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In Search of Meaning: Foreign
Volunteers in the Croatian
Armed Forces, 1991–95
NIR ARIELLI
Abstract
Foreign war volunteers are a recurring phenomenon in modern warfare. The Yugoslav Wars
(1991–95) saw the participation of foreign fighters on all sides. The article focuses on foreigners
who joined the Croatian armed forces (excluding returning Croatian émigrés). It examines
where the volunteers came from, what brought them to the Balkans and how they represent and
commemorate their wartime experiences. It argues that their participation in the conflict can be
understood as part of an individual search for meaning, comradeship and empowerment.
Foreign war volunteers are a recurring phenomenon in modern warfare. The
Yugoslav Wars (19 91–19 95) saw the participation of foreign fighters on all sides.
Volunteers from various Muslim countries, who came to be known as mujahedin,
as well as some non-Muslim volunteers from western Europe and elsewhere
were incorporated into the Armija BiH, the predominantly Bosniak1army of
the government of Bosnia-Herzegovina.2A few hundred Russians, Ukrainians,
Romanians and Greeks, who came to be known as kontraktniki or contract soldiers,
joined the armed forces of Serbia and of the Bosnian-Serb Republika Srpska.3The
foreigners who joined the Croatian armed forces have received little attention.
Outside of Croatia they have usually been described as right-wing extremists,
Institute of Humanities & Creative Arts, University of Worcester, Henwick Grove, Worcester WR2
6AJ; n.arielli@worc.ac.uk
1A term describing Bosnia-Herzegovina’s indigenous Muslim population.
2Marko Attila Hoare, How Bosnia Armed (London: Saqi, 2004), 131–5. Estimates of the number of
mujahedin who fought on the Bosnian side range from a few hundred to up to three thousand. See also
Esad He´
cimovi´
c, Garibi: Mudzahedini u BiH 199 2–1999 (Fondacija Sina, 2006).
3Ali M. Koknar, ‘The Kontraktniki: Russian Mercenaries at War in the Balkans’, website of the Bosnian
Institute, 14 July 2003 www.bosnia.org.uk/news/news_body.cfm?newsid=176 6 (last visited 13 Sept.
2011); A. Beˇ
cirovi´
c, ‘Sarajevo ratište kobno za Ruse’, Oslobodenje,17 May 2010. The number of foreign
fighters on the Serb side is estimated at over 500.
Contemporary European History,21,1(2012 ), pp. 1–17 C
Cambridge University Press 2011
doi:10.1017/S0960777311000518
2Contemporary European History
adventurers or mercenaries.4The last term in particular is anathema to many of
Croatia’s veteran foreign fighters. In fact, one of the main objectives of the Association
of Foreign Volunteers of the Croatian Homeland War (Udruga Stranih Dragovoljaca
Domovinskog Rata or USDDR) is ‘to remind the world of our contribution and
sacrifice for a country’s independence, [and] to get rid of the myth of foreign
volunteers as “mercenaries”.’5
According to figures published by the USDDR, 456 volunteers from thirty-five
countries served in the different Croatian military formations – the Croatian National
Guard (ZNG), the Croatian Army (HV), the Croatian Defence League (HOS) and
the Croatian Defence Council (HVO) – both in Croatia and, after spring 1992, also
in Bosnia-Herzegovina.6The first part of this article examines who these foreigners
were and what brought them to the Balkans. It argues that their participation in the
conflict can be understood as part of an individual search for meaning. The second
part analyses the volunteers’ self-representation of their wartime experiences. An
examination of the enlistment process, of their interactions with each other and of
their reception by the locals underlines the centrality of comradeship and a sense
of empowerment in keeping the volunteers in the warzone. The final part looks
at the post-war period with special emphasis on the veterans’ personal odysseys
and associational activities. These help to illustrate how the search for meaning,
comradeship and recognition can continue to be fundamental elements in the lives
of former volunteers long after the war ended.
For the purpose of this article these foreigners will be defined as volunteers
because they travelled to Croatia and enlisted for service voluntarily. The term
‘adventurer’ seems insufficient as many of those who came to fight were motivated
by either ideological or moral convictions. Moreover, an adventurous spirit has nearly
always been a prerequisite for foreign volunteers in modern conflicts, even in highly
ideological conflicts such as the Spanish Civil War.7The term ‘mercenary’ is likewise
inadequate. Though some of the foreigners who served in the Croatian armed forces
received a monthly salary, payments were irregular and in any case were much
lower than average wages in Western Europe or North America from whence most
volunteers hailed.8The article therefore excludes the fourteen-man training team
4See, for example, Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia (London: Penguin, 1996), 25; Stipe Sikavica,
‘The Army’s Collapse’ in Jasminka Udoviˇ
cki and James Ridgeway, eds., Burn This House: The Making
and Unmaking of Yugoslavia (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), 151 ,fn.20; Attila
Hoare, How Bosnia Armed,131.
5http://www.croatia.org/crown/articles/9991/1/481-foreign-volunteers-from-35-countries-
defended-Croatia-in-1991-19 95.html (last visited 1October 2 010).
6‘USDDR Vinkovci-Vukovar 2009 program’, 17 Nov. 2009. The first two military formations officially
took part only in the war in Croatia; HOS units fought in Croatia and in Bosnia-Herzegovina and
the HVO, a Bosnian-Croat militia, fought only in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
7See, for example, R. Rein, ‘Echoes of the Spanish Civil War in Palestine: Zionists, Communists and
the Contemporary Press’, Journal of Contemporary History,43,9(2008), 18 .
