Battle of Vukovar
Encyclopedia
The Battle of Vukovar was an 87-day siege
of Vukovar
in eastern Croatia
by the Yugoslav People's Army
(JNA), supported by various paramilitary
forces from Serbia
, between August and November 1991. Before the Croatian War of Independence
the Baroque
town was a prosperous, mixed community of Croats
, Serbs
and other ethnic groups. As Yugoslavia began to break up, Serbia's President Slobodan Milošević
and Croatia's President Franjo Tuđman started to pursue nationalist politics. In 1990, an armed insurrection was started by Croatian Serb militias, supported by the Serbian government and paramilitary groups, who seized control of Serb-populated areas of Croatia. The JNA began to intervene in favour of the rebellion, and conflict broke out in the eastern Croatian region of Slavonia
in May 1991. In August the JNA launched a full-scale attack against Croatian-held territory in eastern Slavonia, including Vukovar.
Vukovar was defended by around 1,800 lightly armed soldiers of the Croatian National Guard
(ZNG) and civilian volunteers, against 36,000 JNA soldiers and Serbian paramilitaries equipped with heavy armour and artillery. During the battle shells and rockets were fired into the town at a rate of up to 12,000 a day. At the time it was the fiercest and most protracted battle in Europe, and Vukovar was the first major European town entirely destroyed since the Second World War. When Vukovar fell on 18 November 1991, hundreds of soldiers and civilians were massacred by Serb forces and at least 31,000 civilians were deported from the town and its surroundings. Most of the Vukovar population was ethnically cleansed
and the town became part of the self-declared Republic of Serbian Krajina
. Several Serb military and political officials, including Milošević, were later indicted and in some cases jailed for war crime
s committed during and after the battle.
The battle exhausted the JNA and proved a turning point in the Croatian war. A ceasefire was declared a few weeks later. Vukovar remained in Serb hands until 1998 when it was peacefully reintegrated into Croatia. It has since been rebuilt but has less than half of its pre-war population and many buildings are still scarred by the battle. Its two principal ethnic communities remain deeply divided and it has not regained its former prosperity.
on the west bank of the Danube
river. The area has a diverse population of Croats, Serbs, Hungarians
, Slovaks
, Ruthenians
and many other nationalities, who had lived together for centuries in relative harmony before the Croatian war. It was one of the wealthiest areas of Yugoslavia before the war. Vukovar's long-standing prosperity was reflected in one of Croatia's finest ensembles of Baroque architecture
.
The region underwent major demographic changes following the Second World War, when its ethnic German inhabitants were expelled and replaced with Serb and Montenegrin settlers from elsewhere in Yugoslavia. In the last Yugoslav census in 1991, the Vukovar municipality, which included the town and surrounding villages, was recorded as having 84,189 inhabitants, of whom 43.8 per cent were Croats, 37.5 per cent were Serbs and the remainder were members of other ethnic groups. The town of Vukovar had 47 per cent Croats to 32.3 per cent Serbs.
From 1945, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
was governed as a federal socialist state comprising six newly-created republics – Slovenia
, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina
, Serbia, Montenegro
and Macedonia
. The current border between Serbia and Croatia was defined in 1945 by a Yugoslav federal government commission which assigned areas with a majority Serb population to the Socialist Republic of Serbia
and those with a Croatian majority to the Socialist Republic of Croatia
. This left a large Serb minority in Croatian territory.
After Yugoslavia's leader Josip Broz Tito
died in 1980, long-suppressed ethnic nationalism revived and the individual republics began to assert their authority more strongly as the federal government weakened. Slovenia and Croatia moved towards multi-party democracy and economic reform, but Serbia's authoritarian communist President Slobodan Milošević
opposed reform and sought to increase the power of the communist Yugoslav government. In 1990, Slovenia and Croatia held elections that ended communist rule and brought pro-independence nationalist parties to power in both republics. In Croatia, the Croatian Democratic Union
(HDZ) party of Franjo Tuđman took office, with Tuđman as President.
Tuđman's programme was opposed by many members of Croatia's Serbian minority, towards whom he was overtly antagonistic. The Serb Democratic Party
(SDS) of Croatia, supported by Milošević, denounced the HDZ as a reincarnation of the nationalist-fascist Ustasha movement, which had massacred hundreds of thousands of Serbs during the Second World War. From mid-1990, the SDS mounted an armed rebellion in Serb-inhabited areas of Croatia and set up the self-declared Serbian Autonomous Oblast of Krajina with covert support from the Serbian government and Serbian paramilitary groups. The Croatian government rapidly lost control of large areas of the republic. In February 1991, the Krajina Serbs declared independence from Croatia and announced that they would unite with Serbia. Other Serb communities around Croatia also announced that they would secede and established their own militias.
, a Serbian paramilitary group led by Vojislav Šešelj
, moved into the Serb-populated village of Borovo Selo just north of Vukovar. On 1 May, Gojko Šušak
, a Croatian government minister and hardline nationalist, personally fired three Armbrust
shoulder-launched anti-tank missiles at houses inhabited by Serbs in Borovo Selo. There were no casualties, but the attack aggravated and deepened ethnic tensions. The following day Serb paramilitaries ambushed two Croatian police buses in the centre of Borovo Selo, killing 12 policemen and injuring 22 more. Three Serbs were also killed. The Borovo Selo killings
were the worst act of violence that had occurred between ethnic Serbs and Croats since the Second World War. They enraged many Croatians and led to a surge of ethnic violence across Slavonia.
Shortly after, units of the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) moved into Borovo Selo. The army's intervention was welcomed by local Croatian leaders, but Croatian deputy interior minister Milan Brezak accused the JNA of preventing the Croatian police from dealing with the paramilitaries. Gun battles broke out across the region between rival militias. In Vukovar, Croatians harassed Serb residents, sometimes violently. Croatian police forcibly took over the local radio station, Radio Vukovar, and Serb members of the station's ethnically mixed staff were fired and replaced with Croats. Serb militias systematically blocked transport routes in the predominately Serb-inhabited countryside around Vukovar, and within days the town could only be reached by an unpaved track running through Croat-inhabited villages. The atmosphere in Vukovar was said to be "murderous".
On 19 May 1991, the Croatian government held a nationwide referendum on a declaration of sovereignty. In Vukovar, as elsewhere in Croatia, hardline Serb nationalists urged Serbs to boycott the referendum, while moderates advocated using the poll to register opposition to independence. Many local Serbs did vote, but the referendum passed with 94 per cent nationally voting in favour.
Violence in and around Vukovar worsened after the independence referendum. Repeated gun and bomb attacks were reported in the town and surrounding villages. Serb paramilitaries expelled thousands of non-Serbs from their homes in the municipality. Croatian paramilitaries, led by Tomislav Merčep
, attacked Serbs in and around Vukovar; between thirty and eighty-six Serbs were alleged to have disappeared or been killed, and thousands of others fled their homes. A Croatian government representative in Vukovar told the Zagreb authorities that "the city is again [the] victim of terror, armed strife and provocative shoot-outs with potentially unfathomable consequences. The policy pursued so far has created an atmosphere of terror among the Croatian and Serbian population." Gunmen from both sides burned and looted hundreds of houses and farms in the area.
The conflict blurred ethnic lines. Many Serbs who had lived in Vukovar for generations – known as the starosedioci or "old settlers" – resisted the propaganda coming from Belgrade and Knin
and continued to live peacefully with their Croatian neighbours. The došljaci, or "newcomers", whose families had relocated from southern Serbia and Montenegro to replace the deported Germans after 1945, were the most responsive to nationalist appeals. Paolo Rumiz describes how they "tried to win their coethnics over to the patriotic mobilization, and when they had no success with that, they killed them, plundered their property and goods, or drove them away. The old settlers would not let themselves be stirred up against other nationalities." When Croats fled the fighting they often gave their house keys for safekeeping to their Serb neighbours, whom they trusted, rather than to the Croatian police. Sabrina P. Ramet comments that the distinctive feature of the war in eastern Slavonia was "the mobilization of those who were not integrated into the multi-cultural life of the cities against urban multi-culturalism." The former mayor of Belgrade, Bogdan Bogdanović, characterises the attack on Vukovar as an act of "urbicide
", a deliberate assault on urbanism.
were present in Serb-inhabited areas. There was a small JNA force in the town barracks in the Sajmište district of Vukovar, surrounded by territory controlled by Croatian forces. Although the two sides were commonly referred to as "Croatian" and "Serbian" or "Yugoslav", Serbs and Croats as well as many other of Yugoslavia's national groups fought on both sides. The first commander of the attacking force was a Macedonian, and a substantial portion of the Croatian defenders were Serbs and other ethnicities.
and the 1st Guards Brigade. The 4th Battalion of the 3rd Guards Brigade was stationed in the city from the beginning, while elements of the 1st Guards Brigade arrived retreating from elsewhere in western Syrmia. In addition to the guardsmen there were 300 police officers and 1,100 civilian volunteers from Vukovar and nearby communities. The bulk of the force had initially been organised in an improvised manner, but was formally reorganised in late September 1991 as the 204th Vukovar Brigade
, also known as the 124th Brigade.
Volunteers arrived from other parts of Croatia, including from the far-right paramilitary Croatian Defence Forces
(HOS) backed by Dobroslav Paraga
's extreme nationalist Croatian Party of Rights
(HSP). The defenders were a cross-section of Vukovar society; as many as a third were non-Croats, including Serbs, Ruthenians, Hungarians and other ethnicities. About a hundred of the defenders were Serbs. According to Zoran Šangut, one of the Croat defenders, "We had complete confidence in them. They defended Vukovar alongside us."
The Croatian force in Vukovar was commanded by Mile Dedaković
, a former JNA officer who had joined the ZNG, Dedaković volunteered for a post in Vukovar and took charge of the town's defences. During the siege of Vukovar he was referred to as Jastreb ("Hawk"). At the time, the Croatian Minister of Defence
Šušak publicly claimed that Dedaković was a Serb, a claim that was later reprinted by independent sources, but was false.
Dedaković's second-in-command, Branko Borković, was another former JNA officer who had volunteered for service in Vukovar. The two men established a unified command structure, organised the defenders into a single brigade and implemented an integrated defence system. A defensive ring of six sectors was established, each assigned to one unit within the 204th Brigade. The defenders used a network of cellars, canals, ditches and trenches to redeploy around the sectors as needed.
At the start of the battle they were poorly armed and many were equipped only with hunting rifles. They relied mostly on light infantry weapons, but obtained a few artillery pieces and anti-aircraft guns and improvised their own land mines. They also obtained several hundred anti-tank weapons such as M79
and M80
rocket launchers, but were critically short of ammunition throughout the battle. Although the Croatian government sent some supplies and reinforcements in the early stages, the defenders received little of significance. This was partly because of the difficulty of reaching the town, but may also have been a result of the Croatian government's decision to supply large quantities of arms to the Bosnian Croats
in advance of the Bosnian War
. In doing so, it starved its own forces of weapons and ammunition.
(Serbian nationalist paramilitaries), local Serb militiamen and units of the Yugoslav Navy
and the Yugoslav Air Force
. At their peak, the Yugoslav and Serb forces in the vicinity of Vukovar numbered about 36,000 troops. They were equipped with heavy artillery, rockets and tanks and supported by aircraft and naval vessels on the Danube.
Although the battle was fought primarily by the federal Yugoslav military, the government of Serbia was directly involved. The Serbian secret police agency, the SDB, took part in military operations, and some of its officers commanded Serbian TO units fighting at Vukovar. The Serbian interior ministry
directed the activities of the paramilitaries as well as arming and equipping them. Slobodan Milošević was later accused of direct involvement. According to Veselin Šljivančanin
, who was later convicted of war crimes committed at Vukovar, the order to shell Vukovar came "from Dedinje
" – the elite Belgrade quarter where Milošević lived.
At the start of the war in Slovenia, the army still saw itself as the defender of a federal, communist Yugoslavia, rather than an instrument of Serbian nationalism. Its head, General Veljko Kadijević
, the Yugoslav Minister of Defence and a committed communist, initially sought to forcibly keep Yugoslavia together and proclaimed the army's neutrality in the Serb-Croat conflict. The JNA leadership aimed to cut Croatia in two by seizing the Serb-inhabited inland regions, almost all of the Dalmatia
n coast and much of central and eastern Croatia. It aimed to force Croatia's political leadership to capitulate and renegotiate its membership of Yugoslavia. The JNA's leadership was not yet dominated by ethnic Serbs, and these early goals reflected the "Yugoslav" outlook of its multiethnic leadership. Kadijević was half-Croat and half-Serb, his deputy was a Slovene, the commander of JNA forces in the first phase of the battle was a Macedonian, and the head of the Yugoslav Air Force, which repeatedly bombed Vukovar during the battle, was a Croat.
The loss of Slovenia in the Ten-Day War
made it impossible to fulfil the original objective of keeping Yugoslavia intact. Many of the Serb members of the army no longer wanted to fight for a multiethnic Yugoslavia. The army developed an increasingly Serbian character as non-Serbs deserted or refused to be drafted. Some JNA commanders overtly supported the Serb rebels in Croatia and provided them with weapons. Although Kadijević and other senior JNA commanders initially argued that "the JNA must defend all the nations of Yugoslavia", they eventually recognised that they had no chance of achieving their original goals, and threw their support behind the rebel Serbs of Croatia.
Yugoslav and Serb propaganda portrayed the Croatians as genocidal Ustashas who had illegally taken over Yugoslav territory and were threatening Serb civilians in a reprise of the anti-Serb pogroms of the Second World War. Kadijević later justified the JNA's offensive against Vukovar on the grounds that it was part of the "backbone of the Croatian army" and had to be "liberated". The JNA's periodical Narodna Armija claimed after the battle that Vukovar "had for decades been prepared to support German military penetration down the Danube." The paramilitary leader Vojislav Šešelj declared: "We're all one army. This war is a great test for Serbs. Those who pass the test will become winners. Deserters cannot go unpunished. Not a single Ustasha must leave Vukovar alive."
The Battle of Vukovar took place in two phases over about 90 days: from August to September 1991, before the town was fully surrounded, and from early October to mid-November, when the town was encircled then taken by the JNA. From June, the Serb forces subjected Vukovar and neighbouring villages to daily or near-daily artillery and mortar fire. During July the JNA and TO began deploying in large numbers across eastern Slavonia, surrounding Vukovar on three sides. Heavy fighting began at the end of August. On 23 August Borovo Naselje
, the Croatian-held northern suburb of Vukovar, came under heavy shellfire. Croatian forces shot down two Yugoslav G-2 Galeb fighter aircraft using shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles. The following day the JNA, Yugoslav Air Force and Yugoslav Navy launched a major attack using aircraft, naval vessels on the Danube, tanks and artillery. The attack, which was mounted from both sides of the border, caused extensive damage and many civilian casualties.
The Croatian government launched an attack on JNA garrisons and arms depots throughout its territory on 14 September – an offensive dubbed the Battle of the Barracks
. Vukovar's JNA barracks was one of those attacked that day, but the local Croatian forces failed to capture it. In retaliation, Serb paramilitaries attacked areas to the southwest of Vukovar from the direction of Negoslavci
, forcing about 2,000 people to flee. There were reports of mass killings and scores of civilian deaths. Croatian forces outside the Vukovar perimeter received large quantities of arms and ammunition from depots captured elsewhere, enabling them to hold the line against JNA attacks.
The JNA responded by launching a major offensive in eastern Slavonia, from where it intended to progress west via Vinkovci
and Osijek
to Zagreb. The army did not bypass Vukovar, because they wished to relieve the besieged barracks and to eliminate a possible threat to their supply lines. The JNA leadership did not intend to make Vukovar the main focus of the offensive but, as happened with Stalingrad in the Second World War
, an initially inconsequential engagement became an essential political symbol for both sides.
On 19 September, a JNA force consisting of at least a hundred T-55
and M-84
tanks with armoured personnel carriers and heavy artillery pieces left Belgrade and crossed into Croatia near the Serbian town of Šid
on 20 September. Croatian units were quickly routed and fell back to Vukovar. The JNA's 1st Guards Mechanised Brigade quickly reached the Vukovar barracks and lifted the Croatian siege of the facility. They also moved to encircle Vukovar. By 30 September, the town was almost completely surrounded; all roads in and out were blocked, and the only route in was via a farm track through a perilously exposed cornfield.
The JNA launched repeated assaults on Vukovar but failed to make any progress. Its armour, designed for combat in open country, was barely able to enter Vukovar's narrow streets. Support from regular infantry was lacking, and the poorly trained and motivated troops of the TO were inadequate substitutes. The JNA's soldiers appeared to have little understanding of how to conduct urban operations
and its officers displayed slow and reactive decision-making on the ground.
Croatian forces countered the JNA's attacks by mining approach roads, sending out mobile teams equipped with anti-tank weapons, deploying many sniper
s, and fighting back from heavily fortified positions. The JNA initially relied on massing armoured spearheads which would advance along a street in a column followed by a few companies of infantry. The defenders responded by opening fire with anti-tank weapons at very close range – often as short as 20 metres (65.6 ft) – to disable the lead and rear vehicles, trapping the rest of the column where it could be systematically disabled. The defenders tried to avoid completely destroying enemy armour, as the materiel that they retrieved from disabled vehicles was an important source of resupply. They used a strategy of "active defence", carrying out hit-and-run attacks to keep the JNA forces off balance. Anti-tank and anti-personnel mines hindered JNA manoeuvres. The defenders used unconventional tactics to undermine enemy morale, such as firing weather rockets at Serb forces and sabotaging JNA tanks by planting mines underneath them while they were parked at night, so that they would blow up when the crews started them in the morning. JNA casualties were heavy; on one road, dubbed the "tank graveyard", about a hundred JNA armoured vehicles were destroyed, fifteen of them by Croatian Colonel
Marko Babić
. The high casualties had a debilitating effect on morale all the way up the chain of command.
