Battle of Vukovar

Battle of Vukovar
Part of Croatian War of Independance
A destroyed Yugoslav Army tank in Vukovar, 1991
Date August 25 - November 18, 1991 Location Vukovar, Croatia Result Serbian Pyrrhic victory
Belligerents
Various pro-Serbian forces, JNA	Croatia
Commanders and leaders
General Mladen Bratić (killed), General Života Panić	Blago Zadro (killed), Colonel Mile Dedaković, Major Branko Borković
Strength
50,000 soldiers, 600 tanks and APC's, around 1000 artillery pieces, around 100 aircraft and helicopters	1,800 soldiers
Casualties and losses
6-8,000 soldiers killed, around 400 tanks and APC's destroyed 2o planes and helicopters shot down	1,100 soldiers killed, 2600 soldiers and civilians MIA

The Battle of Vukovar was an 87-day siege of the Croatian city of Vukovar by the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA), supported by various Serbian paramilitary forces, between August-November 1991 during the Croatian War of Independance.

Background on Vukovar

Vukovar is an important regional centre on the border between Croatia and Serbia, situated on the left bank of the Danube river. It is a major river port and capital of what was, before the war, an extremely ethnically mixed area. In the Vukovar municipality, which included the town and surrounding villages, the 1991 census recorded 84,189 inhabitants of which 36,910 were Croats (43.8%), 31,445 Serbs (37.4%), 1,375 Hungarians (1.6%), 6,124 "Yugoslavs" (7.3%), and 8,335 (9.9%) others or undeclared.

The town of Vukovar itself was inhabited by approximately 40,000 people at start of 1991. A small majority (52.98%) of the city's population was reported to be Croats. Serbs constituted 36.28% of the population and other nationalities made up the remainder. Most of the Croats lived in the town centre, while most of the Serbs lived in the town's industrial suburbs. Prior to 1990, though, the town's population was largely integrated, with an unusually high percentage of mixed marriages and people describing themselves as "Yugoslavs" rather than Serbs or Croats.

Prelude to battle

On 25 June 1991, Croatia declared independence from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. This was strongly opposed by the country's substantial Serb minority, who took up arms against the Croatian government across a wide area of the country. They were supported in their opposition by the Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević and by the Serb-dominated leadership of the JNA.

The region was already in the grip of a long-running political crisis. The leading Croatian nationalist party, the HDZ, had little direct influence in the Vukovar municipality, having won none of the area's five parliamentary seats in the 1990 elections. In July 1990, the Serb-dominated Vukovar Municipal Assembly came into conflict with the national government when it refused to endorse the new democratic Constitution of Croatia. The assembly was dominated by the Croatian Communist Party, which had close ties with Milošević's Serbian Communist Party. A Serb extremist Slavko Dokmanović, was elected chairman of the assembly.

Early stages of conflict

The first casualties in Vukovar came in May 1991, during Borovo Selo raid.

As the situation deteriorated, Serb and Croatian paramilitary groups mounted a sporadic campaign of violence and intimidation against each other and against civilians.

In an effort to take control of the situation in Vukovar, the Zagreb government removed the municipal assembly and its chairman from office in July 1991. They were replaced by a government-appointed commissioner, Marin Vidić Bili. This further alienated the local Serbs, but Vidić appears to have had little influence on the ground in any case. Throughout July and August 1991, the Croatian government progressively lost control of Eastern Slavonia as paramilitary forces and local Serb militias, often supported by JNA units stationed in the area, expelled government officials and set up barricades and minefields.

The goal of JNA was to secure Slavonia and free the blocked army barrack in Vukovar. However, in Vukovar, JNA has started to offensively act against Croatian paramilitaries.

The JNA took up positions on the other side of the Danube, and JNA gunboats patrolled the river. Sporadic mortar attacks on Vukovar began in July, and long-range artillery attacks began from early August. By the end of August, the population of the city had fallen to around 15,000 people. The remainder comprised a mixture of Croatians, Serbs and other nationalities. Vukovar was by this time largely surrounded by Serb-controlled territory, and from 25 August onwards was subjected to regular shelling and air attacks. There was, however, no attempt as yet to capture it; the fighting consisted principally of intense exchanges of fire between Croatian- and Serb-held territory.

