Beyond Croatia's beautiful beaches and tall cliffs

3 tall basketball players @ NU

The following appeared in the student newspaper The Daily Northwestern
from Evanston, Illinois. John Kraljic

Beyond Croatia's beautiful beaches and tall cliffs, memories of a once
war-torn country remain embedded in the minds of 3 NU basketball players
By Tania Ganguli
February 11, 2004

Two pieces of Vedran Vukusic's identity come together in his bedroom.

A big, square, purple poster is tacked to one of the walls. White
writing on it reads, "Offense wins games, defense wins championships." A
small Croatian flag is taped a few feet away.

It is one of many in the apartment.

"Summer, that's the best part," says Vukusic, leaning his 6-foot-8 frame
across his bed. He can't help but smile when thinking about his hometown
of Split, Croatia. "My coach calls it the best hidden place in the
world."

Vukusic's home -- on the coast of the Adriatic Sea -- is where he and
fellow Northwestern basketball players Davor Duvancic and Ivan Tolic
grew up. Split is a few hours by car from parts of the country that were
engulfed by a brutal, four-year war following Croatia's 1991 declaration
of independence from the former Yugoslavia.

But scenes of war aren't the first thing that pops into these Croatians'
minds when they think of their native land.

Tolic can't put into words what Split is like, but all you have to do is
take a look at his bedroom walls in Evanston to get an idea.

One wall is covered with images of Split. There's a poster of an aerial
view of the town's coast and another showing a secluded beach surrounded
by cliffs towering above two small beachside houses. A Croatian national
soccer team scarf hangs above Tolic's giant Croatian flag on the
opposite wall.

Amidst these icons, flags and pictures, it's no wonder Croatian is heard
as often as English.

"This apartment is technically part of Croatia," Tolic jokes. "Here and
the Croatian embassy."

Duvancic and Vukusic traded Croatia's beaches and mild, coastal winters
two years ago for NU's biting cold and Big Ten basketball. Tolic
followed a year later. Although the players say they miss their
hometown, they agree they are three lucky guys.

The trio, all forwards, say they were lucky to have gotten the chance to
play basketball and study in the United States. In Europe they would
have had to choose between academics and sports.

But 13 years ago their luck manifested itself in a totally different
way. When Vukusic, Tolic and Duvancic were 8 years old, war broke out in
Croatia, a country slightly smaller than West Virginia. Their families
and homes were mostly spared.


Two Croatian Serb girls sit outside the ruins of a pizzeria in Vukovar,
Croatia, in Oct. 1991. Vukovar lies northeast of the city of Split,
where NU basketball players Ivan Tolic, Davor Duvancic and Vedran
Vukusic are from. (Photo by Mark Milstein/ZUMA Press)

"Here you're going to find three people who none of their family members
went to war," Tolic says. "That's really rare. We're a small country
really, so everybody who's capable of going to war goes to war."

It's been more than eight years since the war ended. Now the three
players share a court and a roof in Evanston and are bonded by a common
home and the once war-torn country they left behind.

CONFUSION, FEAR AND LONG WAITS

Vukusic, Duvancic and Tolic weren't even 10 years old when Split was
attacked in 1992, but they distinctly remember what life was like then.

"Fear," Tolic says immediately.

After World War I, the Balkan nations of Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia and
Montenegro were grouped with Serbia to create Yugoslavia.

All-out war began in July 1991, a month after Croatia declared
independence. Serbian rebels and Yugoslavian soldiers attacked the newly
independent country.

"(Yugoslavia) included inimical groups," says Marv Kantor, a professor
emeritus of Slavic languages and literature at NU. "The enmity was
mostly between the Serbs and the Croats."

Split was only attacked once during the conflict, but air-raid sirens
sounded several other times -- imprisoning the town in a tense wait.

When the sirens went off, residents of Split -- most of whom lived in
apartments -- rushed to the shelters underneath their buildings.
Children went in before adults. The residents of the complex would
gather there until the attack, or threat of attack, was over. That
usually meant staying underground for several hours.

"You could see, hear (that) people were nervous," Duvancic says. "My
father, he didn't want to get in. He wanted to look around. I don't know
-- he was just crazy like that."

Vukusic remembers his father waking him up at five or six on one
morning.

"All I could hear was bombs ... coming through the air," Vukusic says.
"Some were really close. Afterward we saw where they had fallen. I
perfectly remember everything."

He and his family got dressed and packed some clothes and a bag of food
before heading to the shelter in the basement of their apartment
building. When the attack ended, they went back to their apartments. A
few hours later another siren sounded and the family rushed back down.

Vukusic's building and its immediate surroundings were untouched.
Duvancic's and Tolic's complexes also survived. But Vukusic could see
how close the bombs he heard crackling through the air had hit. Still,
he didn't really comprehend what was happening to his city.

"My mom said I was laughing when we went into the shelter," Vukusic
says. "I can still remember hearing the bombs falling and I was just
having fun. I didn't really know what was going on."

Tolic remembers a different kind of confusion.

"As a little kid you're just like, 'Why are these people attacking us?'"
Tolic said. "'We didn't do anything.'"

'YOU CAN SEE PEOPLE DIE'

A two-hour car ride away from Split, attacks devastated the village and
home where Duvancic's father grew up.

"Everything was destroyed," Duvancic says. "There was nothing left."

His father's village wasn't the only one to meet that fate. Every night
on television, Vukusic would watch a seemingly endless list of attacked
cities scroll down the screen for 15 to 20 minutes.

Government-controlled television stations brought all the gruesome
images of war into Croatian homes daily. Tolic guesses the press spread
propaganda to mobilize the population.

"It was the worst thing I'd ever seen in my life," Duvancic says.
"People waiting for water in line and they throw three grenades in front
of them. You can see people die."

The memories of seeing footage of a man running and then being hit by a
sniper, a child running from a tank and dead bodies on streets still
enrage the otherwise soft spoken Duvancic -- but at least he, Vukusic
and Tolic can still talk about it.

"I had so many friends in Sarajevo and Bosnia," Tolic says. "I knew this
one kid who didn't speak after the war for like five years -- at all. He
couldn't."

Tolic's mother, Ivanka, didn't let him watch much television during the
war, but she says she made sure to explain the situation to her
children.

"It was something that I must explain to them," Ivanka Tolic says by
phone from Croatia. "That everybody is not like (the people attacking).
There are many good people. You couldn't go out of the home and it (was
a) time to be together."

Most Croatians didn't need to be convinced that the war was valid.
People felt a duty to defend their country. The country didn't have a
large enough standing army to defend itself, so volunteers swelled its
ranks.

"We were always under someone's rule, always repressed," Tolic's
brother, Marko, says from Split. "We have a big patriotic feeling."

Seventeen years old and too young to fight, Marko's best friend
falsified documents to say he was 18. He didn't survive the war.

Vukusic's uncle also volunteered. He fought for two years before being
wounded by a grenade.

Vukusic says his father probably would have fought, but his mother
wanted him to stay home. Tolic's father also worked for the police in a
position that couldn't be filled by anyone else.

Duvancic's father worked for the government until a new administration
took power in 1990. At that point he was fired without an explanation.
His mother had quit her job the year before so she could stay at home
with Davor and his younger sister during wartime.

"There's a high probability of something happening to you (in war),"
Davor says. "The other side had all kinds of guns and weapons. On our
side you don't have anything -- just small groups of people."

The war ended in 1995 with the Dayton Peace Accords, signed under
pressure from officials in the United States. To Duvancic, the foreign
pressure and ensuing peace came too late.

"After they massacre, after they kill a whole town, (the Americans) come
in," Duvancic says. "It all happened before that. It was too late."

HOME COURT

At 5 a.m. on June 20, 1993, Marko Tolic rushed to wake up his
10-year-old brother, Ivan. Game Six of the NBA finals was on TV -- the
Phoenix Suns versus the Chicago Bulls.

"John Paxson hitting a three for the win over Phoenix for the
championship -- I just remember that," Ivan says.

The brothers shared a room and had a line in the middle of it to
separate Ivan's side from Marko's. They bickered as brothers do.

"Ivan was a crybaby," Marko says. "He was always showing his emotions."

"The little crybaby never got beat one-on-one in basketball," Ivan says.

Tolic followed in his big brother's footsteps. He took up basketball
because Marko did and he learned English because Marko had.

"I knew I couldn't go wrong with him," the younger Tolic says.

Now Marko wakes up at 3 a.m. in Split to listen to his brother's games
online.

Vukusic swam when he was younger but eventually grew tired of waking up
for 6 a.m. practices. At 9 years old, he started playing basketball --
the earliest of NU's Croatian trio.

Duvancic also swam and played tennis. In eighth grade he grew taller
than everyone else and decided to take up basketball. Duvancic and
Vukusic played for the same club team and often played against Tolic's
team.

At the end of high school, Vukusic had many options. He could play in
Croatia, Portugal or Slovenia -- or he could go to college. About six
months before graduation, his coach told him and Duvancic about playing
in the United States.

NU head basketball coach Bill Carmody and assistant coach Paul Lee
visited their practice in 2001. They watched the two and some teammates
play five-on-five for 45 minutes. Carmody says the great thing about
recruiting Croatian athletes is they are good students.

"I just told my parents, and my dad was OK with it, but my mom was like,
'No, you're not leaving,'" Vukusic says. "You know how moms are."

He and Duvancic signed with NU in 2001 and are in their third year on
campus. When Tolic decided to come to the United States, he never
doubted he would play for NU.

"I knew I was going to go crazy if I didn't have anyone to talk in
Croatian with," Tolic says.

THINKING FORWARD

Time and a few classes in NU's Slavic Languages and Literature
department have helped the three players better understand the war they
witnessed.

If Croatia were attacked again, Tolic says he definitely would defend
his country. Still, he can't miss an opportunity to joke about the
possibility.

"Actually, I'm a pretty big target out there," Tolic says. "So maybe
not."

But all three also know the devastation that comes with war. When the
United States went to war in Iraq last year, it was a little hard for
Tolic to swallow.

"I told everyone what war is going to bring," Tolic says. "I'm not
against American involvement in anything. I'm just against war in
general."

Adds Duvancic, "There has to be another way to solve things."

War is something you have to experience to understand, says Tolic's
mother, Ivanka. Split was not in danger often, but she says what
happened in parts of their country happened to the whole country. Ivanka
Tolic calls it "a lost time."

Friends and relatives who fought came out of the war having lost years
of their lives.

"Over the years you have fun, work or go to college," Marko Tolic says.
"And they came out of the war with nothing in their hands."

That's something Vukusic, Duvancic and Tolic won't have to face after
NU. They'll leave with degrees which they say will help them in life
after basketball. Tolic and Duvancic say they probably will return to
Croatia.

"Maybe I could go back to Croatia one day and help other kids to come
here," Tolic says. "Whenever people see something on TV about the
Balkans, it's all about war.

"There's more to it."