The City of Vukovar bombed during the agression in 1991
Symbol of Destruction and Atrocities
This online exhibition is being launched on the twentieth anniversary of The Battle of Vukovar. Vukovar has since become a symbol of destruction and atrocities.
When the Serb forces took control of Vukovar on 19 November 1991, several hundred people took refuge in the town's hospital in the hope that they would be evacuated in the presence of neutral observers. A deal to that effect had earlier been agreed in negotiations between the Yugoslav army and the Croatian government.
But instead of the hoped-for evacuation, about 400 individuals - including wounded patients, soldiers, hospital staff and Croatian political activists were removed from the hospital by Yugoslav army and Serb paramilitary forces. According to The Hague Tribunal's indictment, which was originally issued in 1995, three Yugoslav army officers, Colonel Mile Mrksic, Major Veselin Sljivancanin and Captain Miroslav Radic, oversaw the removal of some 300 men to Ovcara farm, four kilometres outside Vukovar.
The detainees were beaten up. Some died of their injuries and approximately 260 of them were executed and then buried in a mass grave. Details of the Vukovar massacre soon began to emerge as survivors reported on the events, and doubts began to appear about the large number of missing detainees. But it took several years of exhumations and painstaking investigations to gather the evidence that formed the basis of the Tribunal's indictment.
The heart of this exhibit contains the writings of Siniša Glavašević.
See from source: Vukovar massacre: What happened