The battle begins

By the start of September 1991 the Croatian government had lost control of nearly a third of the country. Its forces were poorly armed and, without access to heavy weapons, were unable to put up effective opposition to its better-armed opponents. The JNA, as the national army of Yugoslavia, was still deployed throughout Croatia and was seen as a major threat to the republic's secession from the Yugoslav federation. It was, however, already seen to be openly acting in support of the Serb rebellion in the Croatian Krajina and by mid-1991 most Croatians regarded it as a hostile force.

In order to eliminate the threat of the JNA's garrisons and remedy its own lack of heavy weapons, on 14 September 1991 the Croatian government launched an attack on JNA garrisons and arms depots throughout government-held territory – an offensive dubbed the "Battle of the Barracks". They had already been effectively besieged for a couple of months but the Croatian forces had not, up to that point, attempted to capture them. The outcome of the offensive was mixed; some depots were successfully captured, while others were destroyed or evacuated after negotiations. Nonetheless, it enabled the Croatian forces to obtain a large number of heavy weapons, it eliminated a strategic threat to the Croatian rear and it significantly weakened the strength of the JNA.

On September 14 Serbian paramilitaries and JNA launched a major attack on Vukovar from the southwest of the city (from the directin of Negoslavci). The attack was repulsed with heavy Serbian casualties, but 2,000 residents fled, reporting scores of civilian deaths and mass killings.

Map of military operations in eastern Slavonia, September 1991 - January 1992

In response to the "battle of the barracks", the JNA activated its strategic offensive plan. The main element of this was the drive on Eastern Slavonia. The JNA's objectives in the first stage of the battle were to take the Serb-inhabited areas of Eastern Slavonia plus Vukovar, then to progress west via Vinkovci and Osijek to Zagreb.

On 19 September a huge column of JNA armor left Belgrade; foreign journalists reported that it stretched for nearly 10 km and included at least a hundred tanks, mostly T-55s and M-84s, as well as armored personnel carriers and numerous towed heavy artillery pieces. The force crossed the Croatian border on 20, near the Serbian town of Šid. Further support was provided by other JNA units, notably the 12th (Novi Sad) Corps, advancing from Serbia's Vojvodina province.

Few problems were experienced in the early days of the campaign, and the JNA took the time to expel non-Serbs from mixed communities en route, such as at Ilok. Pockets of Croatian defenders outside Vukovar were quickly routed and fell back to Vukovar. The JNA's 1st Guards Mechanised Division quickly reached the town's 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 of the town were blocked and the only route in was via a track through a perilously exposed cornfield.

Vukovar was cut off for a time after the village of Marinci, straddling the route out of the city, was captured on 1 October. Shortly afterwards, Vukovar's deputy commander Mile Dedaković broke out through the Serbian lines to reach Vinkovci. His place was taken by his deputy Branko Borković (known as "Mladi Jastreb", or Little Hawk). A Croatian counter-offensive was mounted in the second week of October in an effort to break the siege and succeeded in retaking Marinci. However, the counter-offensive was called off by Croatian President Franjo Tuđman, apparently at the urging of European Economic Community negotiators attempting to obtain a ceasefire. The pause enabled the JNA's 252nd Armoured Brigade to retake Marinci on 14 October and consolidate the captured territory. Vukovar was now fully besieged.

Opposing forces

Croatian forces

Vukovar was defended by a force of some 1,800 defenders drawn from local militias, the 204th brigade of the Croatian National Guard (ZNG) and Interior Ministry forces. The defenders reflected Vukovar's ethnic mix. They were relatively poorly armed with little heavy weaponry, though they gained some additional weapons following the capture of JNA barracks elsewhere in Croatia. Despite their small numbers and poor weaponry, they were better motivated than their opponents and benefited from the defensive advantages offered by urban terrain.