8Interview with Steve Gaunt, 14 March 2010; Steve Gaunt, War a n d P i v o , entries for 17 Jan. 19 92,17
Feb. 1992 ,22 Feb. 199 2 and 15 March 1992 . Excerpts from the diary are available on Gaunt’s website,
http://free-vk.t-com.hr/sg/diary.htm (last visited on 2Sept. 2010 ), and see also Steve Gaunt, War a n d
Beer (Coventry: Panic Press, 2010 ); Simon Hutt, Paint: A Boy Soldier’s Journey (Coventry: Panic Press,
Foreign Volunteers in the Croatian Armed Forces, 1991–95 3
which was sent to Croatia by Military Professional Resources Incorporated (MPRI)
as part of that company’s contract with the government in Zagreb. Though there
has been some debate about whether or not MPRI was involved in the planning of
operations in the spring and summer of 19 95 (most notably Operation Storm), their
role remains outside the scope of this study because of its contractual and officially-
sanctioned nature.9This article also does not examine the military contribution of
returning Croatian émigrés. While these played an important part in the country’s
struggle, their decision to fight was motivated by a different set of reasons, such as
kinship and ‘long-distance nationalism’, and their reception and wartime experiences
differed from those of foreigners with little or no prior acquaintance with the region
or the Serbo-Croatian language.10
The sources available to the historian for a study such as this are limited and
incomplete. First they do not represent all the volunteers. Most of the veterans were
unwilling to be interviewed by the author. Fewer than a dozen agreed. One veteran
explained his colleagues’ reluctance by saying: ‘All foreign volunteers who fought
for both Bosnia and Croatia have been subject to large degrees of persecution due
to a posthumous reinterpretation of the roles of foreign fighters in foreign wars,
post 9/11.’11 Fortunately, there are also a number of printed and online accounts that
were published by former volunteers after the war had ended. One veteran, Eduardo
Rózsa Flores, even produced an autobiographical film portraying his experiences in
Croatia. However, retrospective sources dealing with wartime experiences suffer from
known methodological shortcomings. Post-war experiences often affect the portrayal
of the past. Moreover, most accounts conceal as much as they reveal. Certain events
could have been forgotten, repressed or omitted. In particular the description of any
atrocities that may have been committed by the volunteers against civilians is absent
from these narratives. Even if such events took place they would not be mentioned
either because of shame or because of fear from the International Criminal Tribunal
for the Former Yugoslavia. One must also take into account that each of the volunteers
came to the Balkans at a different stage, stayed a different length of time, and saw
different things. Thus, their stories represent an individual and subjective experience.
2010), 195. According to international law, a person is considered to be a mercenary when that person
takes part in armed conflict motivated essentially by the desire for private gain, while having been
promised or paid material compensation substantially more favourable than that of fellow combatants.
These circumstances do not apply to the foreign fighters discussed in this article. Most received the
same pay as Croatian soldiers while some, such as Antaine Mac Coscair, self-financed their stay in
Croatia.
9Deborah D. Avant, The Market for Force:The Consequences of Privatizing Security (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), 102–3.
10 For more on the wartime role of Croatian émigrés and their relations with the Croatian state, see
Francesco Ragazzi, ‘The Invention of the Croatian Diaspora: Unpacking the Politics of “Diaspora”
During the War in Yugoslavia’, Global Migration and Transnational Politics, working paper no. 10 (2009),
3–13;Glenny,The Fall of Yugoslavia,121–22,157 ; Jasminka Udoviˇ
cki and Ejub Štitkovac, ‘Bosnia and
Hercegovina: The Second War’, in Udoviˇ
cki and Ridgeway, Burn This House,190 . For more on
‘long-distance nationalism’, see Benedict Anderson, ‘Western nationalism and eastern nationalism’,
New Left Review,9(2001), 31–42.
11 Email from Ivan Farina, 17 Aug. 2010.
4Contemporary European History
These self-representations can be supplemented by contemporaneous press reports
on the activities of the volunteers, but these were few and focused only on a limited
number of individuals. Therefore the picture that emerges from the analysis of all
these sources offers only a partial reconstruction.
Why did they go?
In his seminal work on the International Brigades, Michael Jackson remarked that
‘there were as many reasons to go to Spain as there were men who went’.12 The
foreign volunteers who fought in the Croatian armed forces were likewise motivated
by a wide variety of reasons. Some came for personal motives, unrelated to the causes
of the conflict. Twenty-one-year-old Nicolas from France told a French news crew
that he needed action in his life and he wanted to die as he was in love with a girl
who did not love him and did not care about him. Therefore, he took the first train
to Zagreb.13 Joost van Dijk from the Netherlands frankly admitted in retrospect that
‘I was in big financial problems. Had no proper education to find a suiting job, was
also in trouble with the law. I decided to burn all bridges behind me and went to war
because I felt I had nothing to lose anymore.’14 Though these cases may be untypical,
most of the volunteers were young unmarried men who did not mind leaving their
workplace. There are no available statistics to establish their median age. At least
five were in their late teens, while there were a number of volunteers who were in
their forties and fifties. The vast majority, though, were in their twenties or thirties.
Sociologist Ozren Žunec, then an officer in the Zagreb Defence Command, had
the impression that the social background of the foreign volunteers he encountered
in 1992 was lower than average.15 On the basis of the available sources it would be
hazardous to come to sweeping conclusions about boredom or lack of opportunities
for the volunteers at home. However, there does appear to have been little to keep
them tied down. Shortly before departing from the UK, Steve Gaunt noted in his
diary, ‘I must admit that I don’t feel I’m leaving much behind’.16
That said, Gaunt and the majority of the volunteers saw the conflict in the Balkans
in ideological terms. Many have pointed out that they fought for Croatian liberty and
against Serbian aggression. While it certainly did not encompass all the volunteers, an
anti-Communist approach was fairly prevalent. Jean-Philippe from France explained
to a French news crew that he joined the war to fight the Communists (which
he equated with the Serbs). He described himself as an idealist who would have
lovedtoliveinthe1930 sor1940s, when communism was emerging in Europe,
so that he could fight against it.17 Another French volunteer, who refused to be
12 Michael Jackson, Fallen Sparrows: The International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War (Philadelphia: The
American Philosophical Society, 1994), 42.
13 ‘108 HVO International Unit – Part 1’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2SXDr0Be0c(last
visited 19 April 2010 ).
14 Email to the author, 19 June 2010.
15 Email to the author, 2July 2011.
16 Gaunt, War and pivo, entry for 6Nov, 1991 .
17 ’108 HVO International Unit – Part 1’.
