A Festering Mystery Fuels a Croatian Mother’s Crusade

His handsome young face wearing a warm smile, Kresimir Ratkovic has become both a mother’s crusade and a political time bomb.

At the age of 23, the wounded Croatian soldier disappeared from his hospital bed in the chaotic hours that followed the Nov. 19, 1991, fall of the eastern Croatian town of Vukovar to Serbian forces. Despite the uneasy peace that followed between the rump Yugoslavia and the newly independent Croatia, his fate remains part of a troubling mystery.

At the family home here, all that’s left of Kresimir is memories, a certificate of military service from the Croatian government and his photo, set under a Madonna on the living room wall.

His mother, Katica, a warm woman with an open face and a broken heart, still begins each day staring into the black hole of uncertainty: “I sit at a full table and wonder, ‘Is he hungry?’ I sit in a warm room and ask myself, ‘Is he cold?’ ”

Other questions, asked at far higher levels, carry more dangerous political implications--ones that could well reverberate around the Balkans once they are answered.

Kresimir was one of 261 men--the majority of them either wounded Croatian soldiers or hospital staff--who were taken from the Vukovar hospital the day after the town fell and who simply vanished.

While Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic has consistently brushed aside requests for information about the incident, the recent Dayton, Ohio, peace accord may finally force his hand.

Terms of that agreement bind all parties to “cooperate fully with the International Committee of the Red Cross to determine the identities, whereabouts and fate of the unaccounted for” in the Balkan war. The accord also sets two related deadlines for later this month--Jan. 10 for an exchange of comprehensive lists of prisoners and Jan. 19 for the release of all prisoners.

Serbian and Croatian deputy foreign ministers are scheduled to meet Thursday in Belgrade, the Serbian and Yugoslav capital, to discuss these and other issues relating to the estimated 2,800 Croats and 210 Serbs still officially unaccounted for in the war.

Although overshadowed by the subsequent long and brutal conflict in neighboring Bosnia-Herzegovina, the 1991 war in which the Serb-dominated Yugoslav National Army, helped by Serbian irregulars, conquered large chunks of Croatia remains a defining experience for many Croats.

No battle in that war is more deeply etched in the Croatian national conscience than the siege of Vukovar, and no single question hangs heavier over the country than the fate of those from the Vukovar hospital. Political analysts fear that unwelcome answers could come just as Serbia and Croatia--two of the Balkans’ oldest adversaries--try to normalize relations in the wake of the Dayton accord.

Katica Ratkovic has little time for such worries.

Driven by hope and the need for answers, her life has become a crusade to end the uncertainty surrounding the fate of her son.

Initially, she chased refugee columns and U.N. patrols for news of her son. When no one in power would listen to her, she formed a pressure group, the Assn. of Croatian Mothers, made herself president and set up an office in Vinkovci. Since then, she has taken her case to just about anyone who would listen--and many who wouldn’t.

She has had an audience with Pope John Paul II (who enlisted U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to approach Milosevic, who in turn rejected the overture); met with former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (who also tried and failed to move Milosevic); written to the wife of former French President Francois Mitterrand, Dominique Mitterrand (who failed to reply); contacted the U.N.’s onetime special envoy in the region, Yasushi Akashi (who refused to see her); contacted CNN (which declined to interview her); and talked with Kofi Annan, now the United Nations’ most senior diplomat in the region (who also tried and failed to push Milosevic, but who wrote her an encouraging letter predicting that the Dayton accord could break the impasse).

She also made contact with Serbian mothers, searching for word of their own sons listed as missing in the war.

“We’d start to get somewhere until I mentioned the Vukovar hospital. Then everything stopped. There was only silence,” Ratkovic said.

Two years ago, consumed with anger by the United Nations’ refusal to address the issue, she organized the construction of a brick wall around its main headquarters in Zagreb, the Croatian capital. The waist-high wall, containing 13,800 bricks--each with the name of one Serb or Croat listed as missing or killed in the war--still surrounds the compound.

“It was our protest for them doing nothing,” she said. “I wanted them to pass it each day as a reminder of that.”

Red Cross officials, whose role in the affair is strictly humanitarian, admit that the political dimension complicates their efforts in the case.

“There’s a political problem with those [missing] from the hospital,” said Marco Weil, deputy head of the Red Cross office in Zagreb. “We know something happened there, but it’s not resolved yet.”

Another source, who requested anonymity for himself and his international organization, predicted that the Serbs will have to be pushed hard before they provide any details.

“They are embarrassed and afraid,” she said. “They don’t want to answer because they know when they do, there’s going to be trouble. The Croats are also unhappy about it because they’re trying to create a new political relationship.”

Certainly there is growing evidence to suggest reason to worry.

Two months ago, the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague indicted three Yugoslav National Army officers in what prosecutors now believe was the massacre of most, if not all, of the 261 men.

“The men were transported in groups of 10 to 20 to a site . . . where Yugoslav National Army and Serb paramilitary soldiers shot and killed them,” reads the indictment. “After the killings, the bodies of the victims were buried by a bulldozer in a mass grave at Ovcara [a village east of Vukovar].”

Several weeks ago, the independent Belgrade weekly Vreme published excerpts from the diary of a Serb from Vukovar that included a conversation with someone the day after he claimed to have participated in the massacre.

“Last night, between 7 p.m. and 1 a.m., we killed them all,” the diarist quoted the self-professed participant as saying. “You should have heard them, begging, crying. . . .”

But there are contradictory accounts too.

Some Croats who managed to escape Vukovar several weeks after it fell claim they saw hospital staff members sweeping the town’s streets under guard. The relative of one man taken from the hospital claimed she had spotted him on a labor gang in the Serbian city of Sid, 20 miles southeast of Vukovar, more than a year later.

“We’re not stupid. We know about Ovcara, but there are these other reports too,” said Kresimir’s younger brother Hrvoje. “It’s enough to give us a bit of hope.”

But as accounts of a possible massacre strengthen, his mother visibly wobbles between her inherent optimism and bracing herself for a bitter truth.

“Hope is all I have,” she said. “Without that I wouldn’t be alive. I just want to know what happened.”