Battle of Vukovar

Battle of Vukovar
Part of the Croatian War of Independence
The Vukovar water tower, 2005. Heavily damaged in the battle, the tower has been preserved as a symbol of the conflict.
Date August 25 - November 18, 1991 Location Vukovar, Croatia Result Serbian Pyrrhic victory
Belligerents
Yugoslav People's Army Yugoslav People's Army (Serb-controlled remnant) SAO Eastern Slavonia, Baranja and Western Syrmia (Serbian insurgents)	Croatia
Commanders and leaders
Yugoslav People's Army Života Panić Yugoslav People's Army Veselin Šljivančanin Yugoslav People's Army Mile Mrkšić Yugoslav People's Army Mladen Bratić† Yugoslav People's Army Andrija Biorčević Željko Ražnatović	Blago Zadro† Mile Dedaković Branko Borković Marko Babić
Strength
~ 80 000 - 100 000 soldiers	~ 1,800 - 2,200 soldiers
Casualties and losses
	Official Croatian figures: 1,656 casualties (879 dead, 777 wounded ) official serbian figures: almost 18 000 regular JNA troops dead , few hundred JNA officers dead , 3500 JNA subofficers dead , and one JNA general dead - general Bratić
~ 1,000 civilians killed

Template:Fixbunching The Battle of Vukovar (Template:Lang-hr, Template:Lang-sr) 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 Independence. It ended with the defeat of the local Croatian National Guard, the destruction of Vukovar and the murder or expulsion of most of the Croat population of the city and surroundings.

Although the battle was a significant and symbolic loss for Croatia, which did not regain control of the town until 1998, it was also a costly victory for the JNA and helped to gain international support for Croatian independence. As such, it is widely regarded as having been a crucial turning point in the course of the war.

Background on Vukovar

Vukovar is an important regional centre on the border between Croatia and Serbia, situated on the right bank of the Danube river. It is a major river port and capital of what was, before the war, an 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.

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 ethnic lines were not as sharply drawn. The relatively high percentage of Yugoslavs, and undeclared as well, suggests that mixed marriages were common.

Prelude to battle

On June 25, 1991, Croatia declared independence from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, by adopting a new constitution in which Serbs were removed as a constitutional nation which they were in Croatia while it was part of the former Yugoslavia.. This was strongly opposed by the country's Serb minority, who took up arms against the Croatian government and civilians 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.

At this stage in the Yugoslav conflict, the objectives of Milošević and the JNA were somewhat different. Milošević sought to support the efforts of the rebel Serb communities to secede from an independent Croatia and associate with a Serb-dominated Yugoslavia. The JNA leadership also supported the Serb rebellion but went further, aiming to decisively overthrow the new Croatian state. According to its former head, Veljko Kadijević, it planned to advance deep into Croatia, capture the capital Zagreb and destroy its armed forces. Having done this, the new Yugoslavia could dictate its western borders, leaving Croatia with less territory. A key element in this plan was the use of Combined Arms units to capture the Serb-populated region of Eastern Slavonia, and then to advance west from there to Zagreb, forcing capitiulation.

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 seceding Croatian national government when it refused to endorse the controversial new Constitution of Croatia, which downgraded the political status of the country's Serb minority. The assembly was dominated by the League of Communists of Croatia. A Serb agricultural engineer, Slavko Dokmanović, was elected chairman of the assembly.

By the spring of 1991, paramilitary militias from Serbia proper – reportedly supported by Milošević through the Serbian Interior Ministry (MUP) – had established themselves in a number of localities in Eastern Slavonia. Serb paramilitaries established a base in the Serb-populated suburb of Borovo Selo on the outskirts of Vukovar. Militant propaganda from both Belgrade and Zagreb added to the tension, radicalising much of the local population and encouraging each side to view the other in the worst possible light.

Opposing forces

Ruins in Vukovar

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. As many as a third of defenders were said to be non-Croats. 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 far better motivated than their opponents, as [in some instances] their families were located in the town, and they would naturally fight with more vigor and emotion. They also 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 attacking force was a mixture of JNA soldiers, conscripts from the Serbian Territorial Defense Forces (Teritorijalna Obrana or TO), Chetniks (Serbian nationalist paramilitaries) and local Serb militiamen. At its largest, it numbered about 50,000 troops. Although it was in theory far stronger than the Croatian forces and was much better equipped, it suffered from often low morale, poor leadership, and constant desertions, which reduced the strength and capability of many units. Many of the JNA soldiers were not Serbs, a large number being Bosniaks and Kosovo's ethnic 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.

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 symbol of the 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. Massive desertions and the casualties suffered by poor organization during the battle led to JNA recruiting people off the streets in Serbia and sending them to the battle zone, which only worsened their losses.

Early stages of conflict

Vukovar

Vukovar (Croatia)

The first casualties at Vukovar came in May 1991, when two Croatian policemen were taken prisoner in Borovo Selo. A detachment of Croatian Interior Ministry (MUP) police was sent in to rescue them on May 2 but came under heavy fire, suffering twelve fatalities and another 20 injured. It was widely reported that the bodies of the dead were mutilated and put on display by the paramilitaries. In the wake of the Borovo Selo killings, relations between Croats and Serbs worsened sharply and intercommunal attacks took place in a number of other places in Croatia over the following months.

