Knin, 5 August. The central commemoration of Operation Storm - the offensive after which more than two hundred thousand Serbs disappeared from Croatia - passed with two speeches worth far more than the ceremony itself. One was by President Zoran Milanovic, the other by Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic. Both spoke about peace. Neither of them mentioned what exactly happened to the people who are no longer there.

Milanovic used the stage for something you rarely hear from the president of a NATO member: he went after the alliance itself. His target was the initiative for every member to allocate five percent of gross domestic product to armaments. Behind that figure, he said, stands not security but interest - the money of Croatian citizens, he argued, will end up in the pockets of the owners of German, French and American arms manufacturers.

The ally selling to the neighbour

Then came the part that explains the real irritation. Milanovic brought up Serbia and the rearmament of the Serbian army, and from there turned his criticism on his own allies - among them France, which he did not name, and which sold Serbia more advanced versions of the Rafale fighter jet than those it previously sold to Croatia.

The questions he put to the audience in Knin were direct: when Serbia arms itself with the help of some of our formal allies, is that fair play? How much is that costing us and how much more will it cost us? The questions are legitimate. The answer is simply uncomfortable for Zagreb - weapons are not an alliance, weapons are trade, and a trader sells to whoever pays. That is not a discovery of 2026.

"The rebellion came from Belgrade"

In the same speech Milanovic said Knin was not the heart of the rebellion against the Croatian state, but that the rebellion came from Belgrade. He added that the Croatian interpretation of history is the more honest one, though he is subjective as a president and as a Croat, and that not everyone has to see history the same way.

That last sentence sounds conciliatory. In fact it is the formula with which every side in the Balkans packages its uncomfortable chapters: this is our perspective. The problem is that the columns that left Krajina in August 1995 are not a perspective. They are a fact.

Plenkovic went further

If Milanovic's speech was aimed at NATO, the prime minister's was aimed at history - and there he went much further. Plenkovic called Operation Storm not only a legitimate liberation operation led by Franjo Tudjman, but also an action that saved Bihac from humanitarian catastrophe, changed the balance of forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina and opened the road to peace and the Dayton agreement.

Then came the formulation that will be remembered: "the crown of all victories in the Homeland War" and "a brilliant military action that changed the course of Croatian history". Brilliant. The word was chosen carefully and it is not accidental - it shifts the entire operation out of the realm of human consequences and into the realm of military aesthetics. When an operation is brilliant, nobody asks who was left behind it.

Plenkovic closed by saying Croatia is not competing in armaments and threatens nobody, but also that it fears nobody, and that it will never again be unprepared or unprotected. From Zagreb to Belgrade and back, this sentence repeats to the same tune every August - only the microphone changes.

Why this concerns us

Macedonia has no August of 1995 of its own, but it has the same mechanism. Every state in the region has a date it celebrates as a victory while the neighbour marks it as a loss. Every one has a prime minister who can say "brilliant" about something after which somebody else is counting graves. And every one, when pressed, says history is a matter of perspective.

Thirty-one years on, in Knin they are talking about peace. Neither of the two speeches found time for the people who are gone.