In his new column, the author warns of the danger of forgetting the sacrifice of veterans and emphasizes that victory in the Homeland War was not a foregone conclusion.
In his column published on August 10, 2026, on the portal Cronika.hr, Mladen Pavković addresses the collective amnesia that, as he claims, pervades Croatian society regarding the Homeland War. His central thesis is that the victory of 1991 is today mistakenly perceived as a historical inevitability, rather than the result of a desperate struggle on the brink of the abyss.
Pavković reminds us of the almost unbelievable circumstances in which Croatia found itself in the autumn of 1991. He describes a people who went to defend their homeland "militarily illiterate, bare-handed, and completely written off by the international community," which further hampered the young state's position by imposing an arms embargo.
"Going to the front lines in your own jeans and sneakers, with your grandfather's hunting rifle or a rusty trophy pistol, was an act of sheer desperation and reckless courage," Pavković writes in his column for Cronika.hr.
Under such conditions, the author emphasizes, there was no question of military readiness or family circumstances. There was only "the awareness of the need to defend bare life and home," and the alternative was brutal and systematic extermination.
The columnist particularly highlights the importance of September 1991 and the "Battle for the Barracks" as a crucial moment that prevented a complete military collapse. By blockading and seizing JNA military facilities in cities such as Varaždin, Koprivnica, Bjelovar, and Ploče, the poorly armed defenders obtained their first heavy weaponry.
They captured tanks, armored vehicles, hundreds of thousands of rifles, and vast quantities of artillery shells and ammunition. This war booty, Pavković notes, enabled the creation of a technical base for a real Croatian army and was literally a "lifeline" without which defense would have been physically unsustainable.
In conditions of a catastrophic disparity in armament, where the aggressor had thousands of tanks and combat aircraft, local experts resorted to incredible improvisation. In local workshops, the first rifles were assembled from water pipes and car parts, and sports and agricultural aircraft were converted into bombers that dropped explosive devices made from gas cylinders over the besieged Vukovar.
Pavković also addresses the dark hypothetical picture of what would have happened had the defensive lines not held. Claiming that the "Greater Serbia" project would have devoured two-thirds of Croatian territory, drawing the border along the Virovitica-Karlovac-Karlobag line, the author describes a fate in which the horrific images of the massacres in Vukovar and Škabrnja would have become a daily occurrence in every Croatian town.
The remaining part of the country would have been, as he states, "a decapitated territory under the complete dictatorship of Belgrade," and thousands of volunteers and civilians would have ended up in mass graves or concentration camps across Serbia. In that scenario, Operation Storm would have remained but an unfulfilled dream, and the idea of an independent state would have been permanently extinguished.
Concluding his column, Pavković emphasizes that freedom was not a gift from international diplomacy, but rather "a debt soaked in blood owed to those who refused to accept capitulation." He warns that peoples who forget the price of their freedom very quickly become prey to the imperial ambitions of others once again.
The memory of 1991, the author believes, must not be a mere ceremonial commemoration, but a lasting warning and the strongest wall against oblivion. He rounds off his column with the words of Cardinal Franjo Kuharić, which, in moments of greatest uncertainty, encapsulated the spirit of defense:
"There are certain lines from which one cannot retreat, because retreating would mean renouncing oneself," Pavković quotes Cardinal Kuharić.