Dedaković and the defenders' chief of staff, Branko Borković, played a key role in devising defensive tactics that kept the JNA out of Vukovar for a prolonged period of time. They created a unified command structure that created a single brigade from a number of previously disparate elements. Their tactics centred on the creation of an integrated defence system that featured the mining of approach routes, roving anti-tank teams, snipers and heavily fortified defensive strongpoints. This combination was intended to slow down and dissipate JNA attacks to the point where counter-attacks could force a retreat.

Yugoslav/Serb forces

The Serbian nationalist paramilitaries and extremists were notorious for their brutality, and treatment of Croatian civilians outside Vukovar effectively as hostages, with random murders and henious bestialities. Use of drugs was common, and in drugged state the extremists were even more cruel to the local non-Serbian population.

The attacking force was a mixture of JNA soldiers, conscripts from the Serbian territorial defence force (teritorialna obrana or TO), Serbian nationalist voulonteers and local Serb militiamen, who were under TO and JNA control. At its largest, it numbered about 36,000 troops. Although it was in theory far stronger than the Croatian forces and was much better equipped, it suffered from low morale, poor leadership, and constant desertions, which reduced the strength and capability of many units. Many of the JNA soldiers were not Serbs in the first place, a large number being Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) and Kosovo Albanians. By this stage, the non-Serb members of the JNA were not particularly supportive of either Serbian nationalism or the nominal cause of Yugoslav unity. The non-Serb soldiers were distrusted by the Serb-dominated officer corps, and many deserted from a battle in which they felt that they had no stake of their own. Sebian nationalist, on the other hand, objected to use of communist symbols, under which they were combating, as the voulonteers were formally part of official JNA and TO structures.

Low morale was a problem for the Serb members of the JNA as well, and desertions and protests were frequent among the largely conscripted force. The war was unpopular at home and the JNA experienced severe problems in mobilizing soldiers for the battle. The Army as a whole struggled to explain adequately what it was fighting for; it was only in October 1991 that its insignia was altered to replace the Communist red star with the Yugoslav tricolor flag, symbolising its shift from Communist to nationalist ideologies.

The attackers also suffered from a persistent lack of coordination between the various groups involved. Even within the JNA, there were problems in establishing a unified chain of command between the different corps and divisions on the battlefield. There were even greater problems in coordinating movements with the Serbian TO militias, Serbian paramilitary groups and the local Croatian Serb militias. The paramilitaries and militias were often poorly organised and indisciplined, and soon gained a reputation for considerable brutality.

The siege of Vukovar

From mid-October 1991 to the fall of the city in mid-November, Vukovar was entirely surrounded by JNA and Serbian forces. Its remaining inhabitants – who included several thousand Serbs – took refuge in communal bomb shelters which had been built during the Cold War as insurance against a Russian invasion. A crisis committee was established, operating from a nuclear bunker underneath the municipal hospital. It organised the delivery of food, water and medical supplies, keeping to a minimum the number of civilians on the streets and ensuring that each bomb shelter was guarded and had at least one doctor and nurse assigned to it.

The hospital was kept busy dealing with hundreds of wounded people; in the latter half of September, it had received between sixteen and eighty wounded each day, three quarters of them civilians. Despite the building being clearly marked with the Red Cross symbol it was shelled and bombed along with the rest of the city. On 4 October the Yugoslav Air Force attacked it, destroying its operating theater. One bomb fell through several floors, failed to explode and landed on the foot of a wounded man, who survived.

Despite the attacking forces' numerical superiority and far greater firepower, they were unable to dislodge the Croatian defenders. The JNA's attempts to storm the city were beaten back with heavy losses in manpower and equipment. Its largely conscript force had no training for urban combat and little desire to undertake such dangerous work. They were also ill-equipped for such work – the JNA, like other armies before it, found that its heavy armour was simply not suited for intense urban combat.

Unable to engage the defenders directly, the army instead resorted to intensive long-range artillery bombardments supported by occasional Yugoslav Air Force bombing raids. By the end of October, much of Vukovar had been reduced to ruins. Ironically, though, this actually worked to the defenders' advantage; as the Red Army had found at Stalingrad fifty years previously, a destroyed city offered far more defensive positions than an intact one.

