A Serb officer was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in jail yesterday for his role in the notorious 1991 massacre of nearly 200 Croats in Vukovar.

Mile Mrksic, the commander of the Yugoslav army (JNA) who led the attack on the Croatian town, was found guilty of aiding and abetting the murder, torture and cruel treatment of the prisoners of war, who were taken from Vukovar hospital and killed.

Although Mrksic, 60, did not order the prisoners to be beaten or killed, judges at the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague ruled that by withdrawing his JNA guards he left the prisoners unprotected, knowing that the local Serb militias and paramilitaries harboured “intense animosity” towards them. The captured men were forced into buses and held overnight at a secluded pig farm at Ovcara. They were subsequently severely beaten and shot into a mass grave. The judges ruled that at least 194 were killed.

The former security officer of the division, Veselin Sljivancanin, 54, was sentenced to five years on charges of aiding and abetting torture, but was cleared of charges of extermination.

The evacuation of the hospital gained particular notoriety after the Serbs failed to live up to an agreement with the Red Cross and other international observers to monitor the surrender. When the agreed hour approached, an armoured Serb vehicle blocked the observers’ access across a bridge to the hospital while the prisoners were smuggled out in buses by another route.

Earlier Sljivancanin had been filmed talking to officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross in front of the hospital, promising to hand over all the patients safely. The footage has been broadcast repeatedly on Croatian television over the years.

More than 200 men were taken first to a Serb army barracks then to Ovcara, where they passed through a gauntlet of soldiers who “beat them with wooden sticks, rifle butts, poles, chains and even crutches”, the judgment said. Their guards formed “shifts of beaters”.

That night, November 20, Mrksic ordered the Serb army and military police to withdraw. The paramilitary forces took the men in small groups to an area near by and shot them.

“The crime of murder was committed during the night after the withdrawal of all military police from Ovcara, pursuant to the order of Mile Mrksic,” Kevin Parker, the presiding judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, said.

Of the JNA officers known as the “Vukovar Three”, the third, Miroslav Radic, was acquitted. All three defendants denied charges of murder, torture and extermination.

Mrskic and Sljivancanin were convicted under statutes related to war crimes, but both were acquitted of all counts categorised as crimes against humanity, since the court found that the prisoners were thought by their captors to be members of the Croatian military forces, not civilians.

The verdict was greeted with anger in Croatia. State-run radio said that it was “shocking for our public and for the families of the victims”. Vesna Bosanac, a doctor at the Vukovar hospital at the time, said: “There clearly is no justice for the Vukovar victims.”

Vukovar, a once-pretty, cosmopolitan town on the banks of the Danube, became known as the Stalingrad of Croatia after it was besieged for months by the Yugoslav army during the Croatian war of independence.

Much of the town was razed once it finally surrendered, and hundreds of residents, many of them civilians, were killed in the bombardment.

What was left of the Habsburg-era streets was still and silent. Rows of houses were reduced to piles of bricks, cars were riddled with so many bullet holes that they resembled sieves on wheels, and spent cartridge cases and unexploded shells lay everywhere.

The failure of the world to act to save Vukovar was regarded as a signal by the Serbian President, Slobodan Milosevic. With Nato, the EU and the UN apparently powerless to stop a war in the heart of Europe, Vukovar was a symbol not just of destruction but also a dark harbinger of the conflicts to come in Bosnia and Kosovo.

Fall of Vukovar

June 25, 1991 Croatia declares independence from Yugoslavia

August 25 Vukovar is bombarded by the Serb-dominated Yugoslav Army (JNA)

September 14 Croatian forces launch a counter-attack on JNA garrisons throughout government-held territory, including Vukovar. The JNA and Serb military begin a siege of the city. Vukovar is defended by a force of about 2,000, up to a third of them nonCroats. The attackers number 36,000

November 18 Fall of Vukovar

January 1, 1998Vukovar is returned to Croatia

Source, BBC, agencies

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