The JNA began launching artillery and rocket barrages against the town. By the end of the battle, over 700,000 shells and other missiles had been fired at Vukovar at a rate of up to 12,000 a day. It is estimated that Vukovar as well as its surroundings were bombarded with a total of over 2.5 million shells of mortar and artillery of over 20 mm. Metre for metre, the bombardment was more intense than at Stalingrad. The thousands of civilians remaining in Vukovar took shelter from the bombardment in cellars and bomb shelters that had been built during the Cold War
.
commented in July 1991 that the situation was one of "total military disintegration".
Morale on the battlefield was poor. JNA commanders resorted to firing on their own positions to motivate their men to fight. When the commander of a JNA unit at Vukovar demanded to know who was willing to fight and who wanted to go home, the unit split in two; one conscript, unable to decide which side to take, shot himself on the spot. A JNA officer who served at Vukovar later described how his men refused to obey orders on several occasions, "abandoning combat vehicles, discarding weapons, gathering on some flat ground, sitting and singing 'Give Peace a Chance
' by John Lennon." In late October, an entire infantry battalion from Novi Sad
in Serbia abandoned an attack on Borovo Naselje and fled. Another group of reservists threw away their weapons and went back to Serbia on foot across a nearby bridge. A tank driver, Vladimir Živković, drove his vehicle from the front line at Vukovar to the Yugoslav parliament in Belgrade, where he parked on the steps in front of the building. He was arrested and declared insane by the authorities. His treatment enraged his colleagues, who protested by taking over a local radio station at gunpoint and issuing a declaration that "we are not traitors, but we do not want to be aggressors."
In late September, Lieutenant Colonel General Života Panić
was put in charge of the operation against Vukovar. He established new headquarters and command-and-control arrangements to resolve the disorganisation that had hindered the JNA's operations. Panić divided the JNA forces into Northern and Southern Areas of Responsibility
(AORs). The northern AOR was assigned to Major General Mladen Bratić, while Colonel Mile Mrkšić
was given charge of the south. As well as fresh troops, paramilitary volunteers from Serbia were brought in. They were well armed and highly motivated but often undisciplined and brutal. They were formed into units of company and battalion size as substitutes for the missing reservists. The commander of the Novi Sad corps was videotaped after the battle praising the Serb Volunteer Guard
("Tigers") of Željko Ražnatović
, known as "Arkan":
Panić combined well-motivated paramilitary infantry with trained engineering units to clear mines and defensive positions, supported by heavy armour and artillery. The paramilitaries spearheaded a fresh offensive that began on 30 September. The assault succeeded in cutting the Croatian supply route to Vukovar when the village of Marinci
, on the route out of the town, was captured on 1 October. Shortly afterwards, the Croatian 204th Brigade's commander, Mile Dedaković, broke out with a small escort, slipping through the Serbian lines to reach the Croatian-held town of Vinkovci. His deputy, Branko Borković, took over command of Vukovar's defences. General Anton Tus
, commander of the Croatian forces outside the Vukovar perimeter, put Dedaković in charge of a breakthrough operation to relieve the town and launched a counter-offensive on 13 October. Croatian tanks and infantry, supported by artillery, retook Marinci and drove the JNA back almost to its starting position. The counter-offensive was then called off by President Tuđman, citing pressure from the European Community for a ceasefire. This enabled the JNA's 252nd Armoured Brigade to retake the ground that it had lost. From then on the town was completely surrounded and under constant attack from the JNA.
During the final phase of the battle, Vukovar's remaining inhabitants, including several thousand Serbs, took refuge in cellars and communal bomb shelters, which housed up to 700 people each. A crisis committee was established, operating from a nuclear bunker underneath the municipal hospital. The committee took over the running of the town and organised the delivery of food, water and medical supplies. It kept the number of civilians on the streets to a minimum and ensured that each shelter was guarded and had at least one doctor and nurse assigned to it.
The hospital had to deal with hundreds of wounded people – between sixteen and eighty each day, three quarters of them civilians, in the second half of September. Even though the building was marked with the Red Cross, it was struck by over eight hundred shells during the battle. Much of the building was wrecked, and the staff and patients had to relocate to underground service corridors. The intensive care unit was moved into the building's nuclear bomb shelter. On 4 October, the Yugoslav Air Force attacked the hospital, destroying its operating theatre. One bomb fell through several floors, failed to explode and landed on the foot of a wounded man, without injuring him. One of the hospital doctors later asked in Serbia why the hospital had been attacked; he was told: "Because you held wounded Croatian soldiers there."
Croatian forces adapted several Antonov An-2
biplanes to drop supplies by parachute on Vukovar. The aircraft also dropped improvised bombs made of fuel cans and boilers filled with explosive and metal bars. The crews used GPS
to find the target, then pushed the payloads out of the side door. One of the aircraft was shot down by an SA-6 missile, killing Marko Živković, the commander of the air unit.
The European Community attempted to provide humanitarian aid to the 12,000 civilians trapped within the perimeter, but only one aid convoy made it through. Croatian forces suspended military action to allow the convoy to pass on 12 October, but the JNA used the pause as cover to make further military gains. After the convoy set off, the JNA delayed it for two days and used the time to lay mines, bring in reinforcements and consolidate JNA control of the road out of Vukovar. When the convoy arrived, it delivered medical supplies to the hospital at Vukovar and evacuated 114 injured civilians.
On 16 October the JNA mounted a major attack against Borovo Naselje. It achieved some gains, but became bogged down in the face of determined Croatian resistance. On 30 October the JNA launched a fully coordinated assault, spearheaded by paramilitary forces, with infantry and engineering troops systematically forcing their way through the Croatian defences. The JNA forces, divided into northern and southern operations sectors, attacked several points simultaneously and pushed back the defenders. The JNA also adopted new tactics, such as firing directly into houses and then driving tanks through them, using tear gas and smoke bomb
s to drive out the defenders, and using anti-tank and anti-aircraft guns to capture the town building by building. This enabled the Serb forces to flush out the defenders, inflicting heavy casualties.
On 2 November the JNA offensive reached the strategic suburb of Lužac, between Borovo Naselje and Vukovar, cutting one of the two roads linking the town centre with its northern suburb. Meanwhile the ZNG (which had been renamed as the Croatian Army) attempted to retake the villages of Marinci and Cerić
to reopen the supply route to Vukovar. It mounted a heavy bombardment of the JNA's access routes to Vukovar and a tank attack on JNA lines. JNA General Mladen Bratić was killed when his tank was hit by a shell, but the JNA's advantage in artillery and rockets enabled it to halt the Croatian advance and inflict heavy casualties.
, just to the west of Vukovar, fell on 10 November. On 13 November the JNA cut the last link between Borovo Naselje and Vukovar. Croatian forces outside the Vukovar perimeter mounted a last-ditch attempt to break the siege by attacking from the village of Nuštar
, but the JNA again repelled them.
By now the defenders were running out of ammunition and were exhausted from fighting around the clock without any prospect of being relieved or replacing their dead and wounded. They had been reduced to three separate pockets. With defeat now inevitable, several hundred Croatian soldiers and civilians attempted to break out over the course of several days, as the JNA mounted its final offensive. Most of those in Borovo Naselje were unable to break out and were killed. On 18 November, the last defenders in Vukovar's town centre surrendered.
Many of Vukovar's civilian inhabitants were living in squalid conditions and nearing starvation. One woman told UN Special Envoy Cyrus Vance
that she had spent the last two months in a bomb shelter with her five children without toilets or water for washing. They lived on two slices of bread and a piece of paté per day. One of Vukovar's defenders described conditions as the battle reached its peak:
When the battle ended, the scale of the destruction came as a shock to many who not been out of their shelters in weeks. Siniša Glavašević
, a reporter for Croatian Radio and a native of Vukovar, who had stayed in the town throughout the battle, described the scene as the survivors emerged:
Although the fighting was over in the centre of Vukovar, sporadic combat continued for several more days elsewhere in the shattered town. Some defenders continued to resist until 20 November and a few managed to slip away from Borovo Naselje as late as 23 November.
Foreign journalists and international monitors entered the town soon after the surrender and recorded what they saw. Blaine Harden of the Washington Post wrote:
Chuck Sudetic
of The New York Times
reported:
Laura Silber
and the BBC
's Allan Little
described how "corpses of people and animals littered the streets. Grisly skeletons of buildings still burned, barely a square inch had escaped damage. Serbian volunteers, wild-eyed, roared down the streets, their pockets full of looted treasures." The JNA celebrated its victory, as Marc Champion of The Independent
described:
, 879 Croatian soldiers were killed and 770 wounded in Vukovar. The Central Intelligence Agency
estimates Croatian casualties at around 4,000 to 5,000 dead across eastern Slavonia. The 204th Vukovar Brigade lost over 60 per cent of its strength in the battle. Croatian officials have given figures of 2,000 killed, 800 missing, 3,000 taken prisoner and 42,852 made refugees in eastern Slavonia as a whole.
Serbian sources disagree with this assessment. General Andrija Biorčević, the former commander of the Novi Sad corps, has said there were "[not] more than 1,500 killed on our side." The Serbian journalist Miroslav Lazanski
, who has close links with the Serbian military, wrote in the Belgrade newspaper Večernje novosti
that "on the side of the JNA, Territorial Defence and volunteer units, exactly 1,103 members were killed." He cited losses of 110 armoured vehicles and two combat aircraft shot down, plus another destroyed due to technical failure. The actual number may have been considerably greater as casualties were consistently underreported during the war.
Around 400 people in Vukovar's hospital – non-Serb patients, medical personnel, local political figures and others who had taken refuge there – were taken from the hospital by the JNA. Although some were subsequently released, around 200 were taken to a pig farm at Ovčara nearby and were executed in what became known as the Vukovar massacre
. At least fifty others were taken somewhere else and were never seen again. Thousands more people were transferred by the JNA to prison camps elsewhere in Serb-controlled Croatia and in Serbia proper. Further mass killings followed; at Dalj
, north of Vukovar, where many inhabitants were previously massacred
, numerous prisoners from Vukovar were subjected to harsh interrogations, beatings and torture, and at least 35 people were killed. The JNA imprisoned two thousand people in the Velepromet industrial facility
in Vukovar. Eight hundred were classified by the JNA as prisoners of war. Many were brutally interrogated, several were shot on the spot by TO members and paramilitaries, and others were sent to Ovčara where they were killed in the massacre. The remaining prisoners were transferred to a JNA-run prison camp
at Sremska Mitrovica
in Serbia, where they were stripped naked on arrival, beaten and interrogated, and forced to sleep for weeks on bare wooden floors. Most were released in January 1992 under an agreement brokered by UN envoy Cyrus Vance. Others were kept prisoner until mid-1992. Serbs who had fought to defend Vukovar were particularly harshly treated and were subjected to savage beatings because their captors considered them to be traitors.
Detainees who were not suspected of involvement with the Croatian armed forces were evacuated from Vukovar to other places in Serbia and Croatia. The non-Serb population of Vukovar and the surrounding region was systematically ethnically cleansed and 31,732 people were forced to leave their homes in the Vukovar district, adding to the tens of thousands already expelled from across eastern Slavonia. 2,600 people disappeared following the fall of the town, of whom around 550 are still missing. There were also incidents of war rape
, for which two soldiers were later convicted.
The Serb forces singled out a number of prominent individuals. Among them was Dr. Vesna Bosanac, the director of the town's hospital, who was regarded as a heroine in Croatia but demonised by the Serbian media. She and her husband were taken to Sremska Mitrovica prison, where she was locked up in a single room with 66 other women for several weeks. Her husband was subjected to repeated beatings. After appeals from the International Committee of the Red Cross
, the couple were eventually released in a prisoner exchange. The Croatian Radio journalist Siniša Glavašević, whose broadcasts had become iconic in Croatia, was taken to Ovčara, severely beaten and shot along with the other victims of the massacre.
Vukovar was systematically looted after its capture. A JNA soldier who fought at Vukovar told Serbia's Dnevni Telegraf newspaper that "the Chetniks [paramilitaries] behaved like professional plunderers, they knew what to look for in the houses they looted." The JNA also participated in the looting; an official in the Serbian Ministry of Defence commented: "Tell me of even one reservist, especially if he is an officer, who has spent more than a month at the front and has not brought back a fine car filled with everything that would fit inside the car." The Serb forces looted more than 8,000 artworks from Vukovar, including the contents of the municipal museum, Eltz Castle
, which was bombed and destroyed during the siege. Serbia returned 2,000 pieces of looted art in December 2001.
(ICTY) on multiple counts of crimes against humanity and violations of the laws of war
, having surrendered or been captured during 2002 and 2003. On 27 September 2007, Mrkšić was sentenced by the ICTY to 20 years' imprisonment for murder and torture, and Šljivančanin was sentenced to five years' imprisonment on charges of torture. Radić was acquitted. Šljivančanin's sentence was increased to 17 years on appeal, then reduced again to ten years after a second appeal, and he was granted early release in July 2011. Slavko Dokmanović
, the Serb mayor of Vukovar, was also indicted and arrested for his role in the massacre, but committed suicide in June 1998, shortly before judgement was to be announced.
The Serbian paramilitary leader Vojislav Šešelj was indicted on war crimes charges, including several counts of extermination, for the Vukovar hospital massacre, in which his "White Eagles" were allegedly involved. Croatia also indicted a number of Serbs for war crimes committed in Vukovar and in December 2005 a Serbian court convicted fourteen former paramilitaries for their involvement in the hospital massacre. The ICTY linked Željko "Arkan" Ražnatović to the massacre, but he was assassinated in Belgrade before he could be brought to trial.
The ICTY indictment of Slobodan Milošević characterised the overall JNA and Serb offensive in Croatia – including the fighting in eastern Slavonia – as a "joint criminal enterprise
" to remove non-Serb populations from Serb-inhabited areas of Croatia. Milošević was charged with numerous crimes against humanity, violations of the laws of war and breaches of the Geneva Conventions
in relation to the battle of Vukovar and its aftermath. He died in March 2006, before his trial could be completed.
The Croatian Serb leader Goran Hadžić
was indicted for "wanton destruction of homes, religious and cultural buildings" and "devastation not justified by military necessity" across eastern Slavonia, and for deporting Vukovar's non-Serb population. He was arrested in July 2011, after seven years on the run, and has pleaded not guilty to fourteen counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Croatian courts indicted Veljko Kadijević
and Blagoje Adžić
, former commanders of the Yugoslav Army, for war crimes in Vukovar. In 2011 a Serbian court indicted more than 40 Croatians for alleged war crimes committed in Vukovar, but an earlier indictment against a Croatian soldier was dropped because of irregularities in the investigation.
denounced the Serbs as "cannibals" and "brutal Serb extremists", while the Serbian media depicted the JNA and Serbian forces as "liberators" and "defenders" of the Serbian people, and the Croatian forces as "Ustashoid hordes", "blackshirts", "militants" and "drunk and stoned monsters". There were overt appeals to racial and gender prejudice, including claims that the Croatian defenders had "put on female dress to escape from the town" and had recruited "black men".
Victim status became a central aim for the propaganda machines of both sides, and the battle was used to support claims of atrocities. Victims became interchangeable as anonymous victims were identified as Croats on Zagreb television and as Serbs on Belgrade TV. According to the Serbian opposition periodical Republika, the state-owned station TV Novi Sad was under orders to identify any bodies its reporters filmed as being "Serbian corpses". After the battle, Belgrade television showed pictures of hundreds of corpses lined up outside Vukovar's hospital and claimed that they were Serbs who had been "massacred" by Croatians. According to Human Rights Watch
, the bodies belonged to those who had died of their injuries at the hospital, whose staff had been prevented from burying them by the intense Serbian bombardment, and had been forced to leave them lying in the open. Serbian television continued to broadcast claims of "massacred Serbs in Vukovar" for some time after the fall of the town.
Such victim-centred propaganda had a powerful motivating effect. One Serbian volunteer said that he had never seen the town before the war, but had come to fight because "the Croats had a network of catacombs under the city where they killed and tortured children just because they were Serbs." Reuters
reported erroneously that forty-one children had been massacred
in Vukovar by Croatian soldiers; although the claim was retracted a day later, it was used by the Serbian media to justify military action against Croatia. Many of those fighting at Vukovar believed that they were engaged in a struggle to liberate the town from a hostile occupier.
to intervene militarily were vetoed by the United Kingdom. Instead, a Conference for Yugoslavia was established under the chairmanship of Lord Carrington
to find a way to end the conflict. The United Nations (UN) imposed an arms embargo
on all of the Yugoslav republics in September 1991 under Security Council Resolution 713
, but this was ineffective, in part because the JNA had no need to import weapons. The European powers abandoned attempts to keep Yugoslavia united and agreed to recognise the independence of Croatia and Slovenia on 15 January 1992.
International observers tried unsuccessfully to prevent the human rights abuses that followed the battle. A visit by UN envoys Marrack Goulding
and Cyrus Vance was systematically obstructed by the JNA. Vance's demands to see the hospital, from which wounded patients were being dragged out to be killed, were rebuffed by one of the massacre's authors, Major Veselin Šljivančanin. The major also blocked Red Cross representatives in an angry confrontation recorded by TV cameras: "This is my country, we have conquered this. This is Yugoslavia, and I am in command here!"
