Pope implores Croats to forgive

VUKOVAR, Croatia -- The Franciscan church of St. Philip and St. Jacob sits on a hilltop above this quiet Danube port. The once elegant Hapsburg facades of the town below are still pocked by shells and shrapnel, nearly 12 years after Serbian paramilitary units and the Yugoslav army carried out an early exercise in ethnic killing here as Yugoslavia began to split apart.

The Serbs killed 5,000 people here during the three-month siege of the city, mostly Roman Catholic Croats. They forced the remaining civilians from their homes and killed more than 255 civilians and wounded soldiers at a nearby farm.

Inside the church's devastated interior, a small red-enameled metal heart lies beside a steel coffin apparently blasted open during the war and still holding a scattering of human bones.

"Love is stronger than death," reads an inscription in black marker on the heart. But in a town that still bears the full weight of its past, death clearly holds the upper hand.

Pope John Paul II, on the third day of a five-day visit to this fiercely Roman Catholic Balkan nation, spoke of forgiveness during a lengthy outdoor Mass on Saturday in Osijek, near Vukovar.

"After the trying times of the war, which has left the people of this region with deep wounds not yet completely healed, a commitment to reconciliation" is in order, the pope told thousands of people, many from this corner of Croatia closest to the Serbian border. But the wounds of war run deep here.

"It's hard to forgive," said Ivka Barbaric, 50, as she paused before entering the church. The brown eyes in her weathered face filled slowly with tears as she recalled the day in November 1991 when Serbian soldiers burned down her home, killing her two sons, Mirko, 3, and Darko, 16 months old. "I don't know if you can understand what it means to go to the graves of your sons."

"If I forgive them," she added, referring to the Serbs who burned down her house, "I would have to forget my sons. I can't do this."

The parish priest, the Rev. Zlatko Spehar, explained his interpretation of the pope's message. "The way of forgiveness," he said, "is the way of Jesus on the cross, who prayed to his father to forgive his enemies. He did not forgive them himself.

"We still did not get any request from the Serbian people or even from the Serbian Orthodox Church asking for forgiveness."

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