visit all Croatian immigrants’ clubs, I will try and reach every voter of Croatian origins and their descendants and try to win over their vote. Pork cracklings and Croatian beer will be served at my election campaign gatherings…Most voters are from immigrant families and I’m counting on their votes,” Vlakancic explains his election strategy.
We did not get a precise answer to the question we asked as to how much money he will need to succeed in all that, but he says that he will be available 24 hours and that only hard and determined work can bring success. He believes in his success and hopes as Congressman to host a member of Croatian parliament in the Congress at Capitol Hill. Besides furthering the Croatian-American relations, which he has been doing since discovering his origins and maintains contact with Croatian politicians, he will apply efforts, he says, into making it possible for Croatian citizens as soon as possible to be able to travel into the US without a visa. Before anything else the Croatian political representatives will need to get support from the EU for that. Vlakancic says he will always work for the benefit of Croatia, a large potential as a tourist destination into which he will try and bring as many tourists from the US as possible. He sees a big opportunity for the launching of agricultural products, beer, randy (rakija) …and says he will work at that regardless who will be president (of US). He firmly believes that in two years time he will be a yet another American Congressman of Croatian origins.