There was no international media presence in Vukovar, as there was in the simultaneous Siege of Dubrovnik
and the later Siege of Sarajevo
, and relatively little of the fighting in Vukovar was broadcast to foreign audiences. British journalist Misha Glenny
commented that the JNA, the Croatian Serb government and many ordinary Serbs were often hostile to the foreign media; the Croatians presented a much more open and friendly attitude.
and Novi list
, failed to report the loss of Vukovar and, on 20 November, two days after it had fallen, repeated the official line that the fight was still continuing. News of the surrender was dismissed as Serbian propaganda. Nevertheless, many people saw Western satellite broadcasts showing the ruined town and Serbian soldiers taking its inhabitants into custody. When the surrender could no longer be denied, the two newspapers interpreted the loss as a demonstration of Croatian bravery and resistance, blaming the international community for not intervening to help Croatia.
The Croatian government was criticised for its approach to the battle. Surviving defenders and right-wing political parties accused it of betrayal and of deliberately sacrificing Vukovar to secure international recognition for Croatia. The only explanation that many people were willing to accept for the town's fall was that it had been given up as part of a conspiracy. The commanders of the Croatian forces in Vukovar, Mile Dedaković and Branko Borković, both survived the battle and spoke out publicly against the government's actions. In an apparent attempt to silence them, both men were briefly detained by Croatian military police, and the Croatian government suppressed an issue of the newspaper Slobodni tjednik
that published a transcript of a telephone call from Vukovar, in which Dedaković had pleaded with an evasive Tuđman for military assistance. The revelations caused public outrage and reinforced perceptions that the defenders had been betrayed.
From a military point of view, the outcome at Vukovar was not a disaster for Croatia's overall war effort. The battle broke the back of the JNA offensive and left Croatia's main adversary exhausted and unable to press its offensive deeper into the country. Vukovar was probably indefensible, being almost surrounded by Serb-held territory and closer to Belgrade than to Zagreb, and although the defeat was damaging to morale, in a strategic context the damage and delays inflicted on the JNA more than made up for the loss of the town.
Following the battle, Vukovar became a symbol of Croatian resistance and suffering. The survivors, veterans and journalists wrote numerous memoirs, songs and testimonies about the battle and its symbolism, calling it variously "the phenomenon", "the pride", "the hell" and "the Croatian knight". Writers appealed to the "Vukovar principle", the "spirituality of Vukovar" and "Vukovar ethics", the qualities said to have been exhibited by the defenders and townspeople. Croatian war veterans were presented with medals bearing the name of Vukovar. In 1994, when Croatia replaced the Yugoslav dinar
with its new currency, the kuna
, it used the destroyed Eltz Castle in Vukovar and the Vučedol Dove
– an artefact from an ancient Neolithic culture centred on eastern Slavonia, which was discovered near Vukovar – on the new 20-kuna note. The imagery emphasises the Croatian nature of Vukovar, at the time under Serbian control. During 1993–94 there was a national debate on how Vukovar should be rebuilt when it was recovered; some Croatians even proposed that it should be preserved as a monument.
The ruling HDZ made extensive use of popular culture relating to Vukovar as propaganda in the years before the region was reintegrated into Croatia. In 1997 President Tuđman mounted a tour of eastern Slavonia, accompanied by a musical campaign called Sve hrvatske pobjede za Vukovar ("All Croatian victories for Vukovar"). The campaign was commemorated by the release of a compilation of patriotic music from Croatia Records
. When Vukovar was returned to Croatian control in 1998, its recovery was hailed as the completion of a long struggle for freedom and Croatian national identity. Tuđman alluded to such sentiments when he gave a speech in Vukovar to mark its reintegration into Croatia:
ran a front-page headline on 20 November announcing: "Vukovar Finally Free". In January 1992, from the ruins of Vukovar, the ultranationalist painter Milić Stanković
wrote an article for the Serbian periodical Pogledi ("Viewpoints"), in which he declared: "Europe must know Vukovar was liberated from the Croat Nazis. They were helped by Central European scum. They crawled from under the papal tiara
, as a dart of the serpent's tongue that protruded from the bloated Kraut
and overstretched Eurocommunal anus."
The Serbian geographer Jovan Ilić set out a vision for the future of the region, envisaging it being annexed to Serbia and its expelled Croatian population being replaced with Serbs from elsewhere in Croatia. The redrawing of Serbia's borders would unite all Serbs in a single state, and would cure Croats of opposition to Serbian nationalism, which Ilić termed an "ethno-psychic disorder"; thus, "the new borders should primarily be a therapy for the treatment of ethno-psychic disorders, primarily among the Croatian population." Other Serbian nationalist writers acknowledged that historical evidence was that eastern Slavonia had been Croatian for centuries, but blamed the Croatian majority in the region on "conversion to Catholicism, Uniating and Croatisation" plus "genocidal destruction". Most irredentist propaganda focused on the region's proximity to Serbia and the large number of Serbs who inhabited the area.
The Croatian Serb leadership also took a positive view of the outcome. During the rule of the Republic of Serbian Krajina
(RSK) between 1991 and 1995, the fall of Vukovar on 18 November 1991 was officially commemorated as "Liberation Day". It was portrayed as a successful struggle by local Serbs to defend their lives and property from the aggression of the Croatian state. Thousands of Vukovar's Serbs had suffered alongside their Croatian neighbours, sheltering in basements or bomb shelters for three months in appalling conditions, but after their "liberation" they were denigrated as the podrumaši, the "people from the basement". The Serb civilian dead were denied recognition, and the only people buried in the Serbian memorial cemetery at Vukovar were local Serbs who had fought with or alongside the JNA.
In contrast, many people in Serbia were strongly opposed to the battle and the wider war and resisted efforts by the state to involve them in the conflict. When the JNA tried to call up reservists, parents and relatives gathered around JNA barracks to prevent their children taking part in the operation. Resistance to conscription became widespread across Serbia, ranging from individual acts of defiance to collective mutinies by hundreds of reservists at a time. Serbian opposition politicians condemned the war: Desimir Tošić of the Democratic Party
accused Slobodan Milošević of "using the conflict to cling to power" and Vuk Drašković
, leader of the Serbian Renewal Movement
, appealed to JNA soldiers to "pick up their guns and run" from the front line. After the fall of Vukovar he condemned what had been done in the name of Yugoslavia, writing in the daily newspaper Borba
:
By late December 1991, just over a month after victory had been proclaimed in Vukovar, opinion polls found that 64 per cent wanted to end the war immediately and only 27 per cent were willing to continue the war. Milošević and other senior Serbian figures decided against continuing the fighting, as they saw it as politically impossible to mobilise more conscripts to fight in Croatia. Desertions from the JNA continued and the well-motivated and increasingly well-equipped Croatian Army was becoming increasingly difficult to counter. By the end of 1991, Serbian politicians and JNA leaders alike had concluded that it would be counter-productive to continue the war. The looming conflict in Bosnia also required the military resources tied up in Croatia to be freed for future use.
Although the battle was publicly portrayed as a triumph, behind the scenes it profoundly affected the JNA's character and leadership. The army's leaders realised that they had overestimated their ability to pursue operations against heavily defended urban targets. The central Croatian town of Gospić
, for instance, was a strategic target of the JNA but was now assessed as potentially a "second Vukovar". The "Serbianisation" of the army was greatly accelerated, and by the end of 1991 it was estimated to be 90 per cent Serb. Its formerly pro-Communist, pan-Yugoslav identity was abandoned, and new officers were now advised to "love, above all else, their unit, their army, and their homeland – Serbia and Montenegro". The JNA's failure enabled the Serbian government to tighten its control over the military, whose leadership was purged and replaced with pro-Milošević nationalists. After the battle General Veljko Kadijević, commander of the JNA, was forced into retirement for "health reasons", and in early 1992 another thirty-eight generals and other officers were forced to retire, with several put on trial for incompetence and treason.
Many individual JNA soldiers who took part in the battle were revolted by what they had seen and protested to their superiors about the behaviour of the paramilitaries. Colonel Milorad Vučić later commented that "they simply do not want to die for such things". The slaughter that they witnessed at Vukovar led some to experience subsequent feelings of trauma and guilt. A JNA veteran told a journalist from the Arabic newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat:
, President Alija Izetbegović
made a televised appeal to Bosnian citizens to refuse the draft on the grounds that "this is not our war". He called it their "right and duty" to resist the "evil deeds" being committed in Croatia and said: "Let those who want it, wage it. We do not want this war." When JNA troops transferred to the front via the Višegrad
region of north-eastern Bosnia, local Bosnian Croats and Muslims set up barricades and machine-gun posts. They halted a column of 60 JNA tanks but were dispersed by force the following day. More than 1,000 people had to flee the area. This action, nearly seven months before the start of the Bosnian War
, caused the first casualties of the Yugoslav Wars in Bosnia.
Macedonia's parliament adopted a declaration of independence from Yugoslavia in January 1991, but it did not take effect until a referendum in September 1991 confirmed it. A group of Macedonian JNA officers secretly sought to prevent soldiers from Macedonia being sent to Croatia, and busloads of soldiers' parents, funded by the Macedonian government, travelled to Montenegro to find their sons and bring them home. Meanwhile, Macedonians continued to be conscripted into the JNA and serve in the war in Croatia. The commander of JNA forces in the first phase of the battle, Gen. Aleksandar Spirkovski, was a Macedonian; his ethnicity was probably a significant factor in the decision to replace him with Života Panić, a Serb. In 2005 the Macedonian Army's Chief of Staff, Gen. Miroslav Stojanovski, became the focus of international controversy after it was alleged that he had been involved in possible war crimes following the battle.
described post-battle Vukovar as:
When Michael Ignatieff
visited Vukovar in 1992, he found the inhabitants living in squalor:
The population increased to about 20,000 as Serb refugees from other parts of Croatia and Bosnia were relocated by RSK authorities. They initially lived without water or electricity, in damaged buildings patched up with plastic sheeting and wooden boards. Residents scavenged the ruins for fragments of glass that they could stick back together to make windows for themselves. The main sources of income were war profiteering
and smuggling, though some were able to find jobs in eastern Slavonia's revived oil industry. Reconstruction was greatly delayed by economic sanctions and lack of international aid.
After the Erdut Agreement
was signed in 1995, the United Nations Transitional Authority for Eastern Slavonia, Baranja and Western Sirmium (UNTAES) was established to enable the return of Croatian refugees and to prepare the region for reintegration into Croatia. This UN peacekeeping force provided security during the transition period between 1996 and 1998. It was only in 1999 that Croats began returning to Vukovar in significant numbers, and many of the pre-war inhabitants never returned. By March 2001, the municipality was recorded as having 31,670 inhabitants – less than half the pre-war total – of whom 18,199 (57.46%) were Croats and 10,412 (32.88%) were Serbs. The community did not recover its mixed character: Croats and Serbs now lived separate social lives. Public facilities such as shops, cafés, restaurants, sports clubs, schools, non-governmental organisations and radio stations were re-established on segregated lines, with separate facilities for each community.
Although the Croatian government sponsored reconstruction efforts in and around Vukovar, the Serb-populated town centre remained in ruins until 2003. Both Croat and Serb residents believed the government had neglected it deliberately, in order to punish the Serb community. Human Rights Watch
noted that, of 4,000 homes that had been rebuilt, none of them were inhabited by Serbs. Unemployment was high because of the destruction of the town's major industries, and many of the inhabitants could not sell their houses. Most houses and many of Vukovar's historic buildings had been restored as of 2011.
Every November, Vukovar's authorities hold four days of festivities to commemorate the fall of the town, culminating in a "Procession of Memory" held on 18 November. This represents the expulsion of the town's Croatian inhabitants and involves a five-kilometre (3.1 mile) walk from the city's hospital to the Croatian Memorial Cemetery of Homeland War Victims. It is attended by tens of thousands of people from across Croatia.
Local Serbs have avoided participating in the Croatian commemorations, often preferring either to leave the town or stay indoors on 18 November. They have held a separate low-key commemoration at the Serbian military cemetery on 17 November, until 2003 and on 18 November since then. The RSK-era term "Liberation Day" has been dropped, but the Serbs also avoid the Croatian terminology, instead calling it simply "18 November".
The issue of how to remember the Serbian dead has posed particular difficulties. Local Serbs who died fighting alongside the JNA were buried by the Croatian Serb authorities on a plot of land where Croatian houses had once stood. The gravestones were originally topped with a sculptural evocation of the V-shaped Serbian military cap, or šajkača
. After Vukovar's reintegration into Croatia the gravestones were repeatedly vandalised. The Serb community replaced them with more neutral gravestones without overt military connotations.
Vukovar Serbs report feeling marginalised and excluded from places associated with Croatian nationalist sentiment, such as monuments to the Croatian defenders. The Croatian sociologist Kruno Kardov gives the example of a prominent memorial, a large cross made from white stone, where the Vuka
flows into the Danube. According to Kardov, Serbs rarely if ever go there, and they feel great stress if they do. A Serb boy spoke of how he wanted to know what was written on the monument but was too frightened to go and read the inscription; one day he got up the courage, ran to the monument, read it and immediately ran back to "safety". As Kardov puts it, Vukovar remains divided by an "invisible boundary line ... inscribed only on the cognitive map of the members of one particular group."
The battle is widely commemorated across Croatia. Almost every town has streets named after Vukovar, and the lead vessel of the Croatian Navy's two new Helsinki-class missile boat
s was named the Vukovar in January 2009. The Croatian Parliament has declared 18 November to be the "Remembrance Day of the Sacrifice of Vukovar in 1991", when "all those who participated in the defence of the city of Vukovar – the symbol of Croatian freedom – are appropriately honoured with dignity."
As a symbol of Croatia's national identity, Vukovar has become a place of pilgrimage for people from across Croatia who seek to evoke feelings of "vicarious insideness", as Kruno Kardov described them, in the suffering endured during the country's war of independence. Some gather in front of the town's main memorial cross on New Year's Eve to pray as the year ends, though such sentiments have attracted criticism from local Croats for not allowing them to "rejoice for even a single night", as one put it. The town has thus become, in Kardov's words, "the embodiment of a pure Croatian identity", and the battle "the foundational myth of the Croatian state". This has led to it becoming as much an "imagined place", a receptacle for Croatian national sentiment and symbolism, as a real place. Kardov concludes that it is questionable whether Vukovar can realise a vision of once again becoming "one place for all its citizens".
In November 2010 Boris Tadić
became the first President of Serbia to travel to Vukovar, when he visited the massacre site at Ovčara and expressed his "apology and regret".
("Vukovar: The Way Home") (1994) and Zapamtite Vukovar ("Remember Vukovar") (2008); and in the French film Harrison's Flowers
(2000). A 2006 Serbian documentary film about the battle, Vukovar – Final Cut, won the Human Rights Award at the 2006 Sarajevo Film Festival
. The battle is also at the centre of Serbian writer Vladimir Arsenijević
's 1995 novel U potpalublju ("In the Hold").
Siege
A siege is a military blockade of a city or fortress with the intent of conquering by attrition or assault. The term derives from sedere, Latin for "to sit". Generally speaking, siege warfare is a form of constant, low intensity conflict characterized by one party holding a strong, static...
of Vukovar
Vukovar
Vukovar is a city in eastern Croatia, and the biggest river port in Croatia located at the confluence of the Vuka river and the Danube. Vukovar is the center of the Vukovar-Syrmia County...
in eastern Croatia
Croatia
Croatia , officially the Republic of Croatia , is a unitary democratic parliamentary republic in Europe at the crossroads of the Mitteleuropa, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean. Its capital and largest city is Zagreb. The country is divided into 20 counties and the city of Zagreb. Croatia covers ...
by the Yugoslav People's Army
Yugoslav People's Army
The Yugoslav People's Army , also referred to as the Yugoslav National Army , was the military of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.-Origins:The origins of the JNA can...
(JNA), supported by various paramilitary
Paramilitary
A paramilitary is a force whose function and organization are similar to those of a professional military, but which is not considered part of a state's formal armed forces....
forces from Serbia
Serbia
Serbia , officially the Republic of Serbia , is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeast Europe, covering the southern part of the Carpathian basin and the central part of the Balkans...
, between August and November 1991. Before the Croatian War of Independence
Croatian War of Independence
The Croatian War of Independence was fought from 1991 to 1995 between forces loyal to the government of Croatia—which had declared independence from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia —and the Serb-controlled Yugoslav People's Army and local Serb forces, with the JNA ending its combat...
the Baroque
Baroque architecture
Baroque architecture is a term used to describe the building style of the Baroque era, begun in late sixteenth century Italy, that took the Roman vocabulary of Renaissance architecture and used it in a new rhetorical and theatrical fashion, often to express the triumph of the Catholic Church and...
town was a prosperous, mixed community of Croats
Croats
Croats are a South Slavic ethnic group mostly living in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and nearby countries. There are around 4 million Croats living inside Croatia and up to 4.5 million throughout the rest of the world. Responding to political, social and economic pressure, many Croats have...
, Serbs
Serbs of Croatia
Višeslav of Serbia, a contemporary of Charlemagne , ruled the Županias of Neretva, Tara, Piva, Lim, his ancestral lands. According to the Royal Frankish Annals , Duke of Pannonia Ljudevit Posavski fled, during the Frankish invasion, from his seat in Sisak to the Serbs in western Bosnia, who...
and other ethnic groups. As Yugoslavia began to break up, Serbia's President Slobodan Milošević
Slobodan Milošević
Slobodan Milošević was President of Serbia and Yugoslavia. He served as the President of Socialist Republic of Serbia and Republic of Serbia from 1989 until 1997 in three terms and as President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1997 to 2000...
and Croatia's President Franjo Tuđman started to pursue nationalist politics. In 1990, an armed insurrection was started by Croatian Serb militias, supported by the Serbian government and paramilitary groups, who seized control of Serb-populated areas of Croatia. The JNA began to intervene in favour of the rebellion, and conflict broke out in the eastern Croatian region of Slavonia
Slavonia
Slavonia is a geographical and historical region in eastern Croatia...
in May 1991. In August the JNA launched a full-scale attack against Croatian-held territory in eastern Slavonia, including Vukovar.