The poor performance of the JNA had been an unwelcome surprise to the Army's high command in Belgrade, and at the start of October General Života Panić, the commander of the First Army District, was put in charge of the Vukovar operation. He was accompanied to the front lines by the JNA Chief-of-Staff, Blagoje Adžić. The two men were appalled by what they found - a situation which Panić himself described as "chaos".

On October 16 the JNA attacked the norther suburb of Borovo Naselje where the 3td battalion of the 204th Brigade fought a desperate house-to-house defence. Croatian commander Blago Zadro was killed on October 16 and from that point Branko Borković was the single defence leader in the city. From mid-October every yard of the city was contested. Fighting in the southern suburb of Sajmište was particulary mercilles. The suburb changed hands several times. Every Croatian commander who fought there was killed. Croatian defenders used the city ruins as defensive positions. Serbian tanks become useless in the heaps of rubble up to five meters hight.

General Panić swiftly made major changes, integrating the paramilitaries into the JNA command structure and putting in place a single chain of command with himself at the apex. Poorly motivated conscripts were replaced with nationalist Serb volunteers wherever possible. The Serbian Ministry of the Interior played a crucial role in facilitating this, organising volunteers from Serbian nationalist parties and clubs and sending them to Eastern Slavonia. Although relatively untrained, they made up for this with an often xenophobic dedication to the cause.

Map of the final phase of the Battle of Vukovar

Panić correctly identified the JNA's key weakness as being its inability to carry out a coordinated assault with well-motivated and equipped troops. The Croatian defenders had previously been able to defeat the JNA's disjointed, single-sector attacks but did not have the numbers to defeat a coordinated attack on multiple sectors.

On 30 October, the JNA launched just such an attack with well-trained infantry and engineering troops systematically forcing their way through the Croatian defences, supported rather than led by armour. Paramilitary forces were used to spearhead the assaults. The JNA forces, divided into a northern and southern operation sector, attacked multiple points simultaneously; as predicted, the defenders were unable to repulse such an attack. On 3 November JNA troops launched a successful amphibious assault across the Danube to meet up with the Serbian paramilitary "Tigers", led by the notorious Arkan. Serbian general Mladen Bratić was killed in the course of the attack, but the incursion eventually succeded. This split the Vukovar perimeter in half, isolating a pocket of Croatian defenders in the suburb of Borovo Naselje. Even so, the pocket held out until 16 November.

Further south, the JNA's "Operational Group South" systematically cleared the town centre, isolating the remaining defenders. A key hilltop was captured on 9 November, giving the attackers 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. By 15 November the defenders had been reduced to isolated pockets, and on 18 November they surrendered.

Political aspects

International reaction

Throughout the siege, the international community attempted unsuccessfully to bring the fighting to an end. European Community negotiators repeatedly sought to arange ceasefires, but neither side observed them; some broke down within hours. By September, some EC members were calling for military intervention by the Western European Union but this was vetoed by the United Kingdom. Instead, a peace conference was convened at The Hague, Netherlands, under the chairmanship of Lord Carrington.

Parallel efforts were undertaken by the United Nations, which imposed an arms embargo on all of the Yugoslav republics in September 1991 . For the most part, however, neither the UN nor the EC was able to achieve much beyond issuing plaintive statements asking the combatants to stop fighting. The closest either came to actually condemning one or other of the two sides was in a statement issued by the EC on 12 November 1991, in which it condemned the escalation of attacks on Croatian towns by the JNA and Serbian forces.

In terms of international media coverage, there is little doubt that the Serbs were widely portrayed as the villains of the battle. There was no international media presence in Vukovar itself (unlike in the sieges of Sarajevo and Dubrovnik) and relatively little of the fighting at Vukovar was broadcast to foreign audiences. Western media coverage was dominated by the simultaneous siege of Dubrovnik. The British journalist Misha Glenny, who reported from behind both sides' front lines, comments that the JNA and especially the Serbian paramilitaries in eastern Slavonia were often extremely hostile to the foreign media, in marked contrast with the relatively open Croatians, who took every opportunity to portray their cause as a struggle against oppression. This was a consequence of the widespread perception of bias in western media against the Serbs, and the propaganda war was important aspect of the conflict, as Croatia used Vukovar and Dubrovnik in order to win approval for the secession.

