“The place felt strangely deserted—almost surreal—as if the murders had happened only five years ago. (…) It was devastating. Instead of a tall memorial having stood there for the past thirty years, already weathered by time, with graffiti and murals nearby depicting people embracing in defiance of war, discarded rifles lying on the ground, broken in half, and older generations extending a sincere hand of reconciliation and mutual understanding, there was nothing of the kind.”

— Statement by a participant in the “In the Footsteps of Peacemakers” study exchange during a visit to the site where Josip Reihl Kir was killed in Tenja, March 2026.

Anthropologist Sharon Macdonald, in her book Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and Beyond (2009), uses the concept of difficult heritage to describe memories of events and individuals that evoke moral, political, or identity-related unease within the community that remembers them. It refers to a past that is socially significant yet difficult to reconcile with dominant perceptions of who we are and the kind of story we wish to tell about ourselves.

The shaping of collective memory about a particular historical period is an inherently political process. In our context, it requires us to assume responsibility for critically re-examining nationalist myths and creating space for more nuanced and complex forms of remembrance.

In Croatia, where public memory of the 1990s has been shaped largely around the identities of victimhood and heroism, it has been difficult to find a place for the memory of Josip Reihl Kir. In the early 1990s, Reihl-Kir was deeply committed to negotiations between the Croatian and Serbian communities in eastern Slavonia. He worked actively to prevent the armed conflict from erupting. 

His legacy poses uncomfortable questions for Croatian society: Was the war truly inevitable? Were there genuine opportunities for a peaceful resolution to the conflict, and if so, why were they missed? What responsibility did the various actors bear, including those on the Croatian side? These are questions that do not fit neatly within the closed, one-dimensional narrative that has long shaped public understanding of the war in Croatia during the 1990s. 

Let us recall the facts. Josip Reihl Kir, chief of the Osijek Police Department, Goran Zobundžija, Vice President of the Osijek City Council, and Milan Knežević, a city council member, were killed on July 1, 1991, at approximately 1:30 p.m. As they approached Tenja, a suburb of Osijek, their vehicle was stopped at a barricade, where they were shot at point-blank range. The murders were carried out by Antun Gudelj, a member of the reserve force of the Croatian Ministry of the Interior. Mirko Tubić, the only survivor, was seriously wounded in the attack. Reihl-Kir was struck by sixteen bullets.

Following years of legal proceedings and a retrial, Antun Gudelj was finally convicted in 2009 and sentenced to twenty years in prison for the murders of Josip Reihl-Kir, Goran Zobundžija, and Milan Knežević, as well as for the attempted murder of Mirko Tubić. In June 2024, Gudelj was released on parole. It has never been legally established whether the murders were carried out on the orders of another person or whether anyone else commissioned the crime.

Yet after years of silence surrounding Reihl-Kir’s efforts to resist the growing calls for war—a silence broken only by a handful of journalists, individual citizens, civil society organizations, and the unwavering determination of Jadranka Reihl Kir, who spent years fighting for the truth and seeking to clarify the circumstances of her husband’s murder—the year 2025 finally arrived.

Thirty-four years after the killing of Josip Reihl Kir, the documentary Mirotvorac (The Peacemaker) premiered at ZagrebDox. Produced by Factum and directed by Ivan Ramljak—who also co-wrote the screenplay with Drago Hedl and Hrvoje Zovko—the film is constructed almost entirely from archival footage from Croatian Radiotelevision. On the website of the Croatian Audiovisual Centre, it is described as: “The story of the final months of Josip Reihl-Kir’s life, on the eve of the bloody Croatian-Serbian war—a war that Kir did everything in his power to prevent—told through the testimony of several witnesses and archival footage from the period. More than thirty years later, many aspects of the murder remain unresolved, while those who may have ordered it remain unknown.”

Following the film’s broadcast on Croatian Radiotelevision in February 2026, its creators—Drago Hedl, Hrvoje Zovko, Ivan Ramljak, and producer Nenad Puhovski—became the target of a public backlash. Screenings of the film in Zadar and Benkovac were likewise postponed and ultimately canceled. A number of historians, several veterans’ organizations, and other commentators went to great lengths to argue that the film was not grounded in fact, that it falsified history, that it was methodologically flawed, and that it deliberately stripped events of their historical context. At the same time, the film received major awards at Croatian and international festivals, earned widespread critical acclaim, and, by some measures, became the most-watched Croatian documentary in history.

In October 2024, Croatian President Zoran Milanović posthumously awarded Josip Reihl Kir the Order of Duke Domagoj with Ribbon, a state decoration conferred upon “Croatian and foreign nationals, as well as units and other organizational components of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Croatia and the Ministry of the Interior, in recognition of demonstrated courage and heroism in war, under the immediate threat of war, or in exceptional circumstances during peacetime.”

Among those who had received the same decoration was Branimir Glavaš. Only a few days ago, in June 2026, after the High Criminal Court of the Republic of Croatia sentenced him to seven years’ imprisonment for war crimes against the civilian population in Osijek, President Zoran Milanović revoked his decoration. As a result, for nearly two years, the same state honor was borne by two profoundly different men: one who had sought to prevent the war, and another who had been finally convicted of war crimes.

This March, the study visit “In the Footsteps of Peacemakers” was held in Osijek, jointly organized by the Serb National Council and the Youth Center CK13. As the organizers explained, the study program was inspired by and centered on the life, work, and death of Josip Reihl Kir, whose courage and selfless commitment to peace had become “a guiding light for our understanding and experience of peacemaking,” as well as a powerful example of “taking personal responsibility for peace.”

The study visit brought together young people, whose recorded reflections focused, among other things, on the theme of hope. Looking back on the program, they wrote: “I want to believe that there is still hope for all of us.”; “It gave me hope that war is not inevitable, and that the system may not be able to manipulate us whenever it wants.” They also emphasized that the injustice did not end with the act of murder itself but continues through the erasure of memory: “If we do not remember them as heroes, all that will remain are the graffiti of the others.”

In the Republic of Croatia, a country in which peacemaking is enshrined as a constitutional value and a principle on which society, at least nominally, is founded, one cannot help but ask: why is Josip Reihl Kir not regarded as a hero of our time? The institutions have largely failed to preserve his memory. There is no official day of remembrance dedicated to him or to his work, nor is there a monument where people can gather to honor his memory or mourn his loss. It was only in 2020 that a street in Osijek, leading toward Tenja, was named after him, while in Zagreb his name remains on the municipal list of proposed names for public spaces. Nor are there educational or cultural events dedicated to celebrating the legacy and courage of Josip Reihl-Kir.

Yet that memory—that monument within the realm of collective remembrance—is being built despite the absence of a physical monument. It is being built through Mirotvorac by Ivan Ramljak, through the novel Where Did Kir Disappear? by Elvis Bošnjak, through the tireless perseverance of Jadranka Reihl Kir, through the commitment of human rights activists who remember him year after year, through the advocacy of his fellow police officers, through younger generations determined to preserve his legacy, and through all those who refuse to allow Josip Reihl-Kir to be forgotten.

Branka Vierda is a lawyer working in the fields of human rights and social activism. She currently works as an independent researcher and educator specializing in transitional justice and memory politics. Her primary research interests include the legacy of the wars of the 1990s in the post-Yugoslav region, particularly through the lenses of nationalism and minority rights. In 2023, she received two peace awards in recognition of her work. She lives in Zagreb, was born in Rijeka, and grew up in Dubrovnik.

Translated by Bogdan Petrović