Remembering the Storm

Aficionados of the QAnon conspiracy, which is putting down roots in the weirder regions of the Republican Party, espouse belief in “The Storm,” which is supposedly when President Donald Trump will expose the Deep State pedophiles who secretly run things and dispatch them all, pizza in hand, to Guantánamo Bay…or something.

That big reveal seems unlikely to happen anytime soon, but a quite real Storm happened a quarter-century ago this week: Operation Storm, Croatia’s victory offensive of August 1995. This Storm is little remembered outside the Balkans but it deserves commemoration for several reasons that matter beyond the former Yugoslavia.

In the first place, Storm remains the largest military operation in Europe since the Second World War. For its big push, Croatia mobilized its reserves and put 130,000 troops in the field, a remarkable feat for a country of only four million. The aim of Operation Storm was the reconquest of the one-third of the country which had declared its independence from Croatia in 1991, the so-called Republic of Serbian Krajina. With Belgrade’s backing, the RSK kept the Croatian military at bay as Yugoslavia collapsed bloodily in 1991.

Operation Storm aimed to overturn that. Despairing of Western-backed diplomatic solutions to regain its lost territory, Croatia’s nationalist President Franjo Tudjman, a military man by background, pondered his options. Croatia retooled its military, which upon independence was hardly more than a half-trained militia, and invested in new equipment, better logistics, raising professional units, and above all developing a cadre of officers schooled in NATO norms.

To do that, Croatia got quiet Western help, including training in modern planning and staff work from veteran American officers, among them retired U.S. Army generals, with a nod from the Pentagon. By 1994, as Balkan wars proliferated in an ugly fashion, Washington, DC, had grown tired of the violent antics of Serbian strongman Slobodan Milošević and sought to discreetly aid Croatia as a bulwark against Belgrade.

Thus, by mid-1995 Croatia’s new model army was ready to go on the offensive. A trial run came at the beginning of May with Operation Flash. This was a small-scale offensive by Croatian forces against the RSK’s pocket in Western Slavonia. Krajina Serb forces folded there inside three days, in some places not offering much resistance at all. While the UN and human rights groups denounced the offensive, nobody did anything to stop Operation Flash. Tudjman had his proof of concept. Importantly, Milošević had done nothing to aid fellow Serbs in Croatia, a message that was not missed in the Krajina.

Exactly three months later, on the morning of August 4, 1995, Operation Storm arrived. This was a complex offensive executed on multiple axes of advance. Months of meticulous planning predated the guns opening up shortly before dawn on that fateful day. Croatian intelligence had diligently mapped out the enemy’s dispositions across the Krajina, including early use of drones for reconnaissance, and initial artillery and air strikes crippled much of the RSK’s military command and control in the first hours of Operation Storm.

Krajina Serb morale was low and the ebullience of four summers before, when local Serbs took up arms against Zagreb with Belgrade’s help, was now a distant memory. The RSK’s ramshackle economy was little more than barter and bribery and many military-age men had fled to Serbia to find work. By the summer of 1995 it was obvious that no help would be coming from Milošević, who abandoned the Krajina Serbs to their fate. The RSK’s army was mostly a shell and in many places it offered only fleeting resistance to the advancing Croats.

Functionally, the end came as noon approached on August 5, the offensive’s second day, when Knin, the RSK’s capital, fell to the Croatian army. The next day, a joyous Tudjman kissed the Croatian flag as it was raised over Knin’s historic fortress, surrounded by his victorious generals, especially Ante Gotovina, the former French Foreign Legionnaire who became a Croatian national icon thanks to his pivotal role in Operation Storm.

Krajina Serb resistance petered out, much of the RSK’s forces simply melted away, and Zagreb declared the offensive over late on August 7, just 84 hours after it began. At a cost of just 1,500 casualties, including 200 killed in action, Croatia’s military had retaken one-third of their country and smothered the Krajina Serb Republic. This, by any standards, was an epic victory.