Croatian reaction

Reactions to the battle in Croatia and the rump Yugoslavia varied considerably. Croatians saw the battle for Vukovar as a life-or-death struggle for the survival of their nation, which they compared to the Soviet Union's decisive Battle of Stalingrad. The aftermath of the battle was marked by controversy over the Croatian government's apparent lack of resolve in dealing with the battle. Two half-hearted relief operations were mounted in October and November but failed to gain any ground. Dedaković and Borković both survived the battle and were spoke out publicly against the government's actions. In an apparent attempt to silence them, both men were briefly detained by Croatian military police.

From a strictly military point of view, however, there was little to be gained from a Croatian counter-offensive. The battle of Vukovar had broken the back of the JNA offensive. The town itself was strategically expendable and was, in any case, probably indefensible. It was virtually surrounded by Serb-held settlements and overlooked Serbia itself, from where it could be (and was) bombarded and assaulted. Although the Croatian government undoubtedly felt the sting of defeat at Vukovar, in a strategic context the damage and delays inflicted on the JNA more than made up for the loss of the town.

Serbian reaction

The high number of casualties incurred in the battle caused serious popular discontent in Serbia and Montenegro, where tens of thousands of those receiving draft papers went into hiding or left the country. A near-mutiny broke out in some reservist units, and mass demonstrations against the war were held in the Serbian towns of Valjevo, Cacak and Kragujevac. In one famous incident, a tank driver named Vladimir Zivković drove his tank all the way from the front line at Vukovar to the federal parliament in Belgrade. Many Serbs simply did not identify with the Croatian Serb cause and were unwilling to see their lives, or those of their children, sacrificed at Vukovar. Although the great majority of JNA casualties were Serbian, Serbia itself was never formally at war.

In a sign of the popular distaste for the battle, the JNA's attempts to draft further troops for a deeper attack into Croatia failed dismally. Only 13% of those eligible for the draft actually reported for duty, and by the end of 1991 six thousand cases against deserters and draft-dodgers were pending in Belgrade's military court alone. . The failure of the draft meant that large elements of the JNA's planned offensive into Croatia had to be abandoned for simple lack of manpower.

Other Yugoslav reaction

In Bosnia, from where many JNA soldiers had been conscripted, President Alija Izetbegović appealed to citizens to resist the draft on the grounds that "this is not our war". Macedonia participated in the battle, but apparently without much enthusiasm. In 2005, Macedonian Chief of Staff General Miroslav Stojanovski became the focus of international controversy after it was alleged that he had been involved in possible war crimes following the battle.

Aftermath

The aftermath of the battle was dominated by two principal issues: the JNA's ongoing campaign in Croatia and the fate of the non-Serbs left in Vukovar when the town fell.

The end of the campaign

The JNA's General Panić was determined to carry forward the JNA's long-delayed advance into Croatia following the fall of Vukovar. After the battle had ended he moved most of his forces forward toward Osijek, the JNA's next strategic target. Vukovar itself was largely left in the hands of paramilitaries. Osijek was, however, a far tougher target than Vukovar. It was a much bigger city, with three times Vukovar's population; it was much better defended; it had better lines of communication with the rest of Croatia than Vukovar had enjoyed; and the JNA itself was a depleted force in the aftermath of the battle of Vukovar. Furthermore, Croatian forces were now better equipped than they had been at the start of the offensive, thanks to the capture of JNA supplies from former federal depots.

Osijek was subjected to intensive shelling in preparation for a planned assault but at this point, Serbia's Slobodan Milošević intervened. The JNA had by now captured most of the Serb-inhabited regions of Croatia and Milošević had little interest in taking predominately Croatian-inhabited territory, much less in Panić's goal of toppling the Zagreb government and putting Croatia under military occupation. Moreover, the ongoing war was causing serious political difficulties in Serbia. After Milošević compelled the JNA high command to order Panić to end his operations, ceasefire talks between Serbia and Croatia were opened under the mediation of UN envoy Cyrus Vance. In January 1992, an armistice was agreed, temporarily ending the fighting in Croatia.