Vukovar was defended by around 1,800 lightly armed soldiers of the Croatian National Guard
Croatian National Guard
The Croatian National Guard was the name of the first modern Croatian military force. Croatian president Franjo Tuđman signed to law the Decree of Formation of the Croatian National Guard on April 20, 1991 which became the first professional armed forces with defence and training duties.These...
(ZNG) and civilian volunteers, against 36,000 JNA soldiers and Serbian paramilitaries equipped with heavy armour and artillery. During the battle shells and rockets were fired into the town at a rate of up to 12,000 a day. At the time it was the fiercest and most protracted battle in Europe, and Vukovar was the first major European town entirely destroyed since the Second World War. When Vukovar fell on 18 November 1991, hundreds of soldiers and civilians were massacred by Serb forces and at least 31,000 civilians were deported from the town and its surroundings. Most of the Vukovar population was ethnically cleansed
Ethnic cleansing
Ethnic cleansing is a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic orreligious group from certain geographic areas....
and the town became part of the self-declared Republic of Serbian Krajina
Republic of Serbian Krajina
The Republic of Serbian Krajina was a self-proclaimed Serb entity within Croatia. Established in 1991, it was not recognized internationally. It formally existed from 1991 to 1995, having been initiated a year earlier via smaller separatist regions. The name Krajina means "frontier"...
. Several Serb military and political officials, including Milošević, were later indicted and in some cases jailed for war crime
War crime
War crimes are serious violations of the laws applicable in armed conflict giving rise to individual criminal responsibility...
s committed during and after the battle.
The battle exhausted the JNA and proved a turning point in the Croatian war. A ceasefire was declared a few weeks later. Vukovar remained in Serb hands until 1998 when it was peacefully reintegrated into Croatia. It has since been rebuilt but has less than half of its pre-war population and many buildings are still scarred by the battle. Its two principal ethnic communities remain deeply divided and it has not regained its former prosperity.
Background
Vukovar is an important regional centre on Croatia's eastern border, situated in eastern SlavoniaSlavonia
Slavonia is a geographical and historical region in eastern Croatia...
on the west bank of the Danube
Danube
The Danube is a river in the Central Europe and the Europe's second longest river after the Volga. It is classified as an international waterway....
river. The area has a diverse population of Croats, Serbs, Hungarians
Hungarians of Croatia
Hungarians of Croatia are a recognized ethnic minority. According to the 2001 census there are around 16,500 people of Hungarian ethnicity living in Croatia . Around two thirds of them live in Osijek-Baranja County in eastern Croatia, especially in the Croatian part of the Baranya region which...
, Slovaks
Slovaks
The Slovaks, Slovak people, or Slovakians are a West Slavic people that primarily inhabit Slovakia and speak the Slovak language, which is closely related to the Czech language.Most Slovaks today live within the borders of the independent Slovakia...
, Ruthenians
Pannonian Rusyns
Rusyns in Pannonia, or simply Rusyns or Ruthenians , are a Slavic minority in Serbia and Croatia...
and many other nationalities, who had lived together for centuries in relative harmony before the Croatian war. It was one of the wealthiest areas of Yugoslavia before the war. Vukovar's long-standing prosperity was reflected in one of Croatia's finest ensembles of Baroque architecture
Baroque architecture
Baroque architecture is a term used to describe the building style of the Baroque era, begun in late sixteenth century Italy, that took the Roman vocabulary of Renaissance architecture and used it in a new rhetorical and theatrical fashion, often to express the triumph of the Catholic Church and...
.
The region underwent major demographic changes following the Second World War, when its ethnic German inhabitants were expelled and replaced with Serb and Montenegrin settlers from elsewhere in Yugoslavia. In the last Yugoslav census in 1991, the Vukovar municipality, which included the town and surrounding villages, was recorded as having 84,189 inhabitants, of whom 43.8 per cent were Croats, 37.5 per cent were Serbs and the remainder were members of other ethnic groups. The town of Vukovar had 47 per cent Croats to 32.3 per cent Serbs.
From 1945, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was the Yugoslav state that existed from the abolition of the Yugoslav monarchy until it was dissolved in 1992 amid the Yugoslav Wars. It was a socialist state and a federation made up of six socialist republics: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia,...
was governed as a federal socialist state comprising six newly-created republics – Slovenia
Slovenia
Slovenia , officially the Republic of Slovenia , is a country in Central and Southeastern Europe touching the Alps and bordering the Mediterranean. Slovenia borders Italy to the west, Croatia to the south and east, Hungary to the northeast, and Austria to the north, and also has a small portion of...
, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Bosnia and Herzegovina , sometimes called Bosnia-Herzegovina or simply Bosnia, is a country in Southern Europe, on the Balkan Peninsula. Bordered by Croatia to the north, west and south, Serbia to the east, and Montenegro to the southeast, Bosnia and Herzegovina is almost landlocked, except for the...
, Serbia, Montenegro
Montenegro
Montenegro Montenegrin: Crna Gora Црна Гора , meaning "Black Mountain") is a country located in Southeastern Europe. It has a coast on the Adriatic Sea to the south-west and is bordered by Croatia to the west, Bosnia and Herzegovina to the northwest, Serbia to the northeast and Albania to the...
and Macedonia
Republic of Macedonia
Macedonia , officially the Republic of Macedonia , is a country located in the central Balkan peninsula in Southeast Europe. It is one of the successor states of the former Yugoslavia, from which it declared independence in 1991...
. The current border between Serbia and Croatia was defined in 1945 by a Yugoslav federal government commission which assigned areas with a majority Serb population to the Socialist Republic of Serbia
Socialist Republic of Serbia
Socialist Republic of Serbia was a socialist state that was a constituent country of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. It is a predecessor of modern day Serbia, which served as the biggest republic in the Yugoslav federation and held the largest population of all the Yugoslav...
and those with a Croatian majority to the Socialist Republic of Croatia
Socialist Republic of Croatia
Socialist Republic of Croatia was a sovereign constituent country of the second Yugoslavia. It came to existence during World War II, becoming a socialist state after the war, and was also renamed four times in its existence . It was the second largest republic in Yugoslavia by territory and...
. This left a large Serb minority in Croatian territory.
After Yugoslavia's leader Josip Broz Tito
Josip Broz Tito
Marshal Josip Broz Tito – 4 May 1980) was a Yugoslav revolutionary and statesman. While his presidency has been criticized as authoritarian, Tito was a popular public figure both in Yugoslavia and abroad, viewed as a unifying symbol for the nations of the Yugoslav federation...
died in 1980, long-suppressed ethnic nationalism revived and the individual republics began to assert their authority more strongly as the federal government weakened. Slovenia and Croatia moved towards multi-party democracy and economic reform, but Serbia's authoritarian communist President Slobodan Milošević
Slobodan Milošević
Slobodan Milošević was President of Serbia and Yugoslavia. He served as the President of Socialist Republic of Serbia and Republic of Serbia from 1989 until 1997 in three terms and as President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1997 to 2000...
opposed reform and sought to increase the power of the communist Yugoslav government. In 1990, Slovenia and Croatia held elections that ended communist rule and brought pro-independence nationalist parties to power in both republics. In Croatia, the Croatian Democratic Union
Croatian Democratic Union
The Croatian Democratic Union is the main center-right political party in Croatia. It is the biggest and strongest individual Croatian party since independence of Croatia. The Christian democratic HDZ governed Croatia from 1990 to 2000 and, in partial coalition, from 2003...
(HDZ) party of Franjo Tuđman took office, with Tuđman as President.
Tuđman's programme was opposed by many members of Croatia's Serbian minority, towards whom he was overtly antagonistic. The Serb Democratic Party
Serb Democratic Party (Croatia)
The Serb Democratic Party was a political party in Croatia whose primary constituency were the Serbs of Croatia. It led the Republic of Serbian Krajina. It existed between 1990 and 1995.The SDS was founded in the Socialist Republic of Croatia on February 17, 1990...
(SDS) of Croatia, supported by Milošević, denounced the HDZ as a reincarnation of the nationalist-fascist Ustasha movement, which had massacred hundreds of thousands of Serbs during the Second World War. From mid-1990, the SDS mounted an armed rebellion in Serb-inhabited areas of Croatia and set up the self-declared Serbian Autonomous Oblast of Krajina with covert support from the Serbian government and Serbian paramilitary groups. The Croatian government rapidly lost control of large areas of the republic. In February 1991, the Krajina Serbs declared independence from Croatia and announced that they would unite with Serbia. Other Serb communities around Croatia also announced that they would secede and established their own militias.
Prelude to the battle
The conflict between Serbs and Croats spread to eastern Slavonia in early 1991. On 1 April, Serb villagers around Vukovar and other towns in eastern Slavonia began to erect barricades across main roads. The White EaglesWhite Eagles (paramilitary)
The White Eagles , also known as the Avengers , were a Serbian paramilitary group associated with the Serbian National Renewal and the Serbian Radical Party...
, a Serbian paramilitary group led by Vojislav Šešelj
Vojislav Šešelj
Vojislav Šešelj, JD is a Serbian politician, writer and lawyer. He is the founder and president of the Serbian Radical Party and was vice-president of Serbia between 1998 and 2000...
, moved into the Serb-populated village of Borovo Selo just north of Vukovar. On 1 May, Gojko Šušak
Gojko Šušak
Gojko Šušak was the Croatian Minister of Defence from 1991 to 1998. A Bosnian Croat emigreé to Canada, he entered the political life of Croat diaspora in North America, subsequently becoming a close friend and associate to Franjo Tuđman, the leader of the Croatian Democratic Union, a nationalistic...
, a Croatian government minister and hardline nationalist, personally fired three Armbrust
Armbrust
Armbrust is a lightweight unguided anti-tank weapon designed and developed by Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm of Germany, who later sold its manufacturing rights to Chartered Industries of Singapore ....
shoulder-launched anti-tank missiles at houses inhabited by Serbs in Borovo Selo. There were no casualties, but the attack aggravated and deepened ethnic tensions. The following day Serb paramilitaries ambushed two Croatian police buses in the centre of Borovo Selo, killing 12 policemen and injuring 22 more. Three Serbs were also killed. The Borovo Selo killings
Borovo Selo killings
The Borovo Selo killings of 2 May 1991 was one of the first military engagements which led to the breakup of Yugoslavia...
were the worst act of violence that had occurred between ethnic Serbs and Croats since the Second World War. They enraged many Croatians and led to a surge of ethnic violence across Slavonia.
Shortly after, units of the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) moved into Borovo Selo. The army's intervention was welcomed by local Croatian leaders, but Croatian deputy interior minister Milan Brezak accused the JNA of preventing the Croatian police from dealing with the paramilitaries. Gun battles broke out across the region between rival militias. In Vukovar, Croatians harassed Serb residents, sometimes violently. Croatian police forcibly took over the local radio station, Radio Vukovar, and Serb members of the station's ethnically mixed staff were fired and replaced with Croats. Serb militias systematically blocked transport routes in the predominately Serb-inhabited countryside around Vukovar, and within days the town could only be reached by an unpaved track running through Croat-inhabited villages. The atmosphere in Vukovar was said to be "murderous".
On 19 May 1991, the Croatian government held a nationwide referendum on a declaration of sovereignty. In Vukovar, as elsewhere in Croatia, hardline Serb nationalists urged Serbs to boycott the referendum, while moderates advocated using the poll to register opposition to independence. Many local Serbs did vote, but the referendum passed with 94 per cent nationally voting in favour.
Violence in and around Vukovar worsened after the independence referendum. Repeated gun and bomb attacks were reported in the town and surrounding villages. Serb paramilitaries expelled thousands of non-Serbs from their homes in the municipality. Croatian paramilitaries, led by Tomislav Merčep
Tomislav Merčep
Tomislav Merčep is a former Croatian politician and paramilitary during the Croatian War of Independence.A native of Vukovar, Merčep worked as an engineer before joining the Croatian Democratic Union in 1990...
, attacked Serbs in and around Vukovar; between thirty and eighty-six Serbs were alleged to have disappeared or been killed, and thousands of others fled their homes. A Croatian government representative in Vukovar told the Zagreb authorities that "the city is again [the] victim of terror, armed strife and provocative shoot-outs with potentially unfathomable consequences. The policy pursued so far has created an atmosphere of terror among the Croatian and Serbian population." Gunmen from both sides burned and looted hundreds of houses and farms in the area.
The conflict blurred ethnic lines. Many Serbs who had lived in Vukovar for generations – known as the starosedioci or "old settlers" – resisted the propaganda coming from Belgrade and Knin
Knin
Knin is a historical town in the Šibenik-Knin county of Croatia, located near the source of the river Krka at , in the Dalmatian hinterland, on the railroad Zagreb–Split. Knin rose to prominence twice in history, as a one-time capital of both the Kingdom of Croatia and briefly of the...
and continued to live peacefully with their Croatian neighbours. The došljaci, or "newcomers", whose families had relocated from southern Serbia and Montenegro to replace the deported Germans after 1945, were the most responsive to nationalist appeals. Paolo Rumiz describes how they "tried to win their coethnics over to the patriotic mobilization, and when they had no success with that, they killed them, plundered their property and goods, or drove them away. The old settlers would not let themselves be stirred up against other nationalities." When Croats fled the fighting they often gave their house keys for safekeeping to their Serb neighbours, whom they trusted, rather than to the Croatian police. Sabrina P. Ramet comments that the distinctive feature of the war in eastern Slavonia was "the mobilization of those who were not integrated into the multi-cultural life of the cities against urban multi-culturalism." The former mayor of Belgrade, Bogdan Bogdanović, characterises the attack on Vukovar as an act of "urbicide
Urbicide
Urbicide is a term which literally translates as "violence against the city." The term was first coined by the author Michael Moorcock in 1963 and later used by critics of 1960s urban restructuring in the US...
", a deliberate assault on urbanism.
Opposing forces
By the end of July 1991, an improvised Croatian defence force in Vukovar was almost surrounded by Serbian militias in the neighbouring villages. Paramilitaries, JNA soldiers and Serbian conscripts of the Territorial Defence ForcesTerritorial Defense Forces (Yugoslavia)
The Territorial Defense Forces were a separate part of the armed forces of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The forces acted as a Home Guard which roughly corresponded to a military reserve force or an official governmental paramilitary...
were present in Serb-inhabited areas. There was a small JNA force in the town barracks in the Sajmište district of Vukovar, surrounded by territory controlled by Croatian forces. Although the two sides were commonly referred to as "Croatian" and "Serbian" or "Yugoslav", Serbs and Croats as well as many other of Yugoslavia's national groups fought on both sides. The first commander of the attacking force was a Macedonian, and a substantial portion of the Croatian defenders were Serbs and other ethnicities.
Croatian forces
The Croatian force in Vukovar comprised 1,800 men assembled from units of the newly created Croatian National Guard, including 400 members of the 3rd Guards Brigade3rd Guards Brigade (Croatia)
The 3rd Guards Brigade , also known by their nickname Kune , was a Croatian Ground Army brigade formed on 29 April 1991 in Vinkovci...
and the 1st Guards Brigade. The 4th Battalion of the 3rd Guards Brigade was stationed in the city from the beginning, while elements of the 1st Guards Brigade arrived retreating from elsewhere in western Syrmia. In addition to the guardsmen there were 300 police officers and 1,100 civilian volunteers from Vukovar and nearby communities. The bulk of the force had initially been organised in an improvised manner, but was formally reorganised in late September 1991 as the 204th Vukovar Brigade
204th Vukovar Brigade
The 204th Vukovar Brigade of the Croatian Army was a military unit of the Republic of Croatia that led the defence of the city of Vukovar during the 1991 Battle of Vukovar, in the Croatian War of Independence....
, also known as the 124th Brigade.
Volunteers arrived from other parts of Croatia, including from the far-right paramilitary Croatian Defence Forces
Croatian Defence Forces
The Croatian Defence Forces was the military arm of the Croatian Party of Rights from 1991 to 1992 during the first stages of the Yugoslav wars....
(HOS) backed by Dobroslav Paraga
Dobroslav Paraga
Dobroslav Paraga is a Croatian right-wing politician.-Background:In his early days Dobroslav Paraga used to advocate secession of Croatia from Yugoslavia and that led him to be persecuted by the Communist authorities. Paraga used that persecution as an argument against Yugoslavia and its low human...
's extreme nationalist Croatian Party of Rights
Croatian Party of Rights
The Croatian Party of Rights is a right-wing political party in Croatia. The "right" in the party's name refer to the idea of Croatian national and ethnic rights that the party has vowed to protect since its founding in the 19th century...
(HSP). The defenders were a cross-section of Vukovar society; as many as a third were non-Croats, including Serbs, Ruthenians, Hungarians and other ethnicities. About a hundred of the defenders were Serbs. According to Zoran Šangut, one of the Croat defenders, "We had complete confidence in them. They defended Vukovar alongside us."
The Croatian force in Vukovar was commanded by Mile Dedaković
Mile Dedaković
Mile Dedaković is a retired Croatian Army colonel. Also known by his nom de guerre Jastreb , Dedaković is best known for commanding the 204th Vukovar Brigade and the city of Vukovar's defenses in during the 1991 Battle of Vukovar in the early stages of the Croatian War of...