Foreign Volunteers in the Croatian Armed Forces, 1991–95 5
interviewed by the author, was only willing to say: ‘We fought for freedom, against
the abandonment of perverted thinkers of the West and against the last Marxists in
Europe!’18 This approach was in tune with the image the regime of Franjo Tu ¯
dman
laboured to project both at home and abroad in the early 1990s, that of a free-market,
democratic country which opposed Slobodan Miloševi´
c’s Bolshevism.19 Yet not all the
volunteers held right-wing views. French volunteer Gaston Besson defines himself as
an anarchist, and there were Labour supporters among the British volunteers. There
were political arguments between the volunteers during the war and some of them
continue to argue among themselves today. Besson, for instance, likened Croatia’s
foreign volunteers to the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, while Steve
Gaunt rejected this analogy.20
Another pervasive reason which influenced the decision of many to volunteer
was a feeling of disappointment at what seemed like the indifference and inaction of
their own country. Irishman Antaine Mac Coscair was ‘dismayed at the indifference
displayed by those around me and that of the international community’.21 Nigel
Patrick Balchin and Rodney Morgan from the UK were likewise angry that the world
was not helping the Croats. Besson, who arrived in Croatia as a photo-journalist,
could not believe that such a tragedy was taking place in Europe and decided to
take up arms and fight.22 In a way these volunteers seem to have felt that they were
stepping in where their home states had failed to do so. To paraphrase Jackson’s
dictum, they each made a personal declaration of war, taking upon themselves the
sovereign’s right to do so.23 However, here too it is impossible to generalise. A Dutch
volunteer whose trip to Croatia was prompted by an advertisement published by a
pro-Croatian organisation in one of the Dutch newspapers, disclosed in retrospect
that ‘if the ad I reacted on came from the Serbian corner I would’ve gone as well’.24
If a generalisation can be made at all, it is to be found in a search for meaning that
was common both to those who fought out of ideological conviction and to those
who volunteered for personal reasons. This, of course, is not to say that the lives
of the volunteers were meaningless before they travelled to the Balkans. ‘Meaning’
here is used in the sense coined by the Viennese neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor
E. Frankl. Taking as his starting point a phrase attributed to Nietzsche – ‘He who
has a why to live can bear with almost any how’ – and drawing on his personal
experience as a prisoner in Auschwitz, Frankl constructed a theory according to
which the search to find and give life meaning is a fundamental human driving force.
By identifying a purpose or a cause to work towards, a person can alleviate stress or
18 Email to the author, 5June 2010.
19 Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia,90; Ejub Štitkovac, ‘Croatia: The First War’, in Udoviˇ
cki and Ridgeway,
Burn This House,158 .
20 Interview with Gaston Besson and Steve Gaunt, 14 March 2010; Gaunt, War and p i vo, entry for 10
April 1992.
21 Email to the author, 28 June 2010.
22 Berislav Jelini´
c, ‘Život nakon rata za tu ¯
du domovinu’, Nacional,Nov.2010 ,68–74.
23 Jackson, Fallen Sparrows,33.
24 Email to the author (date withheld).
6Contemporary European History
internal disharmony and improve his or her self-esteem.25 In this case, wartime service
gave the volunteers a sense of meaning, be it on an ideological, moral, masculine or
any other level, much as it has done for war volunteers throughout history. Ivan Farina
from Ireland, then a twenty-one-year-old student who beforehand had worked on
construction sites in London, commented:
My three years in London were hard in terms of work, societal matters, security and violence. It
was there I think I developed tough self reliant ethical principles that were not serviced upon my
return to education and the surrounding confines. Yugoslavia seemed to hold the answers I was
looking for, the test I craved and the commitment I believed was needed and I could deliver. In
short when the war broke out, so did I, I was ready.26
For him and for others the war provided a sense of purpose. It helped to fill a void.
A search for ‘reasons of being’ is also central in the work of the sociologist,
anthropologist and philosopher Pierre Bourdieu. For him, individuals struggle to
emerge from indifference, depression, solitude or insignificance in order to find
a ‘feeling of counting for others, being important for them’. The accumulation
of meaning provides ‘a kind of continuous justification for existing’.27 Bourdieu
stresses that, ‘It is society, and society alone, which dispenses, in varying degrees, the
justifications and reasons for existing’, a notion which the anthropologist Ghassan
Hage shares: ‘It is society that offers individuals the possibility of making something
meaningful of their lives’.28 Hence there are two exceptional things about the foreign
volunteers. First of all, their quest for meaning could not be fulfilled, for whatever
reason, in their home society, so it was intentionally sought out abroad. Second,
this search transpired in a military context. This is perhaps unsurprising if we bear
in mind that many of these men shared an attraction to war. Almost all the Dutch
volunteers, and many of the British and French, had previous military experience,
as did a number of ex-servicemen from the US. The foreigners in Croatia included
Gulf War veterans, international guerrillas who had fought alongside insurgents in
Southeast Asia and a number of soldiers who deserted the British Army and the
French Foreign Legion in order to fight in a ‘real war’ in the Balkans.29 Rob Krott,
a former officer in the US Army, disliked civilian life and ‘felt that if I didn’t do
something, anything, I was going to lose my mind’.30 Many of those who had no
military experience when they first arrived in Croatia had a military tradition in their
family or had tried to enlist at home in the past. Some went as far as inventing a false
25 Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy (New York: Washington
Square Press, 1963).
26 Email to the author, 20 Sept. 2010.
27 Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 240.
28 Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays towards a Reflexive Sociology (Cambridge: Polity, 199 4), 19 6;
Ghassan Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism (London: Merlin, 2003), 16 .
29 Hutt, Pain t,55 ; interview with Gaston Besson, 14 March 2010; Rob Krott, Save the Last Bullet
for Yourself (Philadelphia: Casemate, 2008), xi; ‘A. Mac (Cascarino)’, ‘The Novska Operations’,
www.cascarino.homestead.com (last visited 29 Jan. 2011).
30 Krott, Save the Last Bullet,6–7.
Foreign Volunteers in the Croatian Armed Forces, 1991–95 7
military background to pave their way into the Croatian armed forces.31 To u s e I v a n
Farina’s words, ‘Foreign volunteers have in common mostly the desire to fight and
the will to engage in conflict’.32 Peter, a Dutch volunteer who was interviewed by
reporter Anthony Loyd in 1993, offered the following apposite remark:
We don’t fight for the money, and we’re not in it for the killing. It’s about camaraderie and, sure,
it’s about excitement. Some are bullshitters, some are psychopaths. We are neither. We are here
because we want to be, and if there is a price to pay, then we are ready for that too.33
Comradeship and power
In her compelling analysis of the attraction that warfare has been able to exercise on
generations of soldiers, Joanna Bourke highlights how
comradeship, with its bittersweet absorption of the self within a group, appealed to some
fundamental human urge. And then – in contrast – there was the awesome power conferred
upon individuals by war.34
Comradeship and power provide two useful frameworks through which the
volunteers’ wartime experiences can be evaluated. While a multitude of reasons,
which we have grouped together under the heading of a search for meaning,
brought the foreign fighters to the Balkans, it was often comradeship and a sense
of empowerment that made them stay.
