The Battle of Vukovar was an 87-day siege of Vukovar in eastern Croatia by the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA), supported by various paramilitary forces from Serbia, between August and November 1991. Before the Croatian War of Independence the Baroque town was a prosperous, mixed community of Croats, Serbs and other ethnic groups. As Yugoslavia began to break up, Serbia's President Slobodan Milošević and Croatia's President Franjo Tuđman began pursuing nationalist politics. In 1990, an armed insurrection was started by Croatian Serb militias, supported by the Serbian government and paramilitary groups, who seized control of Serb-populated areas of Croatia. The JNA began to intervene in favour of the rebellion, and conflict broke out in the eastern Croatian region of Slavonia in May 1991. In August, the JNA launched a full-scale attack against Croatian-held territory in eastern Slavonia, including Vukovar.
Vukovar was defended by around 1,800 lightly armed soldiers of the Croatian National Guard (ZNG) and civilian volunteers, against as many as 36,000 JNA soldiers and Serb paramilitaries equipped with heavy armour and artillery. During the battle, shells and rockets were fired into the town at a rate of up to 12,000 a day. At the time, it was the fiercest and most protracted battle seen in Europe since 1945, and Vukovar was the first major European town to be entirely destroyed since the Second World War. When Vukovar fell on 18 November 1991, several hundred soldiers and civilians were massacred by Serb forces and at least 20,000 inhabitants were expelled. Overall, around 3,000 people died during the battle. Most of Vukovar was ethnically cleansed of its non-Serb population and became part of the self-declared proto-state known as the Republic of Serbian Krajina. Several Serb military and political officials, including Milošević, were later indicted and in some cases jailed for war crimes committed during and after the battle.
The battle exhausted the JNA and proved a turning point in the Croatian War of Independence. A cease-fire was declared a few weeks later. Vukovar remained in Serb hands until 1998, when it was peacefully reintegrated into Croatia with the signing of the Erdut Agreement. It has since been rebuilt but has less than half of its pre-war population and many buildings are still scarred by the battle. Its two principal ethnic communities remain deeply divided and it has not regained its former prosperity.
Background
Vukovar is an important regional centre on Croatia's eastern border, situated in eastern Slavonia on the west bank of the Danube river. The area has a diverse population of Croats, Serbs, Hungarians, Slovaks, Ruthenians and many other nationalities, who had lived together for centuries in relative harmony before the Croatian War of Independence. It was also one of the wealthiest areas of Yugoslavia before the conflict. Vukovar's long-standing prosperity was reflected in one of Croatia's finest ensembles of Baroque architecture.
The region underwent major demographic changes following the Second World War, when its ethnic German inhabitants were expelled and replaced with settlers from elsewhere in Yugoslavia. In 1991, the last Yugoslav census recorded the Vukovar municipality, which included the town and surrounding villages, as having 84,189 inhabitants, of whom 44 percent were Croats, 38 percent were Serbs and the remainder were members of other ethnic groups. The town's population was 47 percent Croat and 33 percent Serb.
From 1945, Yugoslavia was governed as a federal socialist state comprising six newly created republics – Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia. The current border between Serbia and Croatia was defined in 1945 by a Yugoslav federal government commission which assigned areas with a Serb majority to the Socialist Republic of Serbia and those with a Croat majority to the Socialist Republic of Croatia. Nevertheless, a sizable Serb minority remained within the latter.
Following the death of Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito in 1980, long-suppressed ethnic nationalism revived and the individual republics began to assert their authority more strongly as the federal government weakened. Slovenia and Croatia moved towards multi-party democracy and economic reform, but Serbia's authoritarian communist President Slobodan Milošević opposed reform and sought to increase the power of the Yugoslav government. In 1990, Slovenia and Croatia held elections that ended communist rule and brought pro-independence nationalist parties to power in both republics. In Croatia, the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) of Franjo Tuđman took power, with Tuđman as president.