, a former JNA officer who had joined the ZNG, Dedaković volunteered for a post in Vukovar and took charge of the town's defences. During the siege of Vukovar he was referred to as Jastreb ("Hawk"). At the time, the Croatian Minister of Defence
Ministry of Defence (Croatia)
The Ministry of Defence of the Republic of Croatia is the ministry in the Government of Croatia which is in charge of the nation's military. The ministry was established in 1990.-Ministers:-References:...
Šušak publicly claimed that Dedaković was a Serb, a claim that was later reprinted by independent sources, but was false.
Dedaković's second-in-command, Branko Borković, was another former JNA officer who had volunteered for service in Vukovar. The two men established a unified command structure, organised the defenders into a single brigade and implemented an integrated defence system. A defensive ring of six sectors was established, each assigned to one unit within the 204th Brigade. The defenders used a network of cellars, canals, ditches and trenches to redeploy around the sectors as needed.
At the start of the battle they were poorly armed and many were equipped only with hunting rifles. They relied mostly on light infantry weapons, but obtained a few artillery pieces and anti-aircraft guns and improvised their own land mines. They also obtained several hundred anti-tank weapons such as M79
M79 rocket launcher
The 90 mm M79 Manual Rocket Launcher nicknamed "Osa" is a light, reusable, and effective rocket launcher system made of fiber-reinforced plastics. It consists of the launcher, a CN-6 Sighting piece, rocket and the carrying case for the rocket. While primarily intended as an anti-tank weapon,...
and M80
M80 Rocket Launcher
The M80 nicknamed the "Zolja", meaning WASP in English, is a portable one-shot disposable 64 mm anti-tank weapon, designed in the former Yugoslavia...
rocket launchers, but were critically short of ammunition throughout the battle. Although the Croatian government sent some supplies and reinforcements in the early stages, the defenders received little of significance. This was partly because of the difficulty of reaching the town, but may also have been a result of the Croatian government's decision to supply large quantities of arms to the Bosnian Croats
Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia
The Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia was an unrecognised entity in Bosnia and Herzegovina that existed between 1991 and 1994 during the Bosnian war. It was proclaimed on November 18, 1991 under the name Croatian Community of Herzeg-Bosnia, and claimed to be a separate or distinct "political,...
in advance of the Bosnian War
Bosnian War
The Bosnian War or the War in Bosnia and Herzegovina was an international armed conflict that took place in Bosnia and Herzegovina between April 1992 and December 1995. The war involved several sides...
. In doing so, it starved its own forces of weapons and ammunition.
Yugoslav and Serb forces
The attacking force included JNA soldiers conscripted from across Yugoslavia, members of the TO, ChetniksChetniks
Chetniks, or the Chetnik movement , were Serbian nationalist and royalist paramilitary organizations from the first half of the 20th century. The Chetniks were formed as a Serbian resistance against the Ottoman Empire in 1904, and participated in the Balkan Wars, World War I, and World War II...
(Serbian nationalist paramilitaries), local Serb militiamen and units of the Yugoslav Navy
Yugoslav Navy
The Yugoslav Navy was the navy of Yugoslavia. It was essentially a coastal defense force with the mission of preventing enemy landings along the Yugoslavia's rugged 4,000- kilometer shoreline or coastal islands, and contesting an enemy blockade or control of the strategic Strait of Otranto...
and the Yugoslav Air Force
SFR Yugoslav Air Force
The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia Yugoslav Air Force , was the air force of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia . Formed in 1945, it was preceded by the Yugoslav Royal Air Force which was disbanded in 1941, following the German occupation of Yugoslavia...
. At their peak, the Yugoslav and Serb forces in the vicinity of Vukovar numbered about 36,000 troops. They were equipped with heavy artillery, rockets and tanks and supported by aircraft and naval vessels on the Danube.
Although the battle was fought primarily by the federal Yugoslav military, the government of Serbia was directly involved. The Serbian secret police agency, the SDB, took part in military operations, and some of its officers commanded Serbian TO units fighting at Vukovar. The Serbian interior ministry
Ministry of Internal Affairs (Serbia)
The Ministry of Internal Affairs is a governmental agency responsible for local and national law enforcement services in Serbia. It has numerous municipal and district branches throughout the country...
directed the activities of the paramilitaries as well as arming and equipping them. Slobodan Milošević was later accused of direct involvement. According to Veselin Šljivančanin
Veselin Šljivancanin
Veselin Šljivančanin is a former Montenegrin officer in the Yugoslav People's Army who participated in the Battle of Vukovar and was subsequently convicted on a war crimes indictment by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia for his role in the Vukovar massacre...
, who was later convicted of war crimes committed at Vukovar, the order to shell Vukovar came "from Dedinje
Dedinje
Dedinje is an urban neighborhood of Belgrade, the capital of Serbia. It is located in Belgrade's municipality of Savski Venac...
" – the elite Belgrade quarter where Milošević lived.
At the start of the war in Slovenia, the army still saw itself as the defender of a federal, communist Yugoslavia, rather than an instrument of Serbian nationalism. Its head, General Veljko Kadijević
Veljko Kadijevic
Veljko Kadijević is a former General of the Yugoslav People's Army . He was the Minister of Defence in the Yugoslav government from 1988 until his resignation in 1992, which made him de facto commander of JNA during the Ten-Day War in Slovenia and the initial stages of the War in...
, the Yugoslav Minister of Defence and a committed communist, initially sought to forcibly keep Yugoslavia together and proclaimed the army's neutrality in the Serb-Croat conflict. The JNA leadership aimed to cut Croatia in two by seizing the Serb-inhabited inland regions, almost all of the Dalmatia
Dalmatia
Dalmatia is a historical region on the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea. It stretches from the island of Rab in the northwest to the Bay of Kotor in the southeast. The hinterland, the Dalmatian Zagora, ranges from fifty kilometers in width in the north to just a few kilometers in the south....
n coast and much of central and eastern Croatia. It aimed to force Croatia's political leadership to capitulate and renegotiate its membership of Yugoslavia. The JNA's leadership was not yet dominated by ethnic Serbs, and these early goals reflected the "Yugoslav" outlook of its multiethnic leadership. Kadijević was half-Croat and half-Serb, his deputy was a Slovene, the commander of JNA forces in the first phase of the battle was a Macedonian, and the head of the Yugoslav Air Force, which repeatedly bombed Vukovar during the battle, was a Croat.
The loss of Slovenia in the Ten-Day War
Ten-Day War
The Ten-Day War or the Slovenian Independence War was a military conflict between the Slovenian Territorial Defence and the Yugoslav People's Army in 1991 following Slovenia's declaration of independence.-Background:...
made it impossible to fulfil the original objective of keeping Yugoslavia intact. Many of the Serb members of the army no longer wanted to fight for a multiethnic Yugoslavia. The army developed an increasingly Serbian character as non-Serbs deserted or refused to be drafted. Some JNA commanders overtly supported the Serb rebels in Croatia and provided them with weapons. Although Kadijević and other senior JNA commanders initially argued that "the JNA must defend all the nations of Yugoslavia", they eventually recognised that they had no chance of achieving their original goals, and threw their support behind the rebel Serbs of Croatia.
Yugoslav and Serb propaganda portrayed the Croatians as genocidal Ustashas who had illegally taken over Yugoslav territory and were threatening Serb civilians in a reprise of the anti-Serb pogroms of the Second World War. Kadijević later justified the JNA's offensive against Vukovar on the grounds that it was part of the "backbone of the Croatian army" and had to be "liberated". The JNA's periodical Narodna Armija claimed after the battle that Vukovar "had for decades been prepared to support German military penetration down the Danube." The paramilitary leader Vojislav Šešelj declared: "We're all one army. This war is a great test for Serbs. Those who pass the test will become winners. Deserters cannot go unpunished. Not a single Ustasha must leave Vukovar alive."
Phase I, August to September 1991
Borovo Naselje
Borovo Naselje is a Vukovar borough located on the right bank of the Danube river in the Croatian region of Slavonia, 4 kilometers northwest of Vukovar town centre; elevation 90 m. The economy is based on rubber and shoe industries...
, the Croatian-held northern suburb of Vukovar, came under heavy shellfire. Croatian forces shot down two Yugoslav G-2 Galeb fighter aircraft using shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles. The following day the JNA, Yugoslav Air Force and Yugoslav Navy launched a major attack using aircraft, naval vessels on the Danube, tanks and artillery. The attack, which was mounted from both sides of the border, caused extensive damage and many civilian casualties.
The Croatian government launched an attack on JNA garrisons and arms depots throughout its territory on 14 September – an offensive dubbed the Battle of the Barracks
Battle of the Barracks
Battle of the barracks - sometimes also called War for the barracks - is a term given to a series of engagements that took place throughout Croatia as part of the Croatian War of Independence during 1991, with the most important fighting in September...
. Vukovar's JNA barracks was one of those attacked that day, but the local Croatian forces failed to capture it. In retaliation, Serb paramilitaries attacked areas to the southwest of Vukovar from the direction of Negoslavci
Negoslavci
Negoslavci is a village and a municipality in Vukovar-Syrmia County, Croatia. There are 1,466 inhabitants, the majority of the population which are Serbs, making up 96.58% of the population according to the 2001 population census...
, forcing about 2,000 people to flee. There were reports of mass killings and scores of civilian deaths. Croatian forces outside the Vukovar perimeter received large quantities of arms and ammunition from depots captured elsewhere, enabling them to hold the line against JNA attacks.
The JNA responded by launching a major offensive in eastern Slavonia, from where it intended to progress west via Vinkovci
Vinkovci
Vinkovci is a city in Croatia, in the Vukovar-Syrmia County. In the 2011 census, the total population of the city was 35,375, making it the largest town of the county...
and Osijek
Osijek
Osijek is the fourth largest city in Croatia with a population of 83,496 in 2011. It is the largest city and the economic and cultural centre of the eastern Croatian region of Slavonia, as well as the administrative centre of Osijek-Baranja county...
to Zagreb. The army did not bypass Vukovar, because they wished to relieve the besieged barracks and to eliminate a possible threat to their supply lines. The JNA leadership did not intend to make Vukovar the main focus of the offensive but, as happened with Stalingrad in the Second World War
Battle of Stalingrad
The Battle of Stalingrad was a major battle of World War II in which Nazi Germany and its allies fought the Soviet Union for control of the city of Stalingrad in southwestern Russia. The battle took place between 23 August 1942 and 2 February 1943...
, an initially inconsequential engagement became an essential political symbol for both sides.
On 19 September, a JNA force consisting of at least a hundred T-55
T-55
The T-54 and T-55 tanks were a series of main battle tanks designed in the Soviet Union. The first T-54 prototype appeared in March 1945, just before the end of the Second World War. The T-54 entered full production in 1947 and became the main tank for armored units of the Soviet Army, armies of...
and M-84
M-84
The M-84 is a Yugoslav 2nd generation main battle tank. The M-84 is in service in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kuwait, Slovenia and Serbia.-Development and production:...
tanks with armoured personnel carriers and heavy artillery pieces left Belgrade and crossed into Croatia near the Serbian town of Šid
Šid
Šid is a town and municipality in the Srem District of Vojvodina, Serbia. Šid town has a population of 16,301, and Šid municipality 38,921.-Name:...
on 20 September. Croatian units were quickly routed and fell back to Vukovar. The JNA's 1st Guards Mechanised Brigade quickly reached the Vukovar barracks and lifted the Croatian siege of the facility. They also moved to encircle Vukovar. By 30 September, the town was almost completely surrounded; all roads in and out were blocked, and the only route in was via a farm track through a perilously exposed cornfield.
The JNA launched repeated assaults on Vukovar but failed to make any progress. Its armour, designed for combat in open country, was barely able to enter Vukovar's narrow streets. Support from regular infantry was lacking, and the poorly trained and motivated troops of the TO were inadequate substitutes. The JNA's soldiers appeared to have little understanding of how to conduct urban operations
Urban warfare
Urban warfare is combat conducted in urban areas such as towns and cities. Urban combat is very different from combat in the open at both the operational and tactical level...
and its officers displayed slow and reactive decision-making on the ground.
Croatian forces countered the JNA's attacks by mining approach roads, sending out mobile teams equipped with anti-tank weapons, deploying many sniper
Sniper
A sniper is a marksman who shoots targets from concealed positions or distances exceeding the capabilities of regular personnel. Snipers typically have specialized training and distinct high-precision rifles....
s, and fighting back from heavily fortified positions. The JNA initially relied on massing armoured spearheads which would advance along a street in a column followed by a few companies of infantry. The defenders responded by opening fire with anti-tank weapons at very close range – often as short as 20 metres (65.6 ft) – to disable the lead and rear vehicles, trapping the rest of the column where it could be systematically disabled. The defenders tried to avoid completely destroying enemy armour, as the materiel that they retrieved from disabled vehicles was an important source of resupply. They used a strategy of "active defence", carrying out hit-and-run attacks to keep the JNA forces off balance. Anti-tank and anti-personnel mines hindered JNA manoeuvres. The defenders used unconventional tactics to undermine enemy morale, such as firing weather rockets at Serb forces and sabotaging JNA tanks by planting mines underneath them while they were parked at night, so that they would blow up when the crews started them in the morning. JNA casualties were heavy; on one road, dubbed the "tank graveyard", about a hundred JNA armoured vehicles were destroyed, fifteen of them by Croatian Colonel
Colonel
Colonel , abbreviated Col or COL, is a military rank of a senior commissioned officer. It or a corresponding rank exists in most armies and in many air forces; the naval equivalent rank is generally "Captain". It is also used in some police forces and other paramilitary rank structures...
Marko Babić
Marko Babic (soldier)
Marko Babić was a Croatian Army officer that served during the Croatian War of Independence....
. The high casualties had a debilitating effect on morale all the way up the chain of command.
The JNA began launching artillery and rocket barrages against the town. By the end of the battle, over 700,000 shells and other missiles had been fired at Vukovar at a rate of up to 12,000 a day. It is estimated that Vukovar as well as its surroundings were bombarded with a total of over 2.5 million shells of mortar and artillery of over 20 mm. Metre for metre, the bombardment was more intense than at Stalingrad. The thousands of civilians remaining in Vukovar took shelter from the bombardment in cellars and bomb shelters that had been built during the Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
.
JNA weaknesses and adoption of new tactics
The JNA's lack of infantry support was due to a disastrously low level of mobilisation in the preceding months. Many reservists – who were drawn from all the Yugoslav republics, including Croatia – refused to report for duty, and many serving soldiers deserted rather than fight. Serbia was never formally at war and no general mobilisation was carried out. An estimated 150,000 Serbs went abroad to avoid conscription, and many others deserted or went into hiding. Only 13 per cent of conscripts reported for duty. Another 40,000 staged rebellions in towns across Serbia; the Serbian newspaper VremeVreme
Vreme is a weekly newsmagazine based in Belgrade, Serbia.After being prepared for seven months throughout 1990 by liberal Serbian intellectuals dissatisfied with the regime's control of the media, its first issue came out on October 29, 1990. Most of its original staff were journalists from...
commented in July 1991 that the situation was one of "total military disintegration".
Morale on the battlefield was poor. JNA commanders resorted to firing on their own positions to motivate their men to fight. When the commander of a JNA unit at Vukovar demanded to know who was willing to fight and who wanted to go home, the unit split in two; one conscript, unable to decide which side to take, shot himself on the spot. A JNA officer who served at Vukovar later described how his men refused to obey orders on several occasions, "abandoning combat vehicles, discarding weapons, gathering on some flat ground, sitting and singing 'Give Peace a Chance
Give Peace a Chance
"Give Peace a Chance" is a song written by John Lennon, originally under the moniker Lennon–McCartney, released as a single in 1969 by the Plastic Ono Band on Apple Records, catalogue Apple 13 in the United Kingdom, Apple 1809 in the United States. It is the first solo single issued by Lennon, and...
' by John Lennon." In late October, an entire infantry battalion from Novi Sad
Novi Sad
Novi Sad is the capital of the northern Serbian province of Vojvodina, and the administrative centre of the South Bačka District. The city is located in the southern part of Pannonian Plain on the Danube river....
in Serbia abandoned an attack on Borovo Naselje and fled. Another group of reservists threw away their weapons and went back to Serbia on foot across a nearby bridge. A tank driver, Vladimir Živković, drove his vehicle from the front line at Vukovar to the Yugoslav parliament in Belgrade, where he parked on the steps in front of the building. He was arrested and declared insane by the authorities. His treatment enraged his colleagues, who protested by taking over a local radio station at gunpoint and issuing a declaration that "we are not traitors, but we do not want to be aggressors."
In late September, Lieutenant Colonel General Života Panić
Života Panic
Života Panić was the last acting minister of defense and army chief of staff in the Yugoslav government....
was put in charge of the operation against Vukovar. He established new headquarters and command-and-control arrangements to resolve the disorganisation that had hindered the JNA's operations. Panić divided the JNA forces into Northern and Southern Areas of Responsibility
Area of responsibility
Area Of Responsibility is a pre-defined geographic region assigned to a Combatant commanders of the Unified Command Plan , that are used to define an area with specific geographic boundaries where they have the authority to plan and conduct operations; for which a force, or component commander...