Once they left their homes and set out to Croatia, most volunteers had to follow
one of two paths to enlist: report to a military headquarters in Zagreb, or travel
to one of the fronts and join a unit there. Those who came to Croatia during the
early stages of the conflict found that the Croats were not expecting foreign fighters
and did not know exactly what to do with them.35 This reflects the broader lack of
organisation that afflicted the Croatian war effort when hostilities began. A Spanish
Civil War-style International Brigade, with its own recruitment network and training
camp, had no parallel in Croatia.36 Neither was there a state-sponsored organisation
such as Machal, which funnelled overseas volunteers for the Israeli armed forces from
1948 onwards. Thus, the first steps were improvised. When Steve Gaunt arrived in
Zagreb he found:
Soldiers and militia are everywhere, bristling with weapons. I approached two of these and made
clear my intention to join the fight. After looking extremely surprised, they told me that they
would collect me from the hotel at 11 o’clock.37
31 See, for example, John MacPhee, The Silent Cry: One Man’s Fight for Croatia in the Bosnian War
(Manchester: Empire Publications, 2000), 56.
32 Email to the author, 20 Sept. 2010.
33 Anthony Loyd, MyWarGoneBy,IMissItSo(London: Black Swan, 2002), 54.
34 Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 2.
35 Interview with Steve Gaunt, 14 March 2010.
36 When Rob Krott arrived in Zagreb in spring 19 92, he searched in vain for the HQ of the International
Brigade only to discover that ‘there was no real International Brigade per se’. Krott, Save the Last
Bullet,16–17.
37 Gaunt, War and pivo, entry for 9Nov. 1991 .
8Contemporary European History
Who the volunteers met upon arrival in Zagreb often dictated which unit they
joined, at least initially. Mac Coscair met a Croat man on the train who told him
to claim to be of Croatian descent, to avert suspicion, and took him to the HOS
headquarters in Zagreb. HOS headquarters was also the first place to which Simon
Hutt, a soldier in the British Army who went AWOL (absent without leave) to come
to Croatia, was taken by an experienced Dutch volunteer he had met at Zagreb train
station. When Hutt’s request to enlist was turned down, he and his Dutch patron
travelled to the front and joined a HOS unit there.38
Although HOS was the military wing of the ultra-nationalist Croatian Party of
Rights, led by Dobroslav Paraga, it was coincidence rather than familiarity with
Croatian politics that brought foreigners there. For instance, until HOS was forcibly
amalgamated into the government army in late December 1991, the location of its
HQ near Zagreb’s train station made it a logical first stop for many of the incoming
volunteers.39 When Paraga was arrested that month for allegedly plotting a military
coup against the government, a number of foreign volunteers found themselves
‘tangled in the Tu ¯
dman-HOS feud’ when they defended the HOS HQ against a
possible police raid. Mac Coscair and others who were involved insist that their team
was entirely apolitical and that their role in the affair was accidental.40 The fact that
they went on to serve in the Croatian Army supports this claim.
A third and somewhat uncommon path to the warzone was through special units
that were raised abroad. The first unit of foreigners that was recruited outside Croatia
was the First Dutch Volunteer Unit. The Nederlands Kroatische Werkgemeenschap
(Dutch-Croatian Work Community), an organisation associated with the Right,
published an advertisement in the Dutch press in 1991 calling for volunteers with at
least fourteen months of military experience to enlist for military service in Croatia.
Subsequently thirty-two volunteers were taken by bus to Croatia, arriving in mid-
September. These formed the nucleus of the First Dutch Volunteer Unit which was
led by a Dutch officer, Johannes Tilder, who was later captured by Serb forces and
died while in captivity.41 In December 1992 the American magazine Soldier of Fortune
sent an eight-man team to train Croatian troops in western Bosnia. While the team
included seasoned professional soldiers such as the editor, Lieutenant Colonel Robert
K. Brown, and ex-Rhodesian SAS Major Robert MacKenzie, they only remained in
the region for two weeks and did not see active combat.42
38 Hutt, Pain t,95–7.
39 HOS units in Bosnia-Herzegovina continued to act independently of Zagreb long after the forcible
amalgamation in Croatia.
40 www.cascarino.homestead.com (last visited June 2011); email to the author, 28 June 2010.
41 Joost van Dijk, ‘Prva nizozemska dobrovoljaˇ
cka jedinica’, 9Oct. 2007, http://povijest.net/sadrzaj/
hrvatska/rh/domovinski-rat/4-nizozemski-dobrovoljci.html (last visited 22 Jan. 2011); Jelini´
c, ‘Život
nakonratazatu
¯
du domovinu’, 73–4; Rinke van den Brink, ‘Un Colonel Hollandais à la tête de
paras Croates’, Le Soir,30 July 199 2, http://archives.lesoir.be/un-colonel-hollandais-a-la-tete-de-
paras-croates_t-19920730-Z05MMF.html (last visited 25 Jan. 2011). For more on Tilder’s capture and
interrogation, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcMXPlTwXs (last visited 22 Jan. 2011).
42 Krott, Save the Last Bullet,119–40; MacPhee, The Silent Cry,57.Soldier of Fortune magazine has helped
recruit and sponsor training missions for various, mainly anti-communist, conflicts around the world
since the second half of the 1970 s.