On April 9, 1991, Dokmanović wrote a dramatic letter to Croatian President Franjo Tuđman declaring "that the current situation in Vukovar is extremely critical and threatens to escalate any time into inter-ethnic conflict with possible permanent, tragic and unforeseeable consequences, which is particularly emphasized by [the] increasingly frequent arming of civilian population, which continues and is causing the atmosphere of fear and absolute lack of confidence of the entire population in any government institutions."

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 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 August 25 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: part I

From August 25, Vukovar was under constant artillery and rocket bombardment. In many parts of the country the real war had started, and 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 September 14, 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.

Vukovar's JNA barracks, in the southern suburb of Sajmište, was one of those attacked on 14 September. The local Croatian forces were, however, unable to capture it and, in retaliation, Serbian paramilitaries launched a major attack on the southwest of Vukovar from the direction of Negoslavci. About 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 September 19, 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 September 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 September 30, 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.

During the period of 14 to 20 September, JNA launched some of the largest tank and infantry attacks at the city. One of the major tank attacks in this period was started on September 18 from the north on Trpinjska Street; launched by the JNA's 51st Mechanized Brigade's one Mechanized Battalion of about 30 tanks and 30 APCs. When the first tanks reached the Croatian lines, the leading column was ambushed and came under heavy fire from Croatian small arms wepons and rockets, directed from the roofs and basenents along the street. The Croatian ambush would typically funnel the Serbian armoured columns into "killing fields", and then the RPG gunners would knock out the first and last tank in the line, thereby trapping the rest of tanks in the middle. Serbian tanks were unable to depress their tank barrels low enough to fire into basements. The column was almost completely wiped out

. As a result, an area where the fighting occurred was nicknamed "Tank Graveyard". In total, about one hundred armoured vehicles were destroyed there, 15 of which were destroyed by Colonel Marko Babić.

Vukovar was cut off for a time after the village of Marinci, straddling the route out of the city, was captured on October 1. Shortly afterwards, Vukovar's deputy commander Mile Dedaković (Jastreb = hr. "Hawk") broke out through the Serbian lines to reach Vinkovci. His place was taken by his deputy Branko Borković (known as "Mladi Jastreb", or Young 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 October 14 and consolidate the captured territory. Vukovar was now fully besieged.

The battle: part II

From mid-October 1991 to the fall of the city in mid-November, Vukovar was surrounded by JNA and Serbian forces. Its remaining inhabitants – who included some several thousand Serbs – took refuge in communal bomb shelters which had been built during the Cold War as insurance against an Soviet 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 main street in Vukovar. The shell holes in the buildings are clearly apparent.

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 October 4, 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.

On October 16 JNA attacked the northern part of Vukovar (Borovo Naselje) with three tank battalions. During the attack Croatian commander Blago Zadro was killed while personally leading his soldiers into the fiercest battle.

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".

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.

The Battle: Part III

Map of the final phase of the Battle of Vukovar

In a desperate attempt to end the battle, in late October 1991, General Panić 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 October 30, 1991, the JNA launched just such an attack with 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 Serb Volunteer Guard ("Tigers"), led by the notorious warlord Željko Ražnatović ("Arkan"); JNA general Mladen Bratić was killed by a mortar shell on the same day. 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 November 16.

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

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 arrange 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 (UN), which imposed an arms embargo on all of the Yugoslav republics in September 1991 in Security Council Resolution 713. 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 November 12, 1991, in which it condemned the escalation of attacks on Croatian towns by the JNA and Serbian forces.

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 Battle 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.

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 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

Territories of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republic of Croatia controlled by Serb forces 1992-1995. The War Crimes Tribunal accused Milošević and other Serb leaders of "attempting to create a Greater Serbia, a Serbian state encompassing the Serb-populated areas of Croatia and Bosnia, and achieved by forcibly removing non-Serbs from large geographical areas through the commission of crimes."

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, Čačak and Kragujevac. In one famous incident, a tank driver named Vladimir Živković 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 were unsuccessful. Only 13% of those eligible for the draft actually reported for duty, and by the end of 1991 6,000 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. However despite this failure, the Novi Sad city authorities led by the Serbian Radical Party decided in 2007 to rename a few of the city streets after men who participated in the Battle of Vukovar. The opposition councilors left the assembly’s session in protest, however the assembly still decided to support the renaming.

Other Yugoslav reaction

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, 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".