(AORs). The northern AOR was assigned to Major General Mladen Bratić, while Colonel Mile Mrkšić
Mile Mrkšic
Mile Mrkšić is a former Serb Colonel of the Yugoslav People's Army in charge of the unit involved in the Battle of Vukovar during the Croatian War of Independence in 1991...
was given charge of the south. As well as fresh troops, paramilitary volunteers from Serbia were brought in. They were well armed and highly motivated but often undisciplined and brutal. They were formed into units of company and battalion size as substitutes for the missing reservists. The commander of the Novi Sad corps was videotaped after the battle praising the Serb Volunteer Guard
Serb Volunteer Guard
The Serb Volunteer Guard also known as Arkan's Tigers was a Serbian volunteer paramilitary unit, founded and led by Željko Ražnatović, that fought in Croatia ; Bosnia and Herzegovina and in the Kosovo War ....
("Tigers") of Željko Ražnatović
Željko Ražnatovic
Željko Ražnatović , widely known as Arkan was a Serbian career criminal and later a paramilitary leader who was notable for organizing and leading a paramilitary force in the Yugoslav Wars...
, known as "Arkan":
Panić combined well-motivated paramilitary infantry with trained engineering units to clear mines and defensive positions, supported by heavy armour and artillery. The paramilitaries spearheaded a fresh offensive that began on 30 September. The assault succeeded in cutting the Croatian supply route to Vukovar when the village of Marinci
Marinci, Croatia
Marinci is a village in the Nuštar Municipality, Vukovar-Syrmia County, eastern Croatia located northeast of Vinkovci and southwest of Vukovar. The population is 671 ....
, on the route out of the town, was captured on 1 October. Shortly afterwards, the Croatian 204th Brigade's commander, Mile Dedaković, broke out with a small escort, slipping through the Serbian lines to reach the Croatian-held town of Vinkovci. His deputy, Branko Borković, took over command of Vukovar's defences. General Anton Tus
Anton Tus
Anton Tus is a retired Croatian general who served as head of the Yugoslav Air Force between 1985 and 1991 and was the first Chief of Staff of the Croatian Armed Forces from 1991 to 1992 during the Croatian War of Independence....
, commander of the Croatian forces outside the Vukovar perimeter, put Dedaković in charge of a breakthrough operation to relieve the town and launched a counter-offensive on 13 October. Croatian tanks and infantry, supported by artillery, retook Marinci and drove the JNA back almost to its starting position. The counter-offensive was then called off by President Tuđman, citing pressure from the European Community for a ceasefire. This enabled the JNA's 252nd Armoured Brigade to retake the ground that it had lost. From then on the town was completely surrounded and under constant attack from the JNA.
Phase II, October to November 1991
The hospital had to deal with hundreds of wounded people – between sixteen and eighty each day, three quarters of them civilians, in the second half of September. Even though the building was marked with the Red Cross, it was struck by over eight hundred shells during the battle. Much of the building was wrecked, and the staff and patients had to relocate to underground service corridors. The intensive care unit was moved into the building's nuclear bomb shelter. On 4 October, the Yugoslav Air Force attacked the hospital, destroying its operating theatre. One bomb fell through several floors, failed to explode and landed on the foot of a wounded man, without injuring him. One of the hospital doctors later asked in Serbia why the hospital had been attacked; he was told: "Because you held wounded Croatian soldiers there."
Croatian forces adapted several Antonov An-2
Antonov An-2
The Antonov An-2 is a single-engine biplane utility/agricultural aircraft designed in the USSR in 1946...
biplanes to drop supplies by parachute on Vukovar. The aircraft also dropped improvised bombs made of fuel cans and boilers filled with explosive and metal bars. The crews used GPS
Global Positioning System
The Global Positioning System is a space-based global navigation satellite system that provides location and time information in all weather, anywhere on or near the Earth, where there is an unobstructed line of sight to four or more GPS satellites...
to find the target, then pushed the payloads out of the side door. One of the aircraft was shot down by an SA-6 missile, killing Marko Živković, the commander of the air unit.
The European Community attempted to provide humanitarian aid to the 12,000 civilians trapped within the perimeter, but only one aid convoy made it through. Croatian forces suspended military action to allow the convoy to pass on 12 October, but the JNA used the pause as cover to make further military gains. After the convoy set off, the JNA delayed it for two days and used the time to lay mines, bring in reinforcements and consolidate JNA control of the road out of Vukovar. When the convoy arrived, it delivered medical supplies to the hospital at Vukovar and evacuated 114 injured civilians.
On 16 October the JNA mounted a major attack against Borovo Naselje. It achieved some gains, but became bogged down in the face of determined Croatian resistance. On 30 October the JNA launched a fully coordinated assault, spearheaded by paramilitary forces, with infantry and engineering troops systematically forcing their way through the Croatian defences. The JNA forces, divided into northern and southern operations sectors, attacked several points simultaneously and pushed back the defenders. The JNA also adopted new tactics, such as firing directly into houses and then driving tanks through them, using tear gas and smoke bomb
Smoke bomb
A smoke bomb is a firework designed to produce smoke upon ignition. Smoke bombs are useful to military units, airsoft games, paintball games, self defense and pranks...
s to drive out the defenders, and using anti-tank and anti-aircraft guns to capture the town building by building. This enabled the Serb forces to flush out the defenders, inflicting heavy casualties.
On 2 November the JNA offensive reached the strategic suburb of Lužac, between Borovo Naselje and Vukovar, cutting one of the two roads linking the town centre with its northern suburb. Meanwhile the ZNG (which had been renamed as the Croatian Army) attempted to retake the villages of Marinci and Cerić
Cerić
Cerić is a village in eastern Croatia, located to the northeast of Vinkovci.During the Croatian War of Independence, Cerić was on the eastern front, and it was occupied by Serbian forces on October 2, 1991, to the detriment of the Croatian civilian population....
to reopen the supply route to Vukovar. It mounted a heavy bombardment of the JNA's access routes to Vukovar and a tank attack on JNA lines. JNA General Mladen Bratić was killed when his tank was hit by a shell, but the JNA's advantage in artillery and rockets enabled it to halt the Croatian advance and inflict heavy casualties.
Fall of Vukovar
JNA troops launched an amphibious assault across the Danube north of Lužac on 3 November to link up with Arkan's paramilitary "Tigers". This attack split the Croatian perimeter in half and divided the main group of defenders in the town centre from a smaller stronghold in Borovo Naselje. The JNA's Operational Group South now began to systematically clear the town centre, cutting off the remaining groups of defenders. They captured a key hilltop, Milova Brda (Mill Hill), on 9 November, giving them a clear view of the town. The assault was largely led by paramilitary troops, with JNA and TO soldiers providing support, especially in demining operations and close artillery support. The Croatian-held village of BogdanovciBogdanovci
Bogdanovci is a municipality in the Vukovar-Syrmia County in Croatia. It is located a few kilometers south of Vukovar in eastern Slavonia.-Population:...
, just to the west of Vukovar, fell on 10 November. On 13 November the JNA cut the last link between Borovo Naselje and Vukovar. Croatian forces outside the Vukovar perimeter mounted a last-ditch attempt to break the siege by attacking from the village of Nuštar
Nuštar
Nuštar is a village in eastern Croatia, located northeast of Vinkovci and west of Vukovar, on the route D55. The population of Nuštar is 3,639, with a total of 5,772 people in the municipality, which also includes the nearby villages of Cerić and Marinci .90.79% declare themselves Croats...
, but the JNA again repelled them.
By now the defenders were running out of ammunition and were exhausted from fighting around the clock without any prospect of being relieved or replacing their dead and wounded. They had been reduced to three separate pockets. With defeat now inevitable, several hundred Croatian soldiers and civilians attempted to break out over the course of several days, as the JNA mounted its final offensive. Most of those in Borovo Naselje were unable to break out and were killed. On 18 November, the last defenders in Vukovar's town centre surrendered.
Many of Vukovar's civilian inhabitants were living in squalid conditions and nearing starvation. One woman told UN Special Envoy Cyrus Vance
Cyrus Vance
Cyrus Roberts Vance was an American lawyer and United States Secretary of State under President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1980...
that she had spent the last two months in a bomb shelter with her five children without toilets or water for washing. They lived on two slices of bread and a piece of paté per day. One of Vukovar's defenders described conditions as the battle reached its peak:
When the battle ended, the scale of the destruction came as a shock to many who not been out of their shelters in weeks. Siniša Glavašević
Siniša Glavaševic
Siniša Glavašević was a Croatian reporter who was killed in the Battle of Vukovar.-Early life:A native of Vukovar, Glavašević finished primary schooling there and entered the University of Sarajevo, where he graduated with a degree in Comparative Literature...
, a reporter for Croatian Radio and a native of Vukovar, who had stayed in the town throughout the battle, described the scene as the survivors emerged:
Although the fighting was over in the centre of Vukovar, sporadic combat continued for several more days elsewhere in the shattered town. Some defenders continued to resist until 20 November and a few managed to slip away from Borovo Naselje as late as 23 November.
Foreign journalists and international monitors entered the town soon after the surrender and recorded what they saw. Blaine Harden of the Washington Post wrote:
Chuck Sudetic
Chuck Sudetic
Chuck Sudetic is an American writer and former journalist, of Croatian and Irish descent, who has focused on the former Yugoslavia, including the Srebrenica massacre of 1995....
of The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
reported:
Laura Silber
Laura Silber
Laura Silber is Director of Public Affairs at the Open Society Institute, where she runs the Communications department and works with the Soros foundations network to promote advocacy issues. Since 2007 she has been an adjunct professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public...
and the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
's Allan Little
Allan Little
Allan Little is a Special correspondent with the BBC.He graduated from Edinburgh University, where he read History and Politics. Little then joined BBC Scotland in 1983 as a news and current affairs researcher, following which he transferred to London in 1985 to train as a radio reporter...
described how "corpses of people and animals littered the streets. Grisly skeletons of buildings still burned, barely a square inch had escaped damage. Serbian volunteers, wild-eyed, roared down the streets, their pockets full of looted treasures." The JNA celebrated its victory, as Marc Champion of The Independent
The Independent
The Independent is a British national morning newspaper published in London by Independent Print Limited, owned by Alexander Lebedev since 2010. It is nicknamed the Indy, while the Sunday edition, The Independent on Sunday, is the Sindy. Launched in 1986, it is one of the youngest UK national daily...
described:
Croatian
Croatian forces and civilians suffered heavy casualties during the battle. Croatian general Anton Tus has stated that about 1,100 of Vukovar's defenders were killed and 2,600 defenders and civilians were listed as missing; another 1,000 Croatian soldiers were killed on the approaches to Vinkovci and Osijek. He noted that the intensity of the fighting can be judged by the fact that the losses in eastern Slavonia between September and November 1991 constituted half of all Croatian war casualties during the whole of 1991. According to figures published in 2006 by the Croatian Ministry of DefenceMinistry of Defence (Croatia)
The Ministry of Defence of the Republic of Croatia is the ministry in the Government of Croatia which is in charge of the nation's military. The ministry was established in 1990.-Ministers:-References:...
, 879 Croatian soldiers were killed and 770 wounded in Vukovar. The Central Intelligence Agency
Central Intelligence Agency
The Central Intelligence Agency is a civilian intelligence agency of the United States government. It is an executive agency and reports directly to the Director of National Intelligence, responsible for providing national security intelligence assessment to senior United States policymakers...
estimates Croatian casualties at around 4,000 to 5,000 dead across eastern Slavonia. The 204th Vukovar Brigade lost over 60 per cent of its strength in the battle. Croatian officials have given figures of 2,000 killed, 800 missing, 3,000 taken prisoner and 42,852 made refugees in eastern Slavonia as a whole.
Serbian and Yugoslav
Although JNA losses were undoubtedly substantial, the exact numbers are unclear because of a lack of official data. The JNA officially acknowledged 1,279 killed in action, including 177 officers, during the entire war in Croatia. According to Anton Tus, the JNA's Novi Sad corps alone lost 1,300 soldiers during the campaign in eastern Slavonia. He extrapolates from this to estimate that between 6,000 and 8,000 soldiers and volunteers died in eastern Slavonia, with the loss of 600 armoured vehicles and heavy weapons and over 20 aircraft.Serbian sources disagree with this assessment. General Andrija Biorčević, the former commander of the Novi Sad corps, has said there were "[not] more than 1,500 killed on our side." The Serbian journalist Miroslav Lazanski
Miroslav Lazanski
Miroslav Lazanski is a politico-military commentator for the Belgrade daily Politika.-Biography:Born in Karlovac to a Slovenian father and Serbian mother, he graduated from the University of Zagreb's Faculty of Law...
, who has close links with the Serbian military, wrote in the Belgrade newspaper Večernje novosti
Vecernje novosti
Večernje novosti is a Belgrade-based daily newspaper. Founded in 1953, it quickly grew into a high-circulation daily.It first appeared on stands on October 16, 1953 edited by Slobodan Glumac who set the newspaper's tone for years to come...
that "on the side of the JNA, Territorial Defence and volunteer units, exactly 1,103 members were killed." He cited losses of 110 armoured vehicles and two combat aircraft shot down, plus another destroyed due to technical failure. The actual number may have been considerably greater as casualties were consistently underreported during the war.
War crimes
Many of those captured at Vukovar, both military and civilians, were killed. Serbian paramilitaries roamed the streets looking for Croats to kill and carried out numerous summary executions. Journalists witnessed one such killing in Vukovar's main street and also reported seeing the streets strewn with bodies in civilian clothes. BBC television reporters recorded Serbian paramilitaries chanting: "Slobodane, Slobodane, šalji nam salate, biće mesa, biće mesa, klaćemo Hrvate!" ("Slobodan [Milošević], Slobodan, send us some salad, [for] there will be meat, there will be meat, we will slaughter Croats"). A Serbian journalist embedded with the JNA reserve forces in Vukovar later reported:Around 400 people in Vukovar's hospital – non-Serb patients, medical personnel, local political figures and others who had taken refuge there – were taken from the hospital by the JNA. Although some were subsequently released, around 200 were taken to a pig farm at Ovčara nearby and were executed in what became known as the Vukovar massacre
Vukovar massacre
The Vukovar massacre, also known as Vukovar hospital massacre or simply Ovčara, was a war crime that took place between November 20 and November 21, 1991 near the city of Vukovar, a mixed Croat/Serb community in northeastern Croatia...
. At least fifty others were taken somewhere else and were never seen again. Thousands more people were transferred by the JNA to prison camps elsewhere in Serb-controlled Croatia and in Serbia proper. Further mass killings followed; at Dalj
Dalj
Dalj is a village on the Danube in eastern Croatia, near the confluence of the Drava and Danube, on the border with Serbia. It is connected with the D519 highway and administratively located in the municipality of Erdut, Osijek-Baranja County.-References:...
, north of Vukovar, where many inhabitants were previously massacred
Dalj massacre
Dalj killings and Dalj massacre refer to the events beginning on 1 August 1991 which resulted in the murder of 11 Croatian civilians and 28 Croatian policemen in the village of Dalj, eastern Slavonia at the hand of Serbian paramilitaries, during the Croatian War of Independence.-August killings:At...
, numerous prisoners from Vukovar were subjected to harsh interrogations, beatings and torture, and at least 35 people were killed. The JNA imprisoned two thousand people in the Velepromet industrial facility
Velepromet concentration camp
Velepromet camp was a short-lived concentration camp set up during the Battle of Vukovar by the Yugoslav People's Army and Serbian paramilitary forces in 1991 on the outskirts of the Croatian city of Vukovar....
in Vukovar. Eight hundred were classified by the JNA as prisoners of war. Many were brutally interrogated, several were shot on the spot by TO members and paramilitaries, and others were sent to Ovčara where they were killed in the massacre. The remaining prisoners were transferred to a JNA-run prison camp
Sremska Mitrovica camp
Sremska Mitrovica prison is the biggest prison in Serbia, consisting of two facilities. It is situated in Sremska Mitrovica, Vojvodina province....
at Sremska Mitrovica
Sremska Mitrovica
Sremska Mitrovica is a city and municipality located in the Vojvodina province of Serbia, on the left bank of the Sava river. As of 2002 the town had a total population of 39,041, while Sremska Mitrovica municipality had a population of 85,605...
in Serbia, where they were stripped naked on arrival, beaten and interrogated, and forced to sleep for weeks on bare wooden floors. Most were released in January 1992 under an agreement brokered by UN envoy Cyrus Vance. Others were kept prisoner until mid-1992. Serbs who had fought to defend Vukovar were particularly harshly treated and were subjected to savage beatings because their captors considered them to be traitors.
Detainees who were not suspected of involvement with the Croatian armed forces were evacuated from Vukovar to other places in Serbia and Croatia. The non-Serb population of Vukovar and the surrounding region was systematically ethnically cleansed and 31,732 people were forced to leave their homes in the Vukovar district, adding to the tens of thousands already expelled from across eastern Slavonia. 2,600 people disappeared following the fall of the town, of whom around 550 are still missing. There were also incidents of war rape
War rape
War rapes are rapes committed by soldiers, other combatants or civilians during armed conflict or war, or during military occupation, distinguished from sexual assaults and rape committed amongst troops in military service...
, for which two soldiers were later convicted.
The Serb forces singled out a number of prominent individuals. Among them was Dr. Vesna Bosanac, the director of the town's hospital, who was regarded as a heroine in Croatia but demonised by the Serbian media. She and her husband were taken to Sremska Mitrovica prison, where she was locked up in a single room with 66 other women for several weeks. Her husband was subjected to repeated beatings. After appeals from the International Committee of the Red Cross
International Committee of the Red Cross
The International Committee of the Red Cross is a private humanitarian institution based in Geneva, Switzerland. States parties to the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols of 1977 and 2005, have given the ICRC a mandate to protect the victims of international and...
, the couple were eventually released in a prisoner exchange. The Croatian Radio journalist Siniša Glavašević, whose broadcasts had become iconic in Croatia, was taken to Ovčara, severely beaten and shot along with the other victims of the massacre.