Foreign Volunteers in the Croatian Armed Forces, 1991–95 9
Foreign volunteers served on every front where the Croatian armed forces fought
between 1991 and 199 4 (most were gone by the time the war ended). Some stayed
a few weeks, leaving because they became wounded or simply did not fit in, while
others remained for years. The earliest volunteers took part in the defence of the
besieged town of Vukovar in the first months of the conflict. Others served elsewhere
in eastern and western Slavonia and in Krajina. As an uneasy ceasefire took effect
in the early months of 1992 many foreigners were demobilised. However, war soon
erupted in neighbouring Bosnia-Herzegovina and consequently some of the foreign
volunteers joined or were sent to Croatian paramilitary units fighting in the Posavina
corridor in the north, around Donji Vakuf in central Bosnia and in Herzegovina
in the south.43 The volunteers performed a wide range of mainly infantry-related
duties, from manning defence positions to conducting special operations. According
to Rob Krott, ‘Most of the so-called special operations units in the Croat Army
were organised by foreigners or by Croat veterans of the French Foreign Legion.’44
In exceptional cases volunteers served in tanks or as instructors to Croat troops.45
‘The foreigners tend to stick together around here’, Simon Hutt was told when he
first arrived at the front.46 Where possible, most preferred to serve in units with other
volunteers and under English-speaking commanders. In places where the number of
non-Croatian volunteers was high, such as eastern Slavonia and Posavina, foreigners
even commanded small international units in order to avoid language difficulties.
Many volunteers tended to incorporate manifestations of internationalism, stemming
from their own foreign identity, into their immediate environment and subsequently
into their units’ esprit de corps. In Mala Bosna on the eastern Slavonia front, a plaque
was placed over the entry to a bunker declaring: ‘This bunker was built by English
volunteers fighting for Croatian freedom December 1991’. In the same village one
of the volunteers wrote ‘British Poll Tax Refugees’ on an exterior wall of a building.
Simon Hutt carved the words ‘Nuneaton Borough F. C. on tour’ into a plastered
wall while he was at the front in northern Bosnia. Ivan Farina designed a sleeve
patch for a short-lived group of foreign volunteers with the words ‘Free Crusaders’
and a picture of a Templar Knight.47 Seventeen Swedish and Norwegian volunteers
established the Viking Platoon which was part of a HVO brigade in western Bosnia-
Herzegovina.48 Most volunteers wore beret badges from their national armies, distinct
43 British volunteer Cy Mackintosh explains: ‘Officially, the regular Croatian Army, of which I was a
member, wasn’t involved in the war in Bosnia. However, Croatia was officially a military and political
ally of the Bosnians against the Serbian common enemy. A case of my enemy’s enemy is my friend.
In Bosnia were the Bosnian-Croat HVO militia supplied and armed by the Croatian government
and fighting in coalition at that time alongside what passed for the Bosnian Army.’ Cy Mackintosh,
‘Partisan Warfare’, http://cybercat.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/jebiga/index1.htm (last visited on 27 Oct.
2010). Not all the volunteers saw the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina as a continuation of the conflict in
Croatia. ‘Antaine Mac Coscair’ was at first tempted to head for Bosnia, but eventually decided not
to go: ‘The enemy was the same, however the cause was not so clear’. Email to the author, 29 June
2010.
44 Krott, Save the Last Bullet,16.
45 Rinke van den Brink, ‘Un Colonel Hollandais’.
46 Hutt, Pain t,104.
47 Hutt, Pain t,125 ,198.
48 Krott, Save the Last Bullet,151.
10 Contemporary European History
uniform and other insignia which identified them as foreigners. The exhibition of
internationalism can also be found in the way volunteers commemorated the war.
The autobiographical film ‘Chico’ (2001) shows graffiti of the Spanish Civil War
slogan ‘No Pasaran!’ on a wall of a half destroyed house in a Croat village, while the
protagonist, Eduardo Rózsa Flores, whose family had a strong Communist tradition
in Latin America, speaks to his men about the International Brigades and quotes
from a speech by the Spanish Communist leader Dolores Ibárruri (‘La Pasionaria’).
Soldiers everywhere tend to personalise their immediate environment but what is
noteworthy in the case of these foreigners is their desire, whether conscious or not,
to make it visibly known that they had travelled a long way to be there.
However, the volunteers were by no means isolated from the surrounding Croat
environment. As many of the testimonies show, the foreigners often chose or had
to change units, and mobility between different military and paramilitary outfits was
frequent. Many of the volunteers picked up the local language, a process the Dutch
soldiers excelled in, acting at times as mediators between Croats and foreigners.49
It was quite common for foreign volunteers and Croats to fight side by side. Steve
Gaunt observed that:
I feel we have been invited to join this unit for the purpose of increasing morale. The Croats seem
to feel as if they are standing alone. Foreign volunteers seem to alleviate the feeling to some small
extent.50
This feeling was shared by some of the Croat military personnel who came into
contact with the foreign fighters. Ozren Žunec recalls that
I felt somehow that foreign volunteers were a symbol that the world has not totally forgotten what
was happening in Croatia. In autumn of 1991 Croatia felt alone and abandoned by the international
community, and foreigners in HV were a sign, however small, that there are some people in the
world who care.51
In fact, it was precisely this shared comradeship which, even today, makes Gaston
Besson appreciate his service in a HOS unit. Angered by the negative post-war
reputation of this right-wing paramilitary organisation, he stresses that ‘HOS was the
only place where Croats, Muslim, [Croatian-]Serbs, foreigners and women served
together’. The desire to stand by Bosnian comrades who had served with them in
Croatia was what led him and others to go and fight in Bosnia-Herzegovina once
the war there started.52
In summer 1993 Eric, a Canadian deserter from the French Foreign Legion
parachute regiment, was trying to reach central Bosnia to link up with the government
forces, the Armija BiH. However, when he encountered a fellow ex-legionnaire while
passing through Herzegovina, he was easily convinced to join a Croatian HVO unit
49 See, for example, Krott, Save the Last Bullet,20; Hutt, Paint,95 ,103,11 9 .
50 Gaunt, War and pivo, entry for 20 Nov. 1991 .
51 Email to the author, 2July 2011.
52 Interview with Gaston Besson, 14 March 2010. See also Cy Mackintosh, ‘Partisan Warfare’. It is worth
noting that women, Muslims and Croatian Serbs were also to be found in ZNG units.
