This male interviewee was born in the late fifties in a family of Croatian farmers. Their village was surrounded by villages with a mostly Serb population. In the sixties, there was already some bullying going on among the children from different cultural backgrounds and the narrator used to sing old Ustashe songs with his friends, though their parents told them not to. In August 1990, Serbian barricades appeared near the village of Kijevo, where his parents still lived at the time. They were not allowed to bring anything into the village and every person crossing the checkpoints was registered by the Serbs. The interviewee joined the local MUP as a volunteer. Soon the village of Kijevo was under attack by Serbian forces. Only the women and old people stayed in the village, the younger men continued fighting the Serbs from the mountains and the woods. After the fall of Kijevo, he became a member of the Hiking-diverzant unit, that was active until in 1992 Kijevo's Independent Home-Guard Company was founded with more than one hundred members from Kijevo. As one of the Croatian officers, he was involved in several meetings. In this interview he describes his daily life and the situation in the Kijevo area during the war period.

Date Submitted: 2013-09-24