UDIK Udruženje za društvena istraživanja i komunikacije
The Association for Social Research and Communication (UDIK) reminds the public of the thirty-fourth anniversary of the fall of Vukovar, when the three-month siege and shelling of the city by the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) and Serbian paramilitary forces ended on November 18, 1991.
The battle for this city in Eastern Slavonia lasted from August 24 to November 18, 1991. It is estimated that during the 87 days that the siege of Vukovar lasted, from 5,000 to 12,000 missiles fell on the city per day. The Vukovar Franciscans collected data and placed on memorial plaques in the courtyard of the Church of Saints Philip and Jacob the names and surnames of 2,717 Vukovar citizens who died during the siege. In the camps in the area of Podunavlje and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, at least 2,796 Croatian veterans and civilians captured in 1991 in the area of Vukovar were abused and subjected to terrible torture. At least 200 patients and medical staff from the VukovarHospital were liquidated and buried in a mass grave at Ovčara. 938 victims of the siege were exhumed from the mass grave at Novo Groblje after the population returned. According to data presented during the trial at the Hague Tribunal, a total of 22,165 citizens of Vukovar, mostly of Croatian ethnicity, were expelled from the city.
The battle for Vukovar ended on November 18, when members of the JNA led by Veselin Šljivančanin entered the area of the Vukovar Hospital. The fighting stopped that day, the Croatian population was called to leave the shelters and forced to leave the city. Borovo surrendered a day later, and part of the population, together with people from Mitnica, were taken to camps. On the night of 19 to 20 November, a crime was committed on the Ovčara farm, and the bodies of 200 soldiers and civilians from that mass grave were exhumed only in 1996. The occupation of the city lasted until 15 January 1998, when, through the peaceful reintegration of the Croatian Danube region, Vukovar and other occupied places were returned to the constitutional and legal order of Croatia.
On the occasion of the anniversary, UDIK recalls an earlier study published under the title “Media coverage of war events in the 1990s on the examples of Srebrenica and Vukovar”. The fall of Vukovar and the war of the 1990s are the best examples of how the Croatian and Serbian media reported on events in Croatia. Objectivity, impartiality, neutrality, serving the truth, conveying facts – along with all the other postulates of journalism – were put to the test during the war years, and there were quite a few journalists and reporters who failed that test. The analysis of the political and scientific discourse in reference to individual events and the commemoration of the war victims of Vukovar are an important part of this study.
On the occasion of the thirty-fourth anniversary, we remember the victims of Vukovar.