Astonishing archival footage, which never made it to public television and which was unearthed by Croatian director Ivan Ramlak, immerses us in the first minutes of Peacemaker right into the sickeningly tense, confused and unhinged atmosphere in the eastern Croatian region of Slavonia on 1 July 1991, on the brink of Yugoslavia’s wrenching apart into a bloody war of neighbours killing neighbours. It’s filmed on a stretch of road just outside the village of Tenja, in the immediate aftermath of the assassination of Josip Reihl-Ker, the city of Osijek’s police chief, who was shot at a checkpoint by a Croatian extremist with an AK-47 as he was heading to a negotiation to try to diffuse the boiling tensions between local Serbs and Croats. Vehicles whizz past in both directions to and from the scene, as some witnesses relay to the press stationed on the roadside what they saw, in stricken and disoriented fashion, as they struggle to process the hellish and deadly chaos unfolding around them. Shortly after the murder of Reihl-Ker — a peacemaker who was «the last refuge of common sense» in a position of power in the region, one interviewee later concludes — ethnic war in the disintegrating Yugoslavia kicked off.
Litany of horrors
Following on from these electric, alarming first scenes, expertly woven together from further shocking, illuminating archive footage, and interviews in voiceover from key figures of the time with the hindsight and wisdom of what they now know today, is an anatomy of politically leveraged hatred; a warning of sorts, on the way ethnic tension was cynically stirred up and weaponised to enable the killing of Reihl-Ker to happen and to the foment the litany of horrors that came after. Turning such a critical gaze on Croatia’s own role in the bloodshed of the ’90s is courageous and dangerous territory for Ramljak, who has faced significant pressure and threats from ultra-nationalist factions since the release of the film, in a Croatia that remains deeply divided today. It’s the kind of self-examining lens on the war that Serbian director Ognjen Glavonic brought to testimony of Serbian atrocities in Kosovo in his important, devastating documentation Depth Two (2016), and it is still relatively rare in the cinema of the states of the former Yugoslavia when they address these exceptionally painful and traumatic memories.
Peacemaker is a precise reckoning, in microcosm, of how the power-hungry can fan the flames of division
Peacemaker builds up a picture of an intensely volatile climate of fear and mistrust, in a Croatia that was controlled from two parallel and frequently opposed chains of command: the official law and order enforcement of the police, and a Croatian paramilitary of around 400 men, organised by Branimir Glavas, who had set his sights on Reihl-Ker’s job. Reihl-Ker would often negotiate with ethnic Serbs, who had also taken to arming themselves amid the febrile air of escalating insecurity and threat, to dismantle the roadblocking barricades they put up around locations they inhabited — a conciliatory approach derided by more militant politicians and nationalists as weak and unpatriotic, and sabotaged by propaganda campaigns planted in the media, with flags burned and other acts of incitement for which the Serbian minority could be falsely blamed. Happening in consort with this stoking of ethnic hatred was the distribution of military-grade weapons to very young men with next to no experience or guidance. Another mind-boggling archival clip shows a tank being driven through a busy street filled with stunned pedestrians at high speed and totalling a small car in the process. The young tank driver, his training limited to little more than how to start the hulking combat vehicle, reveals in an unaired interview from the time that he had been ordered to carry out this destruction and was praised for it, though even later he had no real understanding of the aim; sowing chaos and terror was, we see, the result.
The flames of division
Reihl-Ker had become sure in the days leading up to his death that his life was in danger. In the vehicle carrying him when he was shot were two council officials, Goran Zobundzija and Milan Knezevic, who were also killed, and Serb community leader Mirko Tubic, who survived and went back over the day with difficulty in a powerful 1998 interview. The gunman, Antun Gudelj, went to prison almost two decades later after being extradited from Australia. His motive, it is argued, was blind rage that Reihl-Ker was ferrying around «Chetniks» (Serb nationalists) in his car, and Glavas’s involvement, though suspected, was never proven. What was certain is that any surviving voices for level-headed calm would not be heeded for some time there. Peacemaker is a precise reckoning, in microcosm, of how the power-hungry can fan the flames of division, and the watchful canniness needed to outsmart and defuse their underhand strategies, in an era of resurgent radical polarisation in Europe, where fear of outsiders is once again a heady, effective propaganda tool.