Foreign Volunteers in the Croatian Armed Forces, 1991–95 11
instead.53 Here again, comradeship more than ideological resolve or awareness of
political developments seems to have guided the way. Most foreign volunteers who
fought on the Croatian side in Bosnia-Herzegovina have conspicuously little to say
on their role in the fighting which erupted between Muslims and Croats in winter
1992–93. This is an interesting omission if we consider that they had originally set
out to fight the Serbs. Indeed, Serbian aggression in Bosnia-Herzegovina, not least
against Muslims, was a key motivation for some of the volunteers who arrived in the
Balkans from April 199 2 onwards. As Ivan Farina remarked, ‘When the existence
of concentration camps came to light in Bosnia all doubts were dispelled and I
concentrated on getting over to fight’.54 While self-representations are prone to gloss
over dissonances, John MacPhee’s detailed description of atrocities committed by
Muslim troops, which can be seen as a justification for staying with a HVO unit
that fought against them, is an exception.55 In this case, and perhaps for others as
well, comradeship led to immersion in the Croat cause, overriding motivations for
participating in the war in the first place. For MacPhee,
they were fuckin’ swell guys these Croatians. War brought out that need, that love of humanity, a
love that children can not inspire – it is a special bond among soldiers who fight, live and die for
one another.56
As noted above, war often gives soldiers a sense of empowerment and alters the
perception of what is permissible. This would account, at least partially, for displays
of bravery by volunteers on the one hand, and them getting into trouble with
the locals, each other and the law on the other. Quite a few volunteers keenly
sought frontline action. In autumn 1991, while in the Novska region, Mac Coscair
took part in hit-and-run ambush operations behind enemy lines against Serb
vehicles and infrastructure. During this period his unit sustained a high number
of casualties and came under daily artillery and rocket attacks as well as occasional
aerial bombardment.57 A small group of German volunteers who served in the King
Tomislav Brigade in Bosnia-Herzegovina begged their Croat-Canadian commander
to go out on patrol. When he consented, they reportedly picked their way through
no-man’s-land and killed two Serb soldiers.58 Steve Gaunt noted in his diary that
when a group of soldiers had to be sent to the front in Mala Bosna the foreigners
were selected as ‘none of the Croatians wanted to go’.59 A Canadian volunteer told
reporter Anthony Loyd, ‘The officers would encourage me to go out on raids but
a lot of the guys I was with got pissed off because they knew every time I went
out with an RPG they would get shelled. I mean, do they want to fight a war
or what?’60 A number of published accounts vividly narrate experiences of killing
53 Loyd, My War G o n e B y ,44–50.
54 Email to the author, 20 Sept. 2010.
55 MacPhee, TheSilentCry,64–70.
56 Ibid.,85.
57 ‘A. Mac (Cascarino)’, ‘The Novska Operations’.
58 Krott, Save the Last Bullet,168.
59 Gaunt, War and pivo, entry for 18 March 199 2.
60 Loyd, My War G o n e B y ,47.
12 Contemporary European History
enemy soldiers.61 Ultimately, war provides participants with the alluring power to
decide over human lives. However, quite aside from frontline activism and courage,
wartime empowerment also brought with it unrestrained behaviour when no enemy
was in sight. Foreign volunteers often drank excessively and got into fights which at
times ended in injury and even murder.62 Some of the foreigners who served with
Rob Krott in 1993 confessed to looting and told him how they had tried to shoot one
of their own commanders from behind. After a while he ‘began to worry about my
wallet – and my back’.63 Because volunteers describe others behaving in this way, and
not themselves, it is difficult to assess whether this conduct was the result of wartime
brutalisation or whether the war merely created circumstances where pre-existing
criminal behaviour could flourish. Krott, however, was convinced that the latter was
true.
The fraudulent and violent behaviour of some volunteers marred the way the
foreign fighters saw themselves, as well as the way they were perceived by Croat
military authorities. Among the veterans there is criticism of an unknown number of
‘cafe bar warriors’ who never ventured beyond Zagreb. These are blamed for giving
the foreign volunteers a bad name. With time, foreigners became involved in the
process of filtering new international recruits. Mac Coscair recalled:
One British individual who attempted to join us at the HOS HQ was immediately rejected.
Claiming to be a former legionnaire, several of our men questioned him and determined he was a
fraud.64
In wartime accounts as well as in retrospect, volunteers tend to distinguish between
‘professionals’ and ‘riffraff’, ‘good mercs and bad mercs’, genuine soldiers and
imposters. In places where the latter element outweighed the first, international
solidarity among foreign fighters crumbled. The ex-US Army Ranger Mike
McDonald (a nom de guerre) decided to leave the Tomislav Brigade in Herzegovina a
few days after arriving because of the ‘crackpot criminal schemes’ of the foreigners in
his unit.65 Cy Mackintosh, a British volunteer, had such a negative impression from
some of the other foreigners that he
preferred to live and fight alongside the Croats in a regular unit rather than the artificially created
‘International’ mercenary units that had plagued the Croatian Army. The Croats had eventually got
wise to the negative influence of these groups and sent them home or sent them to join HVO in
Bosnia. Apart from a few, the foreigners in these mercenary units behaved and fought atrociously
during the war in Croatia. They were hooligans and braggarts, pure and simple. I am proud to say
that I was one of the few foreigners in the conflict who volunteered as a result of the injustice I
perceived rather than being driven by monetary greed or the love of violence.66
61 See, for example, Krott, Save the Last Bullet,48–56; MacPhee, The Silent Cry,18–19 ; Hutt, Paint,
148–54.
62 A local taxi driver was murdered by a British volunteer. For this and other violent occurrences, see
Gaunt, War and pivo, entries for 1Jan. 199 2,31 Jan. 199 2,2March 199 2,12 March 199 2; Krott, Save
theLastBullet,1–4,15 ; Hutt, Pai nt,196–97.
63 Krott, Save the Last Bullet,209.
64 Email to the author, 28 June 2010.
65 Krott, Save the Last Bullet,211–12.
66 Cy Mackintosh, ‘Partisan Warfare’.
Foreign Volunteers in the Croatian Armed Forces, 1991–95 13
Rob Krott concurred:
the Croats considered the Internationals a notoriously big pain in the ass. They caused trouble and
chased after the Croatian women – occasionally to good effect. Nobody really liked them. They
were basically all considered assholes.67
However, he later concedes that the unit he trained ‘received a certain cachet by
having foreign advisors’ whose presence helped to boost morale. Moreover he argues
that, had the Croats filtered the international soldiers more carefully, and organised
them into specific units with strict discipline and strong leadership, a lot more could
have been achieved from ‘the foreign military talent running around’.68 Croat military
authorities were certainly happy to have volunteers such as Willy Van Noort from the
Netherlands, who trained a number of Croatian units. Mentioning this Dutch officer
in his testimony at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia,
General Slobodan Praljak, who was a high-ranking official in the Ministry of Defence
during the war, said ‘Of course, we didn’t take in everybody [from abroad] who
wanted to join, but we considered that it was a particular honour and privilege to
have a colonel of the Dutch Army join us.’69 Krott, nonetheless, left the Balkans in
1993, feeling that ‘Unfortunately there weren’t enough of those [professional, brave
and dedicated] men in Bosnia to go around’.70
Post-war odysseys
Having left the warzone, most of the volunteers returned to their home countries.
