A Priest Awaits Return of Flock in Eastern Slavonia

Long after most of the Catholics fled, Father Marko Malovic tends a flock of geese and watches over the medieval monastery that sits like a fortress above the Danube River. He says Mass for the few faithful, fends off “extremists and hooligans” who try to blow up the chapel and safeguards books and relics salvaged from other churches ravaged by war.

For more than five years, Malovic has been the only Roman Catholic priest in the Serb-controlled part of Croatia known as Eastern Slavonia.

More than 60,000 Catholic Croats and their priests were driven from the region in 1991 during a vicious, 10-month war between an independence-seeking Croatia and Serbia-dominated Yugoslavia. Fewer than 10% of the original Catholic majority remain.

Malovic’s sanctuary is the St. John of Capistrano Franciscan church. It is perched on a hill where Malovic says it has weathered attacks over the years from angry Serbs, who are predominantly Orthodox Christians.

Eastern Slavonia is now home to an estimated 150,000 Serbs, many driven from other parts of Croatia by the Croatian army. Life under Serbian rule has been tough, Malovic says, but he is now bracing for a period of frightening uncertainty.

Under a breakthrough agreement signed by Belgrade and Zagreb, and with the supervision of 5,000 United Nations troops, Eastern Slavonia will gradually be restored to Croatian rule by the end of the year. The transition begins July 15, and returning refugees are likely to clash with those they find occupying their homes.

“We Croats expect our closest friends to come back--we’ve been waiting all these years,” Malovic, 56, says. “But I don’t know what will happen. It depends a lot on whether the U.N. [peacekeeping mission] can do its job and prevent the violence.”

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Work to build Malovic’s church began in 1364. St. John of Capistrano--known in Southern California as San Juan Capistrano--died here more than 500 years ago, slain in battle with Turkish invaders. His remains were buried under the wooden pews, the story goes, until victorious Turks destroyed the body, or Franciscan friars hid it away, never to be found. A piece of what Malovic says is St. John’s tunic is preserved in a glass case at the foot of the altar.

In more recent times of turmoil, after Serbs seized control of the area, gunmen have repeatedly shot out the church’s soaring clock tower; bomb attacks have broken and bulged the stained-glass windows. Last Christmas Eve, more than 100 rock-throwing Serbs disrupted church services and trapped 50 Croats, including the mayor of Ilok, exiled but back for a rare visit. U.N. troops eventually rescued the Croats, but not before Serbs broke into the vestry and destroyed priestly robes and furniture.

Explosives planted on Orthodox Christmas Jan. 7 blew out the church’s front door. Malovic and St. John’s now have permanent U.N. protection.

Malovic--with a round, pink face and curly graying hair--smiles and shrugs off his fate. He says he stays in picturesque Ilok to minister to the handful of Croats left behind. His father and brother disappeared in the devastating Serb assault on nearby Vukovar, one of the earliest sieges of the war, and he has not heard news of them since.

Many in his congregation now regret staying, Malovic says, because of the treatment they have received. Many have been forced to hand over their homes to Serb refugees or to work in forced-labor camps. But Malovic says he, for one, does not regret remaining in Ilok.

“For me, the years I stayed here have been, in a way, the richest and brightest of my life as a priest,” Malovic says. “I played the role I should have. There is a moment in the human life when, despite all your mistakes, you cannot fail. And this was that moment.

“There were many times I felt the finger of God.”

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When Eastern Slavonia is re-integrated into Croatia, Croats will eventually be allowed to return to their homes here in Ilok and elsewhere in these fertile, oil-rich plains of northeastern Croatia.

Serbs who settled into many of the Croats’ houses are supposed to be allowed to return to their own homes, in areas of Croatia that Croatian authorities have tried to cleanse of Serbs.

The exchanges will be tense and possibly deadly.

In Ilok, members of Malovic’s mostly elderly congregation wait.

Zeljko Bedic, a white-haired former shopkeeper who looks older than his 48 years, waits for “the rule of law” to be restored. He has continued to live in Ilok, moving in with his elderly mother after Serbs threw him out of his home.

“We pass on the street sometimes,” he says of the people occupying his house. “I see them, they see me, but we don’t speak. Once I called them to ask them to please tend the vineyard. They said they would. They also said they would never leave the house.”

While the Croats are entitled to their homes, U.N. officials also hope to avoid the messy, haphazard exodus of Serbs that has characterized past attempts to reconcile the warring parties of what was once Yugoslavia.

Because most of the Serbs in Eastern Slavonia have always lived in Croatia, they are being encouraged by U.N. officials to take out Croatian citizenship papers as a way to regain their property and guarantee civil rights, such as the vote.

But neither the Croats nor the Serbs trust each other. The Serbs look at Croatian authorities’ poor human rights record, especially for minorities, and say they are reluctant to submit to Croatian rule.

At the same time, they have few options.

Serbia, under embattled President Slobodan Milosevic, will not accept another wave of refugees. And life in the economically depressed Bosnian Republika Srpska promises to be dismal.

A recent meeting of Serbs who have settled in Ilok dramatized the fears.

Vojislav Stanimirovic, a psychiatrist from Vukovar who has emerged in recent weeks as a moderate leader of the Eastern Slavonia Serbs, attempted to encourage his people to accept Croatian government but also fight for their rights politically.

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In a stuffy, low-ceilinged room in a 19th century castle just a few yards from Malovic’s Roman Catholic monastery, Stanimirovic tried to persuade fellow Serbs that only by staying, voting and working together will they have the political and cultural strength to be safe.

The audience of weathered, long-suffering people was not buying it. One middle-aged worker rose to say that exodus or suicide appeared to be the Serbs’ only choice. “I trusted, I believed every one of our leaders, and they all swindled me,” the man said. “I say, either we raise a Serbian flag and cross the Danube [into Yugoslavia], or we raise a black flag and go into the Danube!”

Another man chimed in: “I remember this Croatia from World War II, and I will not go back to it. We will be slaughtered. You are pushing us to extinction.”