Yet the human cost was high. Although the RSK’s military casualties weren’t much worse than Croatia’s, some 200,000 Krajina Serb civilians fled before the victorious enemy, headed to safety in Serbia or the neighboring Bosnian Serb republic. Serbs claim that more than a thousand Krajina Serb civilians were murdered by Croatian forces during Operation Storm and in its aftermath; Zagreb asserts a far lower number but nobody denies that victorious Croatian troops in places attacked civilians in August 1995.

It should be noted that Krajina Serbs evicted and murdered Croatian civilians when they declared their independence in 1991, so this being the Balkans some payback was regrettably inevitable when the tables turned four years later. Moreover, in some places RSK authorities ordered civilians to retreat before Operation Storm when it happened. Nevertheless, it is a perverse irony that the biggest example of “ethnic cleansing” during the 1990s wars of Yugoslav succession was performed by Croatia, an ally of NATO and the West.

Tudjman and his nationalist government never seemed especially upset that 200,000 Serbs fled the country, many never to return. For Serbs, Operation Storm remains a bitter memory of national mourning for lives lost and the erasure of their ancient community in what had once been the Habsburg Military Border, which shielded Central Europe from the Ottomans for over three centuries.

For Croats, Operation Storm remains the crowning glory of their Homeland War, the greatest achievement of Croatian arms in the country’s thousand-year history. August 5 is Victory Day, a national holiday, complete with military parades and veteran commemorations. Franjo Tudjman died in office in 1999 but for his nationalist party, the still-dominant HDZ, Operation Storm is a revered event.

A quarter-century on, it bears noting that the offensive did achieve much that’s worthy of commemoration. In less than four days, it crushed the malignant dream of Greater Serbia, which the Milošević regime had used to shatter Yugoslavia and unleash terrible wars. Operation Storm also signaled the beginning of joint Croatian-Bosnian Muslim offensives that, in the weeks after it, forced the Bosnian Serbs to the peace table, with help from NATO airpower. Timing matters, and when Croatia launched Operation Storm just three weeks after Bosnian Serbs massacred thousands of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica, horrifying the world, few were inclined to fret about Serbian protests of human rights violations at their expense.

Operation Storm in a real sense ended the Bosnian war as well as Croatia’s. Twenty-five years later, Croatia is free, whole, and a member of both NATO and the European Union. Croatian veterans have a right to feel that they achieved something remarkable. Operation Storm provides a vivid counterpoint to arguments that wars don’t solve anything or that arms are just for hugging.

Moreover, Operation Storm stands as a muted contrast to what American arms have failed to achieve in our wars following the 9/11 attacks on the United States. In 1995, Croatia employed military force to accomplish enduring political aims, which is something that the far mightier Pentagon has been unable to manage in a long time. Zagreb went into Operation Storm with coherent plans for not just winning on the battlefield, but also for establishing lasting peace on politically desirable terms.

While it’s obviously easier to do this in one’s own country than in a foreign land halfway around the world, as our Afghan war prepares to enter its third decade, it’s worth asking if anybody in the Department of Defense comprehends war termination anymore. Just as Croatia needed U.S. military know-how in tactics and planning in 1994-95, it seems that the Pentagon could use some schooling from Croatian generals on how to realistically match military means with political aims.

Time marches on and, at last, there are signs that much-needed reconciliation between Croats and Serbs is taking root. In 2001, The Hague’s Balkan tribunal indicted Ante Gotovina for war crimes related to Operation Storm. After four years on the lam, Gotovina was taken into custody and convicted. Yet he was released in 2012 on appeal and returned home in glory.

However, the man heralded by Croatian nationalists as simply “the General” disappointed his fans. Gotovina stated that he wanted nothing to do with politics and explained that it was time to move on. Gotovina told Croats that the Homeland War belongs to history and they should welcome home the Serbs who fled in the face of his great victory in 1995. These days Gotovina avoids the limelight and runs a successful fish farm, where the employees include African migrants who get a chance at a new life.

This August 5, for the first time, Croatia’s Serbian minority participated in the official commemoration of Operation Storm. Boris Milošević, the deputy prime minister (no relation of the Serbian strongman who died in custody in The Hague in 2006), took part in Victory Day events. His grandmother was murdered by Croats in the aftermath of Operation Storm yet Milošević explained his participation with the statement, “After 25 years, we must stop the hatred, stop the war.”