Tuđman's programme was opposed by many members of Croatia's Serb minority, towards whom he was overtly antagonistic. Croatia's Serb Democratic Party (SDS), supported by Milošević, denounced the HDZ as a reincarnation of the nationalist-fascist Ustaše movement, which had massacred hundreds of thousands of Serbs during the Second World War. From mid-1990, the SDS mounted an armed rebellion in Serb-inhabited areas of Croatia and set up the self-declared Serbian Autonomous Oblast of Krajina, with covert support from the Serbian government and Serbian paramilitary groups. The Croatian government rapidly lost control of large swathes of the republic. In February 1991, the Krajina Serbs declared independence from Croatia and announced that they would unite with Serbia. Other Serb communities in Croatia also announced that they would secede and established their own militias.
Prelude to the battle
The conflict between Serbs and Croats spread to eastern Slavonia in early 1991. On 1 April, Serb villagers around Vukovar and other towns in eastern Slavonia began to erect barricades across main roads. The White Eagles, a Serbian paramilitary group led by Vojislav Šešelj, moved into the Serb-populated village of Borovo Selo just north of Vukovar. In mid-April 1991, an incident occurred in the outskirts of Borovo Selo when three Armbrust man-portable recoilless guns were fired on Serb positions. There were allegations that Gojko Šušak, at the time the Deputy Minister of Defence, led the attack. There were no casualties, but the attack aggravated and deepened ethnic tensions. On 2 May, Serb paramilitaries ambushed two Croatian police buses in the centre of Borovo Selo, killing 12 policemen and injuring 22 more. One Serb paramilitary was also killed. The Battle of Borovo Selo represented the worst act of violence between the country's Serbs and Croats since the Second World War. It enraged many Croatians and led to a surge of ethnic violence across Slavonia.
Shortly after, Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) units moved into Borovo Selo. The army's intervention was welcomed by local Croatian leaders, but Croatia's Deputy Interior Minister, Milan Brezak, accused the JNA of preventing the Croatian police from dealing with the paramilitaries. Gun battles broke out across the region between rival militias. In Vukovar, Croatians harassed Serb residents, sometimes violently. Croatian police forcibly took over the local radio station, Radio Vukovar, and Serb members of the station's ethnically mixed staff were fired and replaced with Croats. Serb militias systematically blocked transport routes in the predominantly Serb-inhabited countryside around Vukovar, and within days the town could only be reached by an unpaved track running through Croat-inhabited villages. The atmosphere in Vukovar was said to be "murderous".
On 19 May 1991, the Croatian government held a nationwide referendum on a declaration of sovereignty. In Vukovar, as elsewhere in Croatia, hardline Serb nationalists urged Serbs to boycott the referendum, while moderates advocated using the poll to register opposition to independence. Many local Serbs did vote. The referendum passed with 94 percent nationally voting in favour.
Violence in and around Vukovar worsened after the independence referendum. Repeated gun and bomb attacks were reported in the town and surrounding villages. Sporadic shelling of the city started in June, and increased in intensity throughout the summer. Borovo Naselje, the Croatian-held northern suburb of Vukovar, sustained a significant shelling on 4 July. Serb paramilitaries expelled thousands of non-Serbs from their homes in the municipality. Croatian paramilitaries, led by Tomislav Merčep, attacked Serbs in and around Vukovar (in what was later investigated as the 1991 killings of Serbs in Vukovar). Between 30 and 86 Serbs disappeared or were killed, and thousands of others fled their homes. A Croatian government representative in Vukovar told the Zagreb authorities that "the city is again [the] victim of terror, armed strife and provocative shoot-outs with potentially unfathomable consequences. The policy pursued so far has created an atmosphere of terror among the Croatian and Serbian population." Gunmen from both sides burned and looted hundreds of houses and farms in the area.
The conflict blurred ethnic lines. Many Serbs who had lived in Vukovar for generations – known as the starosedioci or "old settlers" – resisted the propaganda coming from Belgrade and Knin and continued to live peacefully with their Croatian neighbours. The došljaci, or "newcomers", whose families had relocated from southern Serbia and Montenegro to replace the deported Germans after 1945, were the most