Vukovar was systematically looted after its capture. A JNA soldier who fought at Vukovar told Serbia's Dnevni Telegraf newspaper that "the Chetniks [paramilitaries] behaved like professional plunderers, they knew what to look for in the houses they looted." The JNA also participated in the looting; an official in the Serbian Ministry of Defence commented: "Tell me of even one reservist, especially if he is an officer, who has spent more than a month at the front and has not brought back a fine car filled with everything that would fit inside the car." The Serb forces looted more than 8,000 artworks from Vukovar, including the contents of the municipal museum, Eltz Castle
Eltz Manor
Eltz Manor is a castle in Vukovar, Croatia. The 18th century manor is the location of the Vukovar City Museum.The manor was originally built between the period of 1749 to 1751 by the House of Eltz and was gradually extended over time...
, which was bombed and destroyed during the siege. Serbia returned 2,000 pieces of looted art in December 2001.
Indictments and trials
Three JNA officers, Mile Mrkšić, Veselin Šljivančanin and Miroslav Radić, were indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former YugoslaviaInternational Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
The International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia since 1991, more commonly referred to as the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia or ICTY, is a...
(ICTY) on multiple counts of crimes against humanity and violations of the laws of war
Laws of war
The law of war is a body of law concerning acceptable justifications to engage in war and the limits to acceptable wartime conduct...
, having surrendered or been captured during 2002 and 2003. On 27 September 2007, Mrkšić was sentenced by the ICTY to 20 years' imprisonment for murder and torture, and Šljivančanin was sentenced to five years' imprisonment on charges of torture. Radić was acquitted. Šljivančanin's sentence was increased to 17 years on appeal, then reduced again to ten years after a second appeal, and he was granted early release in July 2011. Slavko Dokmanović
Slavko Dokmanovic
Slavko Dokmanović was born on 14 December 1949 in Trpinja, SR Croatia, Yugoslavia, and died on 29 June 1998, in The Hague...
, the Serb mayor of Vukovar, was also indicted and arrested for his role in the massacre, but committed suicide in June 1998, shortly before judgement was to be announced.
The Serbian paramilitary leader Vojislav Šešelj was indicted on war crimes charges, including several counts of extermination, for the Vukovar hospital massacre, in which his "White Eagles" were allegedly involved. Croatia also indicted a number of Serbs for war crimes committed in Vukovar and in December 2005 a Serbian court convicted fourteen former paramilitaries for their involvement in the hospital massacre. The ICTY linked Željko "Arkan" Ražnatović to the massacre, but he was assassinated in Belgrade before he could be brought to trial.
The ICTY indictment of Slobodan Milošević characterised the overall JNA and Serb offensive in Croatia – including the fighting in eastern Slavonia – as a "joint criminal enterprise
Joint Criminal Enterprise
Joint criminal enterprise ' is a legal doctrine used by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia to prosecute political and military leaders for mass war crimes, including genocide, committed during the Yugoslav wars 1991-1999....
" to remove non-Serb populations from Serb-inhabited areas of Croatia. Milošević was charged with numerous crimes against humanity, violations of the laws of war and breaches of the Geneva Conventions
Geneva Conventions
The Geneva Conventions comprise four treaties, and three additional protocols, that establish the standards of international law for the humanitarian treatment of the victims of war...
in relation to the battle of Vukovar and its aftermath. He died in March 2006, before his trial could be completed.
The Croatian Serb leader Goran Hadžić
Goran Hadžic
Goran Hadžić is a former president of the Republic of Serbian Krajina who was in office during the Croatian War of Independence. He is accused of crimes against humanity and of violation of the laws and customs of war by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.The court...
was indicted for "wanton destruction of homes, religious and cultural buildings" and "devastation not justified by military necessity" across eastern Slavonia, and for deporting Vukovar's non-Serb population. He was arrested in July 2011, after seven years on the run, and has pleaded not guilty to fourteen counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Croatian courts indicted Veljko Kadijević
Veljko Kadijevic
Veljko Kadijević is a former General of the Yugoslav People's Army . He was the Minister of Defence in the Yugoslav government from 1988 until his resignation in 1992, which made him de facto commander of JNA during the Ten-Day War in Slovenia and the initial stages of the War in...
and Blagoje Adžić
Blagoje Adžic
Blagoje Adžić was the acting minister of defence in the Yugoslav government. He is of Serbian ethnicity. Although his rank was Colonel General, he was in charge of the Yugoslav People's Army after the resignation of general Veljko Kadijević in 1992...
, former commanders of the Yugoslav Army, for war crimes in Vukovar. In 2011 a Serbian court indicted more than 40 Croatians for alleged war crimes committed in Vukovar, but an earlier indictment against a Croatian soldier was dropped because of irregularities in the investigation.
Propaganda
The Serbian and Croatian media waged a fierce propaganda battle over the progress and reasons for the battle. Both sides' propaganda machines aimed to promote ultranationalist sentiments and denigrate the other side with no pretence of objectivity or self-criticism. Croatian media described the Serbian forces as "Serb terrorists" and a "Serbo-Communist army of occupation" intent on crushing a thousand-year dream of an independent Croatia. The propaganda reached peak intensity in the wake of Vukovar's fall. The Croatian newspaper Novi listNovi list
Novi list is the oldest Croatian daily newspaper published in Rijeka. It is most read in Primorje-Gorski Kotar County of Croatia....
denounced the Serbs as "cannibals" and "brutal Serb extremists", while the Serbian media depicted the JNA and Serbian forces as "liberators" and "defenders" of the Serbian people, and the Croatian forces as "Ustashoid hordes", "blackshirts", "militants" and "drunk and stoned monsters". There were overt appeals to racial and gender prejudice, including claims that the Croatian defenders had "put on female dress to escape from the town" and had recruited "black men".
Victim status became a central aim for the propaganda machines of both sides, and the battle was used to support claims of atrocities. Victims became interchangeable as anonymous victims were identified as Croats on Zagreb television and as Serbs on Belgrade TV. According to the Serbian opposition periodical Republika, the state-owned station TV Novi Sad was under orders to identify any bodies its reporters filmed as being "Serbian corpses". After the battle, Belgrade television showed pictures of hundreds of corpses lined up outside Vukovar's hospital and claimed that they were Serbs who had been "massacred" by Croatians. According to Human Rights Watch
Human Rights Watch
Human Rights Watch is an international non-governmental organization that conducts research and advocacy on human rights. Its headquarters are in New York City and it has offices in Berlin, Beirut, Brussels, Chicago, Geneva, Johannesburg, London, Los Angeles, Moscow, Paris, San Francisco, Tokyo,...
, the bodies belonged to those who had died of their injuries at the hospital, whose staff had been prevented from burying them by the intense Serbian bombardment, and had been forced to leave them lying in the open. Serbian television continued to broadcast claims of "massacred Serbs in Vukovar" for some time after the fall of the town.
Such victim-centred propaganda had a powerful motivating effect. One Serbian volunteer said that he had never seen the town before the war, but had come to fight because "the Croats had a network of catacombs under the city where they killed and tortured children just because they were Serbs." Reuters
Reuters
Reuters is a news agency headquartered in New York City. Until 2008 the Reuters news agency formed part of a British independent company, Reuters Group plc, which was also a provider of financial market data...
reported erroneously that forty-one children had been massacred
Vukovar children massacre
Vukovar children massacre or Vukovar baby massacre was well known case of Serbian propaganda in the Yugoslav Wars.Day before the execution of 264 Croatian prisoners of war's and civilians in the Ovčara massacre, Serbian media released the news of 40 Serb babies being slaughterd in Vukovar...
in Vukovar by Croatian soldiers; although the claim was retracted a day later, it was used by the Serbian media to justify military action against Croatia. Many of those fighting at Vukovar believed that they were engaged in a struggle to liberate the town from a hostile occupier.
International reaction
The international community made repeated unsuccessful attempts to end the fighting. Both sides violated ceasefires, often within hours. Calls by some European Community members for the Western European UnionWestern European Union
The Western European Union was an international organisation tasked with implementing the Modified Treaty of Brussels , an amended version of the original 1948 Treaty of Brussels...
to intervene militarily were vetoed by the United Kingdom. Instead, a Conference for Yugoslavia was established under the chairmanship of Lord Carrington
Peter Carington, 6th Baron Carrington
Peter Alexander Rupert Carington, 6th Baron Carrington, is a British Conservative politician. He served as British Foreign Secretary between 1979 and 1982 and as the sixth Secretary General of NATO from 1984 to 1988. He is the last surviving member of the Cabinets of both Harold Macmillan and Sir...
to find a way to end the conflict. The United Nations (UN) imposed an arms embargo
Arms embargo
An arms embargo is an embargo that applies to weaponry. It may also include "dual use" items. An arms embargo may serve one or more purposes:# to signal disapproval of behavior by a certain actor,# to maintain neutral standing in an ongoing conflict, or...
on all of the Yugoslav republics in September 1991 under Security Council Resolution 713
United Nations Security Council Resolution 713
United Nations Security Council Resolution 713, adopted unanimously on September 25, 1991, after receiving representations from a number of Member States and commending the efforts of the European Community in the region, the Council decided to impose, under Chapter VII, an arms embargo on the...
, but this was ineffective, in part because the JNA had no need to import weapons. The European powers abandoned attempts to keep Yugoslavia united and agreed to recognise the independence of Croatia and Slovenia on 15 January 1992.
International observers tried unsuccessfully to prevent the human rights abuses that followed the battle. A visit by UN envoys Marrack Goulding
Marrack Goulding
Sir Marrack Goulding, KCMG was a British diplomat who served more than eleven years as Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations.- Early life :...
and Cyrus Vance was systematically obstructed by the JNA. Vance's demands to see the hospital, from which wounded patients were being dragged out to be killed, were rebuffed by one of the massacre's authors, Major Veselin Šljivančanin. The major also blocked Red Cross representatives in an angry confrontation recorded by TV cameras: "This is my country, we have conquered this. This is Yugoslavia, and I am in command here!"
There was no international media presence in Vukovar, as there was in the simultaneous Siege of Dubrovnik
Siege of Dubrovnik
The Siege of Dubrovnik is a term marking the battle and siege of the city of Dubrovnik and the surrounding area in Croatia as part of the Croatian War of Independence. Yugoslav People's Army invaded the Dubrovnik area in October 1991 from Montenegro, Bosnia and even parts of Croatia, surrounding...
and the later Siege of Sarajevo
Siege of Sarajevo
The Siege of Sarajevo is the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare. Serb forces of the Republika Srpska and the Yugoslav People's Army besieged Sarajevo, the capital city of Bosnia and Herzegovina, from 5 April 1992 to 29 February 1996 during the Bosnian War.After Bosnia...
, and relatively little of the fighting in Vukovar was broadcast to foreign audiences. British journalist Misha Glenny
Misha Glenny
Misha Glenny is a British journalist who specializes in southeastern Europe and global organized crime.-Biography:Glenny is the son of the late Russian studies academic Michael Glenny...
commented that the JNA, the Croatian Serb government and many ordinary Serbs were often hostile to the foreign media; the Croatians presented a much more open and friendly attitude.
Croatian reaction
The Croatian media gave heavy coverage to the battle, repeatedly airing broadcasts from the besieged town by the journalist Siniša Glavašević. Much popular war art focused on the "VukoWAR", as posters dubbed it. The Croatian government began suppressing Glavašević's broadcasts when it became clear that defeat was inevitable, despite the confident slogans of "Vukovar shall not fall" and "Vukovar must not fall." Two of the main daily newspapers, Večernji listVecernji list
Večernji list is a Croatian daily newspaper published in Zagreb.The newspaper was started in the 1950s and it is today one of two largest daily newspapers in Croatia...
and Novi list
Novi list
Novi list is the oldest Croatian daily newspaper published in Rijeka. It is most read in Primorje-Gorski Kotar County of Croatia....
, failed to report the loss of Vukovar and, on 20 November, two days after it had fallen, repeated the official line that the fight was still continuing. News of the surrender was dismissed as Serbian propaganda. Nevertheless, many people saw Western satellite broadcasts showing the ruined town and Serbian soldiers taking its inhabitants into custody. When the surrender could no longer be denied, the two newspapers interpreted the loss as a demonstration of Croatian bravery and resistance, blaming the international community for not intervening to help Croatia.
The Croatian government was criticised for its approach to the battle. Surviving defenders and right-wing political parties accused it of betrayal and of deliberately sacrificing Vukovar to secure international recognition for Croatia. The only explanation that many people were willing to accept for the town's fall was that it had been given up as part of a conspiracy. The commanders of the Croatian forces in Vukovar, Mile Dedaković and Branko Borković, both survived the battle and spoke out publicly against the government's actions. In an apparent attempt to silence them, both men were briefly detained by Croatian military police, and the Croatian government suppressed an issue of the newspaper Slobodni tjednik
Slobodni tjednik
Slobodni tjednik is a now defunct Croatian weekly newspaper which was published in Zagreb in the early 1990s and was the first Croatian tabloid....
that published a transcript of a telephone call from Vukovar, in which Dedaković had pleaded with an evasive Tuđman for military assistance. The revelations caused public outrage and reinforced perceptions that the defenders had been betrayed.
From a military point of view, the outcome at Vukovar was not a disaster for Croatia's overall war effort. The battle broke the back of the JNA offensive and left Croatia's main adversary exhausted and unable to press its offensive deeper into the country. Vukovar was probably indefensible, being almost surrounded by Serb-held territory and closer to Belgrade than to Zagreb, and although the defeat was damaging to morale, in a strategic context the damage and delays inflicted on the JNA more than made up for the loss of the town.
Following the battle, Vukovar became a symbol of Croatian resistance and suffering. The survivors, veterans and journalists wrote numerous memoirs, songs and testimonies about the battle and its symbolism, calling it variously "the phenomenon", "the pride", "the hell" and "the Croatian knight". Writers appealed to the "Vukovar principle", the "spirituality of Vukovar" and "Vukovar ethics", the qualities said to have been exhibited by the defenders and townspeople. Croatian war veterans were presented with medals bearing the name of Vukovar. In 1994, when Croatia replaced the Yugoslav dinar
Yugoslav dinar
The dinar was the currency of the three Yugoslav states: the Kingdom of Yugoslavia , the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia between 1918 and 2003. The dinar was subdivided into 100 para...
with its new currency, the kuna
Croatian kuna
The kuna is the currency of Croatia since 1994 . It is subdivided into 100 lipa. The kuna is issued by the Croatian National Bank and the coins are minted by the Croatian Monetary Institute....
, it used the destroyed Eltz Castle in Vukovar and the Vučedol Dove
Vucedol culture
The Vučedol culture was a Indo-European culture that flourished between 3000 and 2200 BC , centered in Syrmia and eastern Slavonia on the right bank of the Danube river, but possibly spreading throughout the Pannonian plain and western Balkans...
– an artefact from an ancient Neolithic culture centred on eastern Slavonia, which was discovered near Vukovar – on the new 20-kuna note. The imagery emphasises the Croatian nature of Vukovar, at the time under Serbian control. During 1993–94 there was a national debate on how Vukovar should be rebuilt when it was recovered; some Croatians even proposed that it should be preserved as a monument.
The ruling HDZ made extensive use of popular culture relating to Vukovar as propaganda in the years before the region was reintegrated into Croatia. In 1997 President Tuđman mounted a tour of eastern Slavonia, accompanied by a musical campaign called Sve hrvatske pobjede za Vukovar ("All Croatian victories for Vukovar"). The campaign was commemorated by the release of a compilation of patriotic music from Croatia Records
Croatia Records
Croatia Records is the largest major record label in Croatia, based in Dubrava in Zagreb.-Summary:Croatia Records d.d. is a joint stock company currently led by the Chairman of the Board of directors Želimir Babogredac, a notable sound engineer...
. When Vukovar was returned to Croatian control in 1998, its recovery was hailed as the completion of a long struggle for freedom and Croatian national identity. Tuđman alluded to such sentiments when he gave a speech in Vukovar to mark its reintegration into Croatia:
Serbian reaction
Although the battle had been fought in the name of Serbian defence and unity, reactions in Serbia were deeply divided. The JNA, the state-controlled Serbian media and Serbian ultra-nationalists hailed the victory as a triumph. The JNA even erected a triumphal arch in Belgrade through which its returning soldiers could march, and officers were congratulated for taking "the toughest and fiercest Ustashe fortress". The Serbian newspaper PolitikaPolitika
Politika is a Serbian newspaper. It is considered the newspaper of record and is the oldest daily in the Balkans, having been founded on January 25, 1904 by Vladislav Ribnikar. It is currently being published by Politika Newspapers and Magazines , a joint venture between Politika AD and...
ran a front-page headline on 20 November announcing: "Vukovar Finally Free". In January 1992, from the ruins of Vukovar, the ultranationalist painter Milić Stanković
Milic od Macve
Milić Stanković, known by his artistic name Milić of Mačva , was a Serbian painter and artist. He graduated from the Belgrade Academy of Arts in 1959....
wrote an article for the Serbian periodical Pogledi ("Viewpoints"), in which he declared: "Europe must know Vukovar was liberated from the Croat Nazis. They were helped by Central European scum. They crawled from under the papal tiara
Papal Tiara
The Papal Tiara, also known incorrectly as the Triple Tiara, or in Latin as the Triregnum, in Italian as the Triregno and as the Trirègne in French, is the three-tiered jewelled papal crown, supposedly of Byzantine and Persian origin, that is a prominent symbol of the papacy...
, as a dart of the serpent's tongue that protruded from the bloated Kraut
Kraut
Kraut is a German word recorded in English from 1918 onwards as a derogatory term for a German, particularly a German soldier during World War I and World War II. Its earlier meaning in English was as a synonym for sauerkraut, a traditional German and central European food.- Etymological...
and overstretched Eurocommunal anus."
The Serbian geographer Jovan Ilić set out a vision for the future of the region, envisaging it being annexed to Serbia and its expelled Croatian population being replaced with Serbs from elsewhere in Croatia. The redrawing of Serbia's borders would unite all Serbs in a single state, and would cure Croats of opposition to Serbian nationalism, which Ilić termed an "ethno-psychic disorder"; thus, "the new borders should primarily be a therapy for the treatment of ethno-psychic disorders, primarily among the Croatian population." Other Serbian nationalist writers acknowledged that historical evidence was that eastern Slavonia had been Croatian for centuries, but blamed the Croatian majority in the region on "conversion to Catholicism, Uniating and Croatisation" plus "genocidal destruction". Most irredentist propaganda focused on the region's proximity to Serbia and the large number of Serbs who inhabited the area.
The Croatian Serb leadership also took a positive view of the outcome. During the rule of the Republic of Serbian Krajina
Republic of Serbian Krajina
The Republic of Serbian Krajina was a self-proclaimed Serb entity within Croatia. Established in 1991, it was not recognized internationally. It formally existed from 1991 to 1995, having been initiated a year earlier via smaller separatist regions. The name Krajina means "frontier"...
(RSK) between 1991 and 1995, the fall of Vukovar on 18 November 1991 was officially commemorated as "Liberation Day". It was portrayed as a successful struggle by local Serbs to defend their lives and property from the aggression of the Croatian state. Thousands of Vukovar's Serbs had suffered alongside their Croatian neighbours, sheltering in basements or bomb shelters for three months in appalling conditions, but after their "liberation" they were denigrated as the podrumaši, the "people from the basement". The Serb civilian dead were denied recognition, and the only people buried in the Serbian memorial cemetery at Vukovar were local Serbs who had fought with or alongside the JNA.
In contrast, many people in Serbia were strongly opposed to the battle and the wider war and resisted efforts by the state to involve them in the conflict. When the JNA tried to call up reservists, parents and relatives gathered around JNA barracks to prevent their children taking part in the operation. Resistance to conscription became widespread across Serbia, ranging from individual acts of defiance to collective mutinies by hundreds of reservists at a time. Serbian opposition politicians condemned the war: Desimir Tošić of the Democratic Party
Democratic Party (Serbia)
The Democratic Party is a political party in Serbia. It is described as a social liberal or social democratic party.-Pre-war history:The Democratic Party was established on 16 February 1919 from unification of Sarajevo parties independent radicals, progressives, liberals and the Serbian part of...
accused Slobodan Milošević of "using the conflict to cling to power" and Vuk Drašković
Vuk Draškovic
Vuk Drašković , leader of the Serbian Renewal Movement, is a Serbian politician who served as the Deputy Prime Minister of Yugoslavia and the Minister of Foreign Affairs of State Union of Serbia and Montenegro and Serbia.He graduated from the University of Belgrade's Law School in 1968...
, leader of the Serbian Renewal Movement
Serbian Renewal Movement
The Serbian Renewal Movement is a political party in Serbia.It was founded in 1990.In 1997 a dissident group abandoned the party and formed New Serbia....
, appealed to JNA soldiers to "pick up their guns and run" from the front line. After the fall of Vukovar he condemned what had been done in the name of Yugoslavia, writing in the daily newspaper Borba
Borba (newspaper)
Borba is a Serbian newspaper, formerly the official newspaper of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia...
:
By late December 1991, just over a month after victory had been proclaimed in Vukovar, opinion polls found that 64 per cent wanted to end the war immediately and only 27 per cent were willing to continue the war. Milošević and other senior Serbian figures decided against continuing the fighting, as they saw it as politically impossible to mobilise more conscripts to fight in Croatia. Desertions from the JNA continued and the well-motivated and increasingly well-equipped Croatian Army was becoming increasingly difficult to counter. By the end of 1991, Serbian politicians and JNA leaders alike had concluded that it would be counter-productive to continue the war. The looming conflict in Bosnia also required the military resources tied up in Croatia to be freed for future use.
Although the battle was publicly portrayed as a triumph, behind the scenes it profoundly affected the JNA's character and leadership. The army's leaders realised that they had overestimated their ability to pursue operations against heavily defended urban targets. The central Croatian town of Gospić
Gospic
Gospić is a town in the mountainous and sparsely populated region of Lika, Croatia. It is the administrative centre of Lika-Senj county. Gospić is located near the Lika River in the middle of a karst field....
, for instance, was a strategic target of the JNA but was now assessed as potentially a "second Vukovar". The "Serbianisation" of the army was greatly accelerated, and by the end of 1991 it was estimated to be 90 per cent Serb. Its formerly pro-Communist, pan-Yugoslav identity was abandoned, and new officers were now advised to "love, above all else, their unit, their army, and their homeland – Serbia and Montenegro". The JNA's failure enabled the Serbian government to tighten its control over the military, whose leadership was purged and replaced with pro-Milošević nationalists. After the battle General Veljko Kadijević, commander of the JNA, was forced into retirement for "health reasons", and in early 1992 another thirty-eight generals and other officers were forced to retire, with several put on trial for incompetence and treason.
Many individual JNA soldiers who took part in the battle were revolted by what they had seen and protested to their superiors about the behaviour of the paramilitaries. Colonel Milorad Vučić later commented that "they simply do not want to die for such things". The slaughter that they witnessed at Vukovar led some to experience subsequent feelings of trauma and guilt. A JNA veteran told a journalist from the Arabic newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat:
Other Yugoslav reaction
In Bosnia and HerzegovinaBosnia and Herzegovina
Bosnia and Herzegovina , sometimes called Bosnia-Herzegovina or simply Bosnia, is a country in Southern Europe, on the Balkan Peninsula. Bordered by Croatia to the north, west and south, Serbia to the east, and Montenegro to the southeast, Bosnia and Herzegovina is almost landlocked, except for the...
, President Alija Izetbegović
Alija Izetbegovic
Alija Izetbegović was a Bosniak activist, lawyer, author, philosopher and politician, who, in 1990, became the first president of Bosnia and Herzegovina. He served in this role until 1996, when he became a member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, serving until 2000...
made a televised appeal to Bosnian citizens to refuse the draft on the grounds that "this is not our war". He called it their "right and duty" to resist the "evil deeds" being committed in Croatia and said: "Let those who want it, wage it. We do not want this war." When JNA troops transferred to the front via the Višegrad
Višegrad
Višegrad is a town and municipality in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is part of the Republika Srpska entity. It is on the river Drina, located on the road from Goražde and Ustiprača towards Užice, Serbia.-History:...
region of north-eastern Bosnia, local Bosnian Croats and Muslims set up barricades and machine-gun posts. They halted a column of 60 JNA tanks but were dispersed by force the following day. More than 1,000 people had to flee the area. This action, nearly seven months before the start of the Bosnian War
Bosnian War
The Bosnian War or the War in Bosnia and Herzegovina was an international armed conflict that took place in Bosnia and Herzegovina between April 1992 and December 1995. The war involved several sides...
, caused the first casualties of the Yugoslav Wars in Bosnia.
Macedonia's parliament adopted a declaration of independence from Yugoslavia in January 1991, but it did not take effect until a referendum in September 1991 confirmed it. A group of Macedonian JNA officers secretly sought to prevent soldiers from Macedonia being sent to Croatia, and busloads of soldiers' parents, funded by the Macedonian government, travelled to Montenegro to find their sons and bring them home. Meanwhile, Macedonians continued to be conscripted into the JNA and serve in the war in Croatia. The commander of JNA forces in the first phase of the battle, Gen. Aleksandar Spirkovski, was a Macedonian; his ethnicity was probably a significant factor in the decision to replace him with Života Panić, a Serb. In 2005 the Macedonian Army's Chief of Staff, Gen. Miroslav Stojanovski, became the focus of international controversy after it was alleged that he had been involved in possible war crimes following the battle.
Occupation, restoration and reconstruction
Vukovar suffered catastrophic damage in the battle. Croatian officials estimated that 90 per cent of Vukovar's housing stock was damaged or destroyed, and put the cost at $2.5 billion. The town barely recovered during its seven years under Serb control. Marcus Tanner of The IndependentThe Independent
The Independent is a British national morning newspaper published in London by Independent Print Limited, owned by Alexander Lebedev since 2010. It is nicknamed the Indy, while the Sunday edition, The Independent on Sunday, is the Sindy. Launched in 1986, it is one of the youngest UK national daily...
described post-battle Vukovar as:
When Michael Ignatieff
Michael Ignatieff
Michael Grant Ignatieff is a Canadian author, academic and former politician. He was the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and Leader of the Official Opposition from 2008 until 2011...
visited Vukovar in 1992, he found the inhabitants living in squalor:
The population increased to about 20,000 as Serb refugees from other parts of Croatia and Bosnia were relocated by RSK authorities. They initially lived without water or electricity, in damaged buildings patched up with plastic sheeting and wooden boards. Residents scavenged the ruins for fragments of glass that they could stick back together to make windows for themselves. The main sources of income were war profiteering
War profiteering
A war profiteer is any person or organization that profits from warfare or by selling weapons and other goods to parties at war. The term has strong negative connotations. General profiteering may also occur in peace time.-International arms dealers:...
and smuggling, though some were able to find jobs in eastern Slavonia's revived oil industry. Reconstruction was greatly delayed by economic sanctions and lack of international aid.
After the Erdut Agreement
Erdut Agreement
The Erdut Agreement , officially the Basic Agreement on the Region of Eastern Slavonia, Baranja and Western Sirmium, was the agreement reached on November 12, 1995 between the authorities of the Republic of Croatia and the local Serb authorities of the Eastern Slavonia, Baranja and Western Syrmia...
was signed in 1995, the United Nations Transitional Authority for Eastern Slavonia, Baranja and Western Sirmium (UNTAES) was established to enable the return of Croatian refugees and to prepare the region for reintegration into Croatia. This UN peacekeeping force provided security during the transition period between 1996 and 1998. It was only in 1999 that Croats began returning to Vukovar in significant numbers, and many of the pre-war inhabitants never returned. By March 2001, the municipality was recorded as having 31,670 inhabitants – less than half the pre-war total – of whom 18,199 (57.46%) were Croats and 10,412 (32.88%) were Serbs. The community did not recover its mixed character: Croats and Serbs now lived separate social lives. Public facilities such as shops, cafés, restaurants, sports clubs, schools, non-governmental organisations and radio stations were re-established on segregated lines, with separate facilities for each community.
Although the Croatian government sponsored reconstruction efforts in and around Vukovar, the Serb-populated town centre remained in ruins until 2003. Both Croat and Serb residents believed the government had neglected it deliberately, in order to punish the Serb community. Human Rights Watch
Human Rights Watch
Human Rights Watch is an international non-governmental organization that conducts research and advocacy on human rights. Its headquarters are in New York City and it has offices in Berlin, Beirut, Brussels, Chicago, Geneva, Johannesburg, London, Los Angeles, Moscow, Paris, San Francisco, Tokyo,...
noted that, of 4,000 homes that had been rebuilt, none of them were inhabited by Serbs. Unemployment was high because of the destruction of the town's major industries, and many of the inhabitants could not sell their houses. Most houses and many of Vukovar's historic buildings had been restored as of 2011.
Commemorations and memorials
Signs of the battle are still widely apparent in Vukovar, where many buildings remain visibly scarred by bullets and shrapnel. The riverside water tower has been preserved in its badly damaged state as a memorial. The town hospital presents an exhibition and reconstruction of the conditions in the building during the battle. At Ovčara, the site of the massacre is marked by a mass grave and exhibition about the atrocity. Local tourist guides, some of whom lived through the battle, offer tourists the opportunity to visit these and other sites on walking and bicycle tours.Every November, Vukovar's authorities hold four days of festivities to commemorate the fall of the town, culminating in a "Procession of Memory" held on 18 November. This represents the expulsion of the town's Croatian inhabitants and involves a five-kilometre (3.1 mile) walk from the city's hospital to the Croatian Memorial Cemetery of Homeland War Victims. It is attended by tens of thousands of people from across Croatia.
Local Serbs have avoided participating in the Croatian commemorations, often preferring either to leave the town or stay indoors on 18 November. They have held a separate low-key commemoration at the Serbian military cemetery on 17 November, until 2003 and on 18 November since then. The RSK-era term "Liberation Day" has been dropped, but the Serbs also avoid the Croatian terminology, instead calling it simply "18 November".
The issue of how to remember the Serbian dead has posed particular difficulties. Local Serbs who died fighting alongside the JNA were buried by the Croatian Serb authorities on a plot of land where Croatian houses had once stood. The gravestones were originally topped with a sculptural evocation of the V-shaped Serbian military cap, or šajkača
Šajkaca
The Šajkača is the Serbian national hat or cap.-History:The Šajkača originated in the 18th century. It was originally worn by the Serbian river fleet as a military headgear in the service of the Habsburg Empire around the Danube and Sava Rivers...
. After Vukovar's reintegration into Croatia the gravestones were repeatedly vandalised. The Serb community replaced them with more neutral gravestones without overt military connotations.
Vukovar Serbs report feeling marginalised and excluded from places associated with Croatian nationalist sentiment, such as monuments to the Croatian defenders. The Croatian sociologist Kruno Kardov gives the example of a prominent memorial, a large cross made from white stone, where the Vuka
Vuka
Vuka is a river in eastern Croatia, a right tributary of the Danube river. At it is the 11th longest river in Croatia and it has a drainage area of . The river is located in Vukovar-Syrmia County, in Slavonia region. It empties into the Danube at the town of Vukovar, which got its name from the...
flows into the Danube. According to Kardov, Serbs rarely if ever go there, and they feel great stress if they do. A Serb boy spoke of how he wanted to know what was written on the monument but was too frightened to go and read the inscription; one day he got up the courage, ran to the monument, read it and immediately ran back to "safety". As Kardov puts it, Vukovar remains divided by an "invisible boundary line ... inscribed only on the cognitive map of the members of one particular group."
The battle is widely commemorated across Croatia. Almost every town has streets named after Vukovar, and the lead vessel of the Croatian Navy's two new Helsinki-class missile boat
Helsinki class missile boat
The Helsinki class missile boats are a type of vessel which were in use by the Finnish Navy. They were the predecessors of the Rauma class missile boats...
s was named the Vukovar in January 2009. The Croatian Parliament has declared 18 November to be the "Remembrance Day of the Sacrifice of Vukovar in 1991", when "all those who participated in the defence of the city of Vukovar – the symbol of Croatian freedom – are appropriately honoured with dignity."
As a symbol of Croatia's national identity, Vukovar has become a place of pilgrimage for people from across Croatia who seek to evoke feelings of "vicarious insideness", as Kruno Kardov described them, in the suffering endured during the country's war of independence. Some gather in front of the town's main memorial cross on New Year's Eve to pray as the year ends, though such sentiments have attracted criticism from local Croats for not allowing them to "rejoice for even a single night", as one put it. The town has thus become, in Kardov's words, "the embodiment of a pure Croatian identity", and the battle "the foundational myth of the Croatian state". This has led to it becoming as much an "imagined place", a receptacle for Croatian national sentiment and symbolism, as a real place. Kardov concludes that it is questionable whether Vukovar can realise a vision of once again becoming "one place for all its citizens".
In November 2010 Boris Tadić
Boris Tadic
Boris Tadić is the President of Serbia and leader of the Democratic Party. He was elected to a five-year term on 27 June 2004, and was sworn into office on 11 July. He was re-elected for a de facto second five-year term on 3 February 2008 and was sworn in on 15 February...
became the first President of Serbia to travel to Vukovar, when he visited the massacre site at Ovčara and expressed his "apology and regret".
Films and books
The battle was portrayed in the Serbian films Dezerter ("The Deserter") (1992), Kaži zašto si me ostavio ("Why Have You Left Me?") (1993) and Vukovar, jedna priča ("Vukovar: A Story") (1994); in the Croatian films Vukovar se vraća kućiVukovar: The Way Home
Vukovar: The Way Home is a Croatian film directed by Branko Schmidt. It was released in 1994....
("Vukovar: The Way Home") (1994) and Zapamtite Vukovar ("Remember Vukovar") (2008); and in the French film Harrison's Flowers
Harrison's Flowers
Harrison's Flowers is a 2000 French film by Elie Chouraqui. It stars, among others, Andie MacDowell, Elias Koteas, Brendan Gleeson, Adrien Brody, Marie Trintignant, Gerard Butler and David Strathairn....
(2000). A 2006 Serbian documentary film about the battle, Vukovar – Final Cut, won the Human Rights Award at the 2006 Sarajevo Film Festival
Sarajevo Film Festival
The Sarajevo Film Festival is the premier and largest film festival in the Balkans, and is one of the largest in Europe. It was founded in Sarajevo in 1995 during the siege of Sarajevo, and brings international and local celebrities to Sarajevo every year. It is held in August and showcases an...
. The battle is also at the centre of Serbian writer Vladimir Arsenijević
Vladimir Arsenijevic
Vladimir Arsenijević is a Serbian writer, translator, editor, musician, and publicist.In his early youth, Arsenijević played with a punk band called Urbana Gerila as well as its post-punk offshoot Berliner Strasse.After graduating high school and completing the mandatory military service in 1985,...
's 1995 novel U potpalublju ("In the Hold").
External links
- Vukovar – Final Cut – Producer's announcement of the 2006 documentary film
- Images from Vukovar after the fall by Ron Haviv