Britt Baillie (University of Cambridge, UK)

In 1991, the town of Vukovar underwent three months of siege by the Yugoslav National Army and Serbian paramilitary troops. On November 18th, the town 'fell' and became a part of the Krajina or Serb occupied territories within the former Republic of Croatia. As the conflicts in the Balkans shifted further south, Vukovar temporarily became a forgotten wasteland. Officially existing outside of any nation in a highly tense and militarized manner, the 'auto'-occupied Vukovar became what Foucault terms a heterotopia. In 1995, with the siege of the UN protected areas, the area around Vukovar became a unique Serb island in what would become the new state of Croatia. This paper examines how the Serbs commemorated themselves and their 'victory' in Vukovar and examines the responses to this physical narrative in the aftermath of reintegration and its wave of 'counter-iconoclasm'.