A small fraction settled in Croatia, some of them marrying local women. Rob
Krott and a handful of others went on to fight in other conflicts. Life was not
always easy for Croatia’s foreign volunteers once the war was over. Simon Hutt,
who lost one of his legs as a result of an injury he received on the front, went
back to the UK where he plunged into an addiction to drugs and served time
in prison. Eduardo Rózsa Flores, the Hungarian-Bolivian volunteer who played
himself in the autobiographical film ‘Chico’, was killed by police in Bolivia in 2009
for allegedly plotting the assassination of president Evo Morales.71 Cy Mackintosh,
who remained in the Bosnian government’s army after the war, was badly injured in
a bomb explosion in 1996 for which he was blamed by a military court in Sarajevo.
He was subsequently sentenced to five years in prison.72 Jackie Arklöv, a Liberian-
born Swedish volunteer who served with Croatian militia in Bosnia-Herzegovina in
1993, was sentenced in Bosnia in 1995 to a thirteen-year jail term for threatening and
67 Krott, Save the Last Bullet,11.
68 Ibid., 17,28.
69 Open session, 12 May 2009, quoted on http://www.slobodanpraljak.com/MATERIJALI/
svjedocenje/transkripti_sudjenja/09 0512ED.htm (last visited 22 Jan. 2011)
70 Krott, Save the Last Bullet,203.
71 Philip Sherwell, ‘My meeting with the man accused of plotting the assassination of Evo Morales’, The
Daily Telegraph,20 April 2009.
72 http://www.blogger.ba/komentari/2608/599571/str4(last visited 27 Oct. 2010). I am very grateful
to Bojan Kovaˇ
ci´
c for this information.
14 Contemporary European History
assaulting prisoners. His sentence was later reduced, taking into account that he was
only twenty years old at the time. Back in Sweden, Arklövwas given a life sentence for
a highly publicised killing of two police officers after a bank robbery in 1999.During
his time in prison new evidence emerged regarding war crimes he had committed.
The case was reopened and, in November 2006, he was found guilty.73 A group of
thirteen former Dutch volunteers was similarly investigated for alleged war crimes
in the Medak area in September 1993 , though their case was eventually dismissed.
The investigation by Dutch authorities concluded that the ‘accused Dutchmen on
the list were not even in Croatia at the time of the military operation in the Medak
enclave’.74 Even in cases where return to civilian life was not marred by violence and
crime, veterans of the Yugoslav Wars often encountered alienation at home when
discussing their wartime experience. Mac Coscair ‘quickly learnt not to mention it. It
was incomprehensible to most people, worried them, and was a depressing subject.’75
In recent years, using the Internet, former volunteers have been able to get back
in touch and, in cases where they did not know each other, get acquainted. The
veterans’ association, the USDDR, was formed following the initiative of Gaston
Besson. Since 2007 the association holds an annual meeting in November in Vinkovci,
where many foreigners fought and where two of them have settled. The gathering
includes a memorial service for foreign volunteers who died during the war, an
event attended not only by veteran volunteers from various countries but also
by locals, including dignitaries from the armed forces and the municipality. On a
public level, the association is campaigning for Croatian recognition for the foreign
volunteers’ wartime contribution. In an article published in 2009 by the Croatian
magazine Nacional, USSDR members lamented the fact that, because of a complicated
bureaucratic system, only twenty foreigners had received state recognition as Branitelji
(defenders). Meanwhile, they complained, hundreds of thousands of Croats had
been given this status even though some of them never saw the front line.76 As
Bourdieu and Hage have observed, eventually, it is society which confers meaning.
Through the activities of the veterans’ association, interviews they have given in the
media and online, and printed accounts of their experiences, the former volunteers
seek recognition for the sacrifices they made; a sense of counting for others, being
important for them. Apart from symbolic recognition, there is also a practical side
to the Branitelj status: it enables those veterans who were wounded during the war
to receive an invalidity pension. The association therefore tries to help a number
73 ‘Swedish robber convicted of crimes in Bosnia’, The Gulf Times,10 Nov. 2006, http://www.gulftimes.
com/site/topics/article.asp?cu_no=2&item_no=123186&version=1&template_id=39&parent_id=
21;The Associated Press,10 Nov. 2006; Amnesty International, ‘Sweden end impunity through
universal jurisdiction’, No Safe Haven Series,1(London: Amnesty International Publications, 2009),
pp. 88–92.
74 Openbaar Ministerie, ‘Dutchmen not involved in war crimes in Croatia’, 1April 2009,
http://www.om.nl/@150 4 51 /dutchmen_not/ (last visited 20 Sept. 2011).
75 Email to the author, 28 June 2010.
76 Jelini´
c, ‘Život nakon rata za tu ¯
du domovinu’, 68–74.
Foreign Volunteers in the Croatian Armed Forces, 1991–95 15
of former volunteers to get through the bureaucratic process and receive official
recognition.77
The association sees the number of volunteers who were killed in action as
a key measure of the foreigners’ contribution to Croatia’s war effort. In recent
years, the USDDR has compiled and published a number of lists of volunteers
who were killed and wounded during the hostilities. In 2 010, the association’s ‘Roll
of Honour’ commemorated seventy-two fallen volunteers. Divided according to
country of origin, it included twelve volunteers who were identified only by a first
name or a nickname, and five who were listed as ‘unknown volunteer’.78 The only
female on the list was Collette Webster, an American aid worker who was killed in
Mostar in September 1993. Webster was twenty-seven, her marriage was breaking up
and her convenience store was losing money. Moved by a Bosnian refugee she had
met, she took a six-week training course in emergency medicine and travelled to
Bosnia-Herzegovina through Croatia in January 1993 . She joined a Croatian-based
relief organisation and spent the next few months working at orphanages, hospitals
and refugee camps. At a certain point she applied to join a Croatian military unit as a
combat medic in order to work close to the front line.79 There is, of course, no way
of knowing whether she would have identified with the veterans’ association which
honours her memory.