JNA conscript soldiers from the Republic of Macedonia participated in the battle, but apparently without much enthusiasm. Macedonia had just declared its independence from SFR Yugoslavia during the battle (on September 9, 1991), and many conscripts from Macedonia were still held in JNA by the commanding officers, most of whom were Serbs. In 2005, the 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

Vukovar, 2004

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 three-month siege tied down some of the best units the Yugoslav Army had, including two tank and six mechanized brigades in the wider area - substantial part of the Army's tank assault force - which eased the pressure on other fronts in Croatia. This three-month pause, during which the JNA was concentrating on defeating just one Croatian infantry brigade, enabled Croatia to complete the mobilization started in October. As a result: when the battle of Vukovar begun, Croatian Army had less than 20 infantry brigades, which rose to about 60 when it was over.

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 predominantly 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 war crimes

Main article: Vukovar massacre

Vukovar Memorial

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 slaughter 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) as well as many other civilians were imprisoned in Serbian prisons. Majority from Vukovar ended up in the Sremska Mitrovica camp. 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 there (Vukovar massacre). 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. On 27 September 2007, Mrkšić was sentenced by the ICTY to 20 years' imprisonment for murder and torture, Šljivančanin was sentenced to five years' jail on charges of torture, but was acquitted on charges of extermination, and Radić was acquitted. 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 chetniks (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.

Serbian courts later sentenced 14 former militiamen to jail terms of up to 20 years for the killing of at least 200 prisoners of war seized at a Vukovar hospital. A re-trial was ordered by Serbia's supreme court over alleged irregularities in the proceeding.

Occupation of Vukovarska Ada

Main article: Island of Vukovar

Even though Vukovar was returned to Croatia as early as 1998, Vukovarska Ada, a Croatian island on the Danube, still remains under the control of Serbia.

Despite the Badinter Arbitration Committee decision from 1991, Serbia refuses to return the islands with the explanation that they are nearer to the Serbian side of the river so they are Serbian. Military occupation of the islands ended recently after an incident in which Serbian military opened fire and arrested the mayor of Vukovar Vladimir Štengl with 19 other Croatian civilians and eight children who were going to visit Zvezdan Kisić, the mayor of the Serbian town Bačka Palanka. These Croatian islands, together with another occupied island, the Island of Šarengrad, are now under Serbian police control.

Casualties

Croatian

Vukovar after occupation

By the end of 1991, the official figures issued in Croatia showed that approximately 3,210 Croats were killed and 17,393 people injured during the conflict. Most of the casualties resulted from the siege of Vukovar. The exact numbers of casualties at Vukovar is still unknown. According to official Croatian figures, published by Croatian Ministry of Defence in 2006, Croatia lost 879 soldiers killed and 770 wounded in Vukovar only.

According to Croatian general Anton Tus, 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-November 1991 constituted half of all Croatian war casualties during the whole of 1991.

In his book Croatian history, published 2004, Croatian historian Ivo Goldstein wrote that Croatian military losses in the Battle of Vukovar were 2,500 military dead (including forces which helped defence of Vukovar outside the town). The CIA estimates Croatian casualties at around 4,000-5,000 dead across Eastern Slavonia.

Serbian

The bitter street-to-street fighting reportedly caused significant JNA casualties with one general working for Serbia's Ministry of Defense calling the Serbian losses at Vukovar "senseless". Estimates of JNA losses are complicated by a lack of official figures. Former commander of the Novi Sad Corps, pensioned General Andrija Biorčević, could not remember how many people he lost, but he said that he believed that it was not more than 1,500 killed. Biorcevic explained that during the siege of Vukovar, "most of the combat activities took place from a distance and from well entrenched positions."

The only exact figures of Serbian losses in the Battle of Vukovar published by their side (published by Miroslav Lazanski, an unofficial spokesman of the JNA and well known military commentator from Belgrade) were 1,103 soldiers and volunteers killed, 2,500 wounded, and 110 tanks and APCs destroyed. Two aircraft were shot down, while another crashed because of malfunction. Although the JNA officially acknowledged only 1,279 killed in action during the entire war, the actual number was probably considerably greater, since casualties were consistently underreported during the war. For example, in the case of one brigade, while official reports spoke of two lightly wounded after an engagement, the actual number was 50 killed and 150 wounded according to the unit's intelligence officer. There were indications that morale were by November, 1991 becoming a serious concern in the JNA in direct proportion to the casualties.

In 1997 Tus himself estimated enemy losses in the three months of war in Croatia to be in the order of 10,000 dead, 600 armoured vehicles, and 23 aircraft

Popular culture

The battle was portrayed in the Serbian film Vukovar, jedna prica (1994), the Croat films Vukovar se vraca kuci (1994) and Zapamtite Vukovar (2008), and the 2000 French film Harrison's Flowers.

See also

• Siniša Glavašević, Croatian war reporter executed during the Vukovar massacre

External links

• Vukovar – Final Cut (2006 Croat-Serb documentary film)
• Heroji Vukovara – "Heroes of Vukovar"(2008 Croat documentary with interviews with the surviving defenders)
• Vukovar, hrvatski grad heroj - istinita priča; Vukovar, heroic city in Croatia - the true story
• HRT film footage of the 1991 siege and bombardment of Vukovar
• Video of Vukovar after the town fell to Serbian forces
• Harrison's Flowers - starring [[Andie McDowell, Adrien Brody ]