Date: January 9, 1995
Author: Valentina Krčmar, Thornhill, Ontario
Addressed to: Letters to the Editor, The Toronto Star
View the Original Letter: krcmar book 3_Part3_Part16.pdf
About This Letter
In this succinct yet haunting letter dated January 9, 1995, Valentina Krčmar draws a chilling parallel between two wars and two cities destroyed in silence: Vukovar in Croatia and Grozny in Chechnya. Written in response to Olivia Ward’s Toronto Star article “Battered Grozny a Vision from Hell” (January 8, 1995), Krčmar reminds readers that history has repeated itself — and the world has learned nothing.
She begins by recalling a moment from November 20, 1991, when journalist Alan Ferguson reported from the ruins of Vukovar following its siege and destruction by the Yugoslav Army.
“The savagery of war was revealed in all its naked horror yesterday as the Yugoslav Army showed off its success in blowing this riverside Croatian city to smithereens.”
Krčmar then juxtaposes this with Ward’s contemporary account of Grozny’s devastation, drawing on her descriptions of the Russian bombardment that turned the Chechen capital into a landscape of horror.
“Yesterday Olivia Ward says in her article ‘Battered Grozny a Vision from Hell’... ‘This is the way a city dies’ and ‘Grozny yesterday was a vision from the pits of hell.’”
Her message is both poetic and damning. Through two nearly identical eyewitness accounts — separated by three years and two wars — Krčmar exposes the world’s moral paralysis. The same atrocities, the same human suffering, the same indifference.
“On November 20, 1991 the world was silent when the town of Vukovar in Croatia was dying. Today when Grozny in Chechnya is dying the world is again silent. Amen!”
With only a few sentences, Krčmar delivers one of her most powerful condemnations of international apathy. Her words stand as both lament and warning: when silence greets injustice, history will always find a new Vukovar — and a new Grozny.