In addition to public recognition, the formation of the USDDR helped to fill
the void left by the war and its aftermath. The association and its annual gathering
provide both physical and virtual forums to sustain wartime camaraderie and to help
certain veterans to cope with trauma and/or the effects of physical injury. Speaking
of one association member who experienced much hardship in the post-war years,
Steve Gaunt commented: ‘It’s nice to see our organisation was able to help him.
Even if we don’t do anything, we’re there. He’s with us now, he’s with his old
comrades.’80 Despite ongoing differences and occasional personal rivalries, members
of the association keep in touch and retain a strong sense of group identity based on
their experiences during the war, much like veteran international volunteers who
fought in other conflicts.81 However, some veterans want to have no part in the
activities of the USDDR, echoing the aversion towards fellow volunteers expressed
by a number of foreign fighters during the war. To use the words of one former
volunteer, ‘Veteran associations are the perfect place to get backstabbed by disgruntled
fellow members.’82
77 Interview with Steve Gaunt and Gaston Besson, 14 March 2010.
78 http://www.croatia.org/crown/articles/9991/1/481-foreign-volunteers-from-35-countries-
defended-Croatia-in-1991–19 95.html (last visited 20 Sept. 2011). For different figures of volunteers
who were killed in action see: ‘USDDR Vinkovci-Vukovar 2009 program’, 17 Nov. 2009.
79 Michael Rubiner, ‘The Making of a Martyr’, People,27 Dec. 1993: http://www.people.com/people/
archive/article/0,20107228,00.html (last visited 1April 2010); Krott, Save the Last Bullet,197 –8.The
sources vary on whether or not Spencer succeeded in joining a HVO medical unit.
80 Interview with Steve Gaunt, 14 March 2010.
81 See, for comparison, Josie McLellan, Antifascism and Memory in East Germany: Remembering the
International Brigades 1945–1989 (Oxford: Clarendon University Press, 2004), 70.
82 Email to the author (date withheld).
16 Contemporary European History
Conclusions
A mixed bunch by all accounts, Croatia’s foreign fighters came to the Balkans from
very different backgrounds. As a result of their voluntary participation in the fiercest
military confrontation Europe has known since the end of the Second World War,
dozens of foreign fighters died and an even greater number were wounded. But what
is to be learned from this case study? In terms of manpower, the contribution of the
456 foreigners to the Croatian war effort was tiny. At the early stages of the conflict
the strength of the Croatian armed forces was approximately 65,000 troops. By early
1992 this number had risen to somewhere between 230,000 and 250,000.83 In places
where foreigners served as instructors or helped to boost the morale of local soldiers
they may have had a greater influence than their small number suggests. For instance,
when describing Mac Coscair, Dobroslav Paraga recalled that:
HOS Army general Blaz Kraljevic (killed in West Herzegovina 1992) and my wife Nevenka said
the young, smart and brave Irishman was the best. He assisted in many dangerous battles around
Vukovar, Vinkovci, Nustar, Jasenovac, Novska, Petrinja, Zadar etc. He was a brother in arms with
the best HOS fighters later involved in the Croatian Army and he contributed in the war with
other prominent foreigners like him.84
For Ozren Žunec, the foreigners he encountered were similar in many respects
to Croatian war volunteers. Some were ‘very young, some very disciplined and
focused with clear sense of purpose, and some unruly troublemakers, loud and
drunk’. However, he also recalled that in spring 1992
I was specifically ordered that all of them were to be demobilised without exception. I remember
that the higher command was not easy with the idea that foreigners serve in Croatian Army (HV)
and tried to get rid of them. Maybe this was under the influence of former JNA [Yugoslav National
Army] officers occupying higher posts in HV for whom the foreign volunteers were equal to
mercenaries of the worst kind.85
Clearly, any appreciation of the volunteers’ contribution to morale was subjective
and depended on individual experiences of interaction.
The importance of this case study is in its contribution to our understanding of the
phenomenon of transnational war volunteering. Recent scholarship has dedicated
considerable attention to the analysis of the motivations behind volunteering for
war.86 The case of Croatia’s foreign soldiers suggests that the decision to volunteer to
fight abroad can be understood as part of a search for meaning. In a Franklian sense
every individual searches for meaning. These war volunteers, however, searched for
a particular kind of meaning – in a foreign, dangerous, masculine and ostensibly just
environment. Moreover, for these men (and one woman), this search could not be
83 Branka Magaš and Ivo Žani´
c, eds., The War in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1991–1995 (London:
Frank Cass, 2001), 25,38,51 .
84 Email from Paraga to Sean MacBride, 17 Jan. 2005. I am grateful to Antaine Mac Coscair for this
information.
85 Email to the author, 2July 2011.
86 See, for example: Christine G. Krüger and Sonja Levsen, eds., War Volunteering in Modern Times: From
the French Revolution to the Second World War (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011).
Foreign Volunteers in the Croatian Armed Forces, 1991–95 17
satisfied at home. It is difficult to generalise, on the basis of the available sources,
about what was missing in the lives of the volunteers prior to their departure. Indeed,
different individuals may have been lacking quite different things: excitement, moral
coherence, a test of one’s true worth and so on. But there nonetheless seems to have
been a void that the war in the Balkans appeared to be able to fill. This is an attribute
they share with transnational volunteers in other conflicts, despite differences in
historical circumstances.
During the war the individual search for meaning receded to the background.
Clear pre-war perceptions of right and wrong, as seen from abroad, often lost
their clarity in the realities of the Yugoslav Wars. Lacking a cohesive and generally
accepted ideology, comradeship – or in some cases the lack thereof – as well as
empowerment played an important role in the foreigners’ wartime experiences. The
post-war veterans’ association provides forums for sustaining wartime camaraderie.
It also bears witness to the re-emergence of the volunteers’ search for meaning,
though this time in a retrospective way. The attempts to attain societal recognition
for the sacrifice foreign volunteers have made for Croatia illustrate that the search
for meaning is an ongoing process that applies not only to the present and future but
also to the interpretation of the past.