Captives and Serbian war crimes

The fate of those captured at Vukovar – both military and civilians – was grim. Many appear to have been summarily executed by Serbian paramilitaries; journalists visiting the town immediately after its fall 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 butcher the Croats").

The defenders of the northern pocket of Borovo Naselje were unable to escape and most are reported to have been killed. Many of the defenders of Vukovar proper were also killed although some, including the commanders, successfully broke through JNA lines and escaped to government-held territory. Of the non-Serb civilian survivors, most were expelled to government-held territory but around 800 of the men of fighting age (civilians and captured soldiers alike) were imprisoned in Serbian prisons at Sremska Mitrovica and elsewhere. Although most were eventually freed in prisoner exchanges, some reportedly died after being tortured.

Many of the Croatians in the Vukovar hospital (around 260 people plus several medical personnel) were taken by JNA and Serb paramilitary forces to the nearby field of Ovčara and executed. Three JNA officers, Mile Mrkšić, Veselin Šljivančanin and Miroslav Radić were indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) on multiple counts of crimes against humanity and violations of the laws of war. The three indictees were either captured or handed themselves in during 2002 and 2003 and stood trial in October 2005. The trial is still ongoing. (See Vukovar massacre for more.) Slavko Dokmanović was also indicted and arrested for his role in the massacre, but committed suicide in 1998 days before judgement was to be announced.

The Serbian paramilitary leader Vojislav Šešelj has been indicted on a variety of war crimes charges including several counts of extermination in relation to the Vukovar hospital massacre, in which his "White Eagles" were allegedly involved. In addition, Croatia has tried a number of Serbs for war crimes committed at Vukovar – although most of the original indictees either died before they could be tried, or had to be tried in absentia – and in December 2005 a Serbian court convicted fourteen former paramilitaries for their involvement in the hospital massacre.

Although the initial attack on Vukovar has not been the subject of war crimes charges, the ICTY's indictment of Slobodan Milošević characterised the overall JNA/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 also charged with responsibility for exterminations, deportations and destruction of property conducted in Vukovar, as well as involvement in the hospital massacre.

Long term effects

In the end, Vance peace plan has granted protection to Serbs in 4 UNPA zones in early 1992, one, namely eastern Slavonia, included Vukovar with sorrounding Serbian villages and Baranja. This was the only zone that did not experience devastating ethnic cleansing in 1995, as Croatian leaders didnt dare to attack the zone and provoke response from Yugoslavia and Russia [1] - Yugoslavia was guarantee of the Vance peace plan. The zone was peacefully reintegrated into Croatia in 1998, with strict guarantees for protection of Serbian minority, and is the only region in Croatia wich still has substantial number of Serbs, who are even allowed to use cyrillic alphabet.

Casualties

The exact numbers of casualties at Vukovar is still unknown. According to Croatian general Anton Tus, about 1,100 of Vukovar's defenders were killed, and another 2,600 defenders and civilians were listed as missing. Another 1,000 Croatian soldiers were killed on the approaches to Vinkovci and Osijek. The intensity of the fighting can be judged by the fact that the losses in Eastern Slavonia between September-November 1991 constituted half of all Croatian war casualties during the whole of 1991. The Central Intelligence Agency estimates Croatian casualties at around 4,000-5,000 dead across Eastern Slavonia.

Estimates of JNA losses are complicated by a lack of official figures. The only published losses on the JNA side were some 1,300 dead in the Novi Sad corps, from which the federal combatants were send. There is also a total number of 2,300 killed federal troups and TO in all conflicts in 1991. Tus cites foreign estimates of 6,000-8,000 JNA and Serb losses in the whole of eastern Slavonia and Croatian estimates of at least 5,000 dead. Around 400 armoured vehicles and heavy weapons and more than 20 aircraft were also alledgedly destroyed. These estimates are used in Croatia for propaganda purposes.