The fate of Vladimir Barović, rear admiral of the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA), which ended in a tragic death, could serve as a film story.
It would not be just a drama or a psychological thriller, but a story about the end of a life, a navy and a country.
While the war raged on the territory of Yugoslavia, he was remembered by the words engraved on a memorial plaque with his name that was installed in 2022 on the Croatian island of Vis in the Adriatic Sea.
"There will be no destruction here while I am in command, and if I am forced to order destruction, then I will be gone."
Barović was the commander of the JNA garrison in the Croatian coastal town of Pula, before being transferred to Vis, but on the first day of his command, he committed suicide on September 29, 1991.
In his farewell letter, the authenticity of which has never been officially confirmed, he opposed the aggression against Croatian cities, saying that "Montenegrins cannot fight and destroy a people who have not hidden anything from them".
He was awarded posthumously in Montenegro, and few people remember him in Serbia.
"He was an excellent officer, conscientious, meticulous, we met often.
"Barović was very respected, everyone called him Bare, I remember him as a good friend and a man, a capable officer, a patriot", describes Boško Antić, retired admiral of the JNA, who knew Barović since 1970 and when they studied together at the University specialization of naval officers in Divulje, a place between Split and Trogir in today's Croatia.
- Heroes who defied war - why decades later we still know so little about them
- "Montenegro's greatest shame": Thirty years since the siege of Dubrovnik
- "Woe to the country where the army passes": Who was Pavle Strugar and why was he the first to surrender to The Hague
Due to a combination of circumstances and geography, the seat of the Yugoslav Navy was on the Croatian coast and islands, and it was in the hinterland that in 1991, some of the first clashes between the JNA and Croatian forces would begin.
"For the pride of Montenegro"
Barović's rank is a source of pride for Montenegro, says former Montenegrin President Filip Vujanović, during whose mandate Barović was awarded in 2016.
"That bullet, they say in our country, that he shot in his own head is the most valuable bullet that Montenegro should be proud of," Vujanović told the BBC in Serbian.
Three decades later, there are still disputes as to whether Barović was of Montenegrin, Serbian or Yugoslav nationality.
Vujanović says that "it is important for him that he showed above all that he is a great man.
"It doesn't matter what nationality he is when his act is magnificent from the aspect of the need to save the lives of those he was supposed to bomb, torpedo and do everything to destroy that space.
"Barović did not want it in the name of anything," Vujanović believes.
How was the path of the officer and the navy?
Almost side by side.
World Management of schools and courses Navy of the People's Liberation Army of Yugoslavia, was opened during the Second World War precisely on Vis in 1944, which was then one of the territories that the partisans liberated from the German and Italian occupiers.
Only a few years earlier, on the Balkan mainland, in Banja Luka, Vladimir Barović was born - on November 7, 1939.
His father was a military man, serving in Pristina, Kosovo, but Barović finished elementary and high school in his hometown.
Today, Banjaluka is the capital of Republika Srpska, one of the two entities of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
He graduated from the 12th class of the Naval Academy in 1960.
Zlatko Crnogorac, who wrote in the weekly Vreme about the rise and fall of the Yugoslav Navy.
"They had the task of following Tito and the ship Galeb on his travels and making documentaries about her.
"It was a kind of easy going race, they wore white uniforms. In modern language, the land army was a mining business, and the navy and air force were programmers," says Crnogorac.
In that family, Barović's career went on an upward trajectory, with the acquisition of new titles, specializations and ranks.
As a young officer, he held various positions in the command of the Boka Military and Naval Sector from 1966 to 1987, where he was finally the head of the Department for Naval and Coastal Forces of the Command of the Military and Naval Area.
From there, he moved to the Center of Higher Military Schools of the Navy for several years Maršal Tito, which was located in Divulje, which was the headquarters of educational and scientific research work of the Yugoslav Navy.
It was located in the immediate vicinity of the Lore war port, which during and after the war would become one of the the most notorious camps under the control of the Croatian army and a torture center for Serbian and Montenegrin detainees for the next seven years.
In the peacetime of Yugoslavia, this one Military Center near Split, he had a large library, tactical training rooms and training grounds, a training ground for the combat resistance of ships and a detachment of training ships, such as Jadran i Seagull.
There, Barović led the Command and Staff School of Tactics and Operations of the Navy until September 27, 1990.
At the end of that year, he received the rank of rear admiral.
An admiral is the highest rank in the navy in the rank of general in the army, and below him are vice admiral and rear admiral.
While he was collecting stars on his epaulettes, Yugoslavia was getting smaller and smaller.
On December 23, 1990, Slovenia held a referendum on independence in which about 95 percent of citizens supported leaving Yugoslavia.
A few months later, Croatia will do the same, declaring independence in June 1991, based on a referendum in May of that year.
The Yugoslav People's Army, a large sluggish system distributed throughout the country, could not keep up with the speed of political decision-making, but was directly exposed to them - in the two former republics, it became an enemy army.
Barović replaces school assignments in the Split area with barracks.
He became the assistant to the commander of the Naval Rear Area until June 29, 1990, and the commander of the Pula Naval Sector until September 28, 1991.
- Mamula: The light and darkness of the former camp, now a luxury hotel in Montenegro
- Who are the Yugoslavs in the Balkans today?
- The origin and disappearance of Berga Istra, the largest ship in the world and the pride of Tito's Yugoslavia
The position of the JNA in 1991.
Being a JNA officer at that time was not easy at all, testifies Boško Antić.
"The JNA then found itself under attack by secessionist forces, torn between its own obligations and the command staff represented by the Presidency of the SFRY - we had a collective body for the commander, and that is not good for the army.
"Because of that, there were slow decisions and failure to react on time.
"The Navy was specific because it was on the territory of Croatia, that Croatian personnel slowly entered the facilities of the Navy," says Antić, who is also the author of numerous scientific works in the field of military skills and chronicle of the JNA.
Antic would later become rear admiral of the Serbian Armed Forces.
It was not easy at that time to be neither a manager nor an ordinary soldier.
Zlatko Crnogorac was serving his military service in Zadar, as a 20-year-old.
He left in September 1990, as he says, at the time of "humanism and renaissance" in the entire country.
"It's time Ante Marković (the last prime minister of the former SFR Yugoslavia), we had salaries of 2.000-3.000 marks, that was the swan song of the entire country, we lived as if there was no tomorrow.
"For the first six months of the army, I lived like in a movie Top hon, we went out, drank, flew back to Belgrade," describes the Montenegrin, a stage designer by profession.
Then, like in the movie, there is an eclipse.
The first major armed clashes between local Serbs and the Croatian police at Plitvice Lakes on Easter 1991 started a bloody series of events in which the referendum on Croatian independence would be one of the incidental stages.
All this affects the soldiers: they are forbidden to leave the barracks, the Croatian authorities cut off their water and electricity.
"The Croats leave on a daily basis, the Slovenians had already left," recalls the Montenegrin of the difficult days that were just beginning.
- How the British lord's attempt to prevent war in Yugoslavia failed
- Three decades since the day Croatia decided to leave Yugoslavia
- Milan Kučan for the BBC: "We didn't want to achieve the goal with weapons, but through conversation and agreement - but that didn't work."
- Mesić told the BBC: "So much war has been fought and blood has been shed, and the borders have not changed even a millimeter."
- How does peace live in the place where the war in Yugoslavia started
Then the Navy, as a formationally small unit, found itself in the unknown of what to do, which would be the subject of his newspaper research many years later.
The struggle of the local Serbs in the hinterland of Croatian coastal cities was "wholeheartedly supported by the JNA", he says, and states that the navy is sheltering in barracks, on islands such as Vis, which was an outpost command post.
"Tactically once positioned towards the external enemy, with strategic support on island and coastal defenses and military strongholds, it is now turned upside down," writes Crnogorac in Vremen.
At that time, the main hero of our story, Vladimir Barović, was in the northern part of the coast, in Pula, an important strategic place, as the commander of the garrison.
The newspaper Glas Istra recalls that Barović was the commander of the JNA "which held Pula in the crosshairs for three months and during whose mandate Pula mothers protested to return their sons from the army, when posters and graffiti directed against the JNA appeared all over Pula".
It also says that Barović was at the head of the army whose navy blocked the port of Pula for five days.
"Nevertheless, he strongly opposed orders to destroy Pula, bravely refused the order, negotiated with Pula's mayor Lucan Delbianka and saved the city," said a local official. Matija Tomac.
He proposed that Barović posthumously, in 2023, become an honorary citizen of Pula.
Precommand on Vis
In the fall of 1991, Antić was at the General Staff, in Belgrade, from where he followed the events.
Due to circumstances, right there, in the elevator, he will meet Barović, who came for an interview because of a reassignment.
They greeted each other briefly, but didn't talk much, though he was surprised to see him.
"He had a slightly distraught expression on his face, shocked - I didn't know what happened to him, I even thought, unfortunately, that he wasn't drunk.
"However, at that time he was going to an interview with the Chief of the General Staff to be appointed to a new position, and when he returned to Vis in the evening, he did what he did," says Antic and pauses for a moment.
When he was transferred to Vis as the Chief of Staff of the Navy, he tragically died on the same day, September 29, 1991.
He committed suicide in the building on the island where he was placed to sleep.
"According to our old custom, we are always late with announcements, and the Croats were the first to take action, declaring that he had committed suicide, because he did not want to go to war against Croatia, and some of his letters also appeared.
"However, we are convinced that the letter was forged and that Barović did not write it that way, that the reason was that there was a war, as a conscientious elder - maybe he respected Croatia, but he also respected Montenegro, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina ", says Antic.
Đorđe Pražić, a retired battleship captain, who met Barović during his schooling in Split and gained an impression of him as a fine and cultured man, shares a similar attitude.
The news of the suicide finds Pražić in the besieged Divulje barracks, without water and electricity, where young soldiers are serving their military service, with no connection to the command.
He was reading the alleged farewell letter published in Slobodna Dalmacija and he was particularly surprised that the letter reached the newsroom in Split in two days from the barracks on Vis.
"For me it was disappointing, at that time people were running away, the Croats were leaving, the Slovenians had already left.
"It struck us that an admiral did something like that, whom you think should come to save you and find a solution to the situation we are in - he kills himself on free Vis, and we should fight where we are surrounded," he says. Pražić.
- "There were five of us in the vehicle - only I survived": Tuzla column, 30 years later
- "Don't shoot, don't shoot": Words that did not prevent Dobrovoljačka, a bloody episode of the war in Sarajevo
Hero of Croatia
For the representatives of Vedra, the association of Croatian war veterans and anti-fascists, Barović is a hero and one of the brightest spots of the war.
"Soldier's honor implies that you fight against an enemy that attacks, threatens the security of the homeland, and Barović defended the honor of all those people who were against such a war.
"He drew the attention of the domestic and international public to the fact that there are still people who sink with their ships and leave with their army," says Ranko Britvic, president of Vedra, for the BBC in Serbian.
This one officer, which is the Croatian word for an officer, showed how honorable he was - he was ready to die, just so he wouldn't violate moral principles, he adds.
"He gives life and becomes a symbol of something that has not yet been achieved in this space, apart from individual heroism.
"That's why we are advocating that he be awarded the Croatian president's award," says this Croatian war veteran.
He did not know Barović personally, but those who did told him that he was a great professional, with a completely stable mind, although he must have experienced a shock due to the shootings in the cities.
"With that act, Barović told all his colleagues, ``think carefully about whether to continue this war'' - if there were more Barovićs, there would be more effect.
"He could not have stayed alive for two reasons: not to betray and not to attack," the former Croatian police officer is convinced.
During the installation of the memorial plaque on Vis in September 2022, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Croatia Gordan Grlić Radman he said that "Barović's act of humanity and disagreement with evil is a symbol of those values that today, as well as 30 years ago, are the pledge of relations based on mutual respect".
'The ideal personal hero for the drama of the breakup of Yugoslavia'
It was recorded that Barović talked to his wife the whole night before his death and that he left a farewell letter.
Pražić, however, is convinced that this is not what was published in Slobodna Dalmacija.
The letter, which he is convinced is genuine, was shown to him by a man who was investigating the suicide scene and is much shorter.
Regardless, he believes that "the deceased man should be left alone".
"For me, Admiral Barović is the tragedian of the civil war.
"He's certainly not a hero, because he could leave the JNA in a minute and fight for peace as a civilian," says Pražić.
He adds that the heroes of the Navy are the sailors and officers who defended themselves, the assigned equipment, and above all, military and human honor, such as the 26 members of the Navy who died during the attack by Croatian forces in the 1991-1992 war.
He is proud that the navy, with only a quarter of its personnel, preserved three quarters of its equipment and weapons, until the military facilities on the Croatian coast and islands were abandoned in 1992, when the official headquarters was moved to Boka Kotor in Montenegro.
"Barović's suicide was misused, and his wife Radmila refused to receive recognition from Montenegro and Croatia," says Antić.
On behalf of the family, the then Commander of the Navy of the Army of Montenegro received the Order of Authority in Podgorica Darko Vuković who today does not want to speak for the BBC in Serbian about this act.
"By the act of awarding him, I showed that I highly value him and I think he is a man to be admired.
"I did that only for the assassinated Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic." Then you will understand my experience of Barović", says Filip Vujanović.
Vladimir Barović was buried first on Vis, and then his remains were transferred to Herceg Novi, a city on the Montenegrin coast.
He remained off the radar of the general public for a long time.
The renewed interest in his story coincided with Montenegro's turn towards NATO, which it became a member of in 2017, Zlatko Crnogorac says.
"The figure of Vladimir Barović served as a bridge between Croatia and Montenegro.
"He was told that he was a Montenegrin, even though he was not born there, he only served in Kumbor," says the Montenegrin.
However, the myth about him did not gain wider proportions.
"Barović is an ideal personal hero for a drama that would illustrate the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the navy, although historiography has not dealt with it.
"He was lucky that his name remained unsullied because he did not have the strength to resist, but this can also be interpreted as a line of least resistance," concludes the Montenegrin.
You may also be interested in this story
Follow us on Facebook, Twitter i Viber. If you have a topic proposal for us, contact us at bbcnasrpskom@bbc.co.uk
Bonus video:
