The Epochique
Issue 001
PAST. PRESENT. ALTERNATE
1st Week of May 2025 Edition
The First Week of May back in 1995...
On May 1st, at 5:30 a.m., artillery opened up on Western Slavonia.
In less than 36 hours, it was over—Operation Flash, one of the final turning points in the Croatian War of Independence. A quick, decisive offensive by the Croatian Army to retake territory held by rebel Serbs since 1991. The war was already dragging toward exhaustion. Sarajevo was still under siege. But this moment—May 1, 1995—was the first real flex of a new Croatian military, trained and modernized, pushing to change the map.
Western Slavonia was small but strategic. What happened here wasn’t just battlefield logistics—it was a message. Zagreb the Croatian capital was done waiting.
The operation displaced around 15,000 ethnic Serbs, and within hours, their homes were abandoned or burning. Some escaped by train; others simply vanished into forest roads. A UN peacekeeping force stationed in the area was caught flat-footed—again—and reduced to documenting the aftermath, filing reports no one would really read.
Western headlines called it a "lightning offensive." Local papers hedged. Serbian media called it a massacre. Truth, as always, sat somewhere in the mud—next to shrapnel, scattered clothes, and a photo of a child that someone never came back for.
In time, Croatia would call this part of its rightful victory. For many, it was. But this page of history smells of burnt wood and uncertainty. What’s left out of the footage is the silence after the artillery stopped—the long hush of a region trying to remember what normal once sounded like.
Croatian Forces Launch Offensive in Western Slavonia
The First Week of May 2025 Today...
Go to Okučani (which was at the centre of Operation Flash) today and you'll find a memorial, a police station, and a few rebuilt homes that look like they were dropped from a prefab kit. The land is green again. Quiet. But history doesn’t really settle here—it still hovers around like an unsatiated ghost.
For Croatia, the war ended in victory and independence. But for those displaced, their lives were changed forever, lives uprooted and violently thrown into communities and countries that they never knew.
Every May 1st, the country commemorates Operation Flash with wreaths, flags, and speeches. Some Serb leaders boycott the ceremonies. Others show up in quiet protest, laying their own wreaths at sites with no plaques.
For those still seeking justice, what remains hardest to process is that no one really talks about it anymore. Not with urgency. The younger generation scrolls past it. History classes shrink it to a paragraph. Ask a teenager in Zagreb what happened in Western Slavonia in '95, and you’ll get a shrug.
T o those affected, weapons used against them don't haunt them as much as the world's forgetfulness does.
There’s a push now, among a few Croatian and Serbian historians, for shared memory initiatives—exhibitions where both sides present photographs, testimony, and ephemera.
The goal isn’t forgiveness. It’s to re-thread a narrative so it doesn’t unravel completely. But these are boutique efforts, held in borrowed galleries and funded by grants.
Three Decades On, Croatia Confronts Memory and Division
Editors note: There’s something unsettling about how quickly war becomes a paragraph in a history book—flattened, packaged, and potentially misremembered. In tracing May 1, 1995, we don’t aim to glorify or reopen wounds, but to ask: what lingers? What if it had gone differently? In the present, silence sometimes feels louder than memory. What of the families that were separated at the time, what of the people who didn't plan on having their lives disrupted - we still find modern day parallels in many other parts of the world - in Ukraine, in Gaza and other unnamed wars that don't make to the ink of publications...
Alternate timeline...
Let’s say the blue helmets weren’t just decoration.
On the night of April 30, satellite images show troop mobilization. Word reaches the UNPROFOR command faster than usual. And—for once—they act. Not just faxes and worried cables, but boots repositioned, roads blocked, armored carriers parked like punctuation marks on the edge of what could be.
On May 1, 1995, when the Croatian offensive is meant to begin, they find something unexpected at the gates of Western Slavonia: resistance not from an army, but from neutrality. A thin but unmoving line of UN peacekeepers, backed by urgent calls from embassies, and the international press watching for once in real-time. The message is clear: not today.
It’s not a permanent stay—just a stall. Long enough for Croatia’s leadership to calculate optics. Long enough for the Americans to step in—not as silent sympathizers, but as negotiators.
A corridor is established. Civilians are evacuated under UN escort. The Krajina leadership is forced to the table. They sit across from Croatian officials in Vienna, where the coffee is bad but the eyes are watching.
It’s slow. Tense. But the region changes hands without bombardment. Western Slavonia is reintegrated not with fire, but with signatures. The Serbs who remain become citizens again—not insurgents, not refugees.
There’s no Operation Storm (which was the last major battle in the Croatian War of Independence). Or if there is, it’s different—shorter, with international monitors embedded in the column. The war still ends. Croatia still emerges whole. But the healing starts sooner.
Years later, in Okučani, there's a museum instead of just a memorial. Children visit with school groups. There are photos on the walls of the commanders who agreed to peace—faces remembered not for their victories, but for their restraint.
And perhaps—just perhaps—in this alternate 2025, when someone mentions May 1, they don’t first think of artillery.
They think of the day they didn’t go to war.
If the UN forces had intervened...
