Plitvice Lakes Incident - Conflict at Plitvice

Conflict At Plitvice

On 29 March 1991, the Plitvice Lakes management was expelled by rebel Krajina Serb police under the control of Milan Martić, supported by paramilitary volunteers from Serbia proper under the command of Vojislav Šešelj. The region itself is relatively sparsely populated and there was no obvious threat to local Serbs. It has been suggested that, instead, the Serb seizure of the park may have been motivated by a desire to control the strategic road that ran north-south through the park, linking the Serb communities in the Lika and Banovina regions. Tuđman's government decided to retake the park by force.

On Easter Sunday, 31 March 1991, Croatian police from the Croatian Ministry of the Interior (MUP) entered the national park to expel the rebel Serb forces. Serb paramilitaries ambushed a bus carrying Croatian police into the national park on the road north of Korenica, sparking a day-long gun battle between the two sides. During the fighting, two people, one Croat and one Serb policeman, were killed. Twenty other people were injured and twenty-nine Krajina Serb paramilitaries and policemen were taken prisoner by Croatian forces. Among the prisoners was Goran Hadžić, later to become the President of the Republic of Serbian Krajina.

The violence was greeted with alarm by Yugoslavia's collective Presidency, which met on the night of 31 March to discuss the situation at Plitvice. At the insistence of Serbia's representative on the Presidency, Borisav Jović, but against the wishes of Slovenia and Croatia, the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) was ordered to intervene to create a buffer zone between the two sides and end the clashes. The JNA units, commanded, ironically, by a Croatian colonel, moved in the following day. The Serbian parliament also met in emergency session, treating the clashes as a virtual casus belli and voting to offer the Krajina Serbs "all necessary help" in their conflict with Zagreb.

On 2 April, the JNA ordered the Croatian government's special police units to leave the national park, which they did. General Andrija Rešeta, in overall command of the operation, told the media that his men were "protecting neither side" and were there only to prevent "ethnic confrontations" for as long as was necessary. However, the Croatian government reacted with fury to the JNA move. Tuđman's senior aide Mario Nobilo claimed that the JNA had "told us quite literally that if we do not evacuate Plitvice they will liquidate our police" and Tuđman himself gave a warning on Croatian radio that if the army continued its activities it would be regarded as a hostile army of occupation.

Although the JNA's intervention successfully brought an end to the fighting, it had the effect of consolidating the front lines in the region and preventing any further Croatian operations against the rebel Serbs. A few months later, the outbreak of full-scale war resulted in the national park falling firmly into Krajina Serb hands, this time fully and overtly supported by the JNA. Croatian control of the Plitvice Lakes was not finally restored until after Operation Storm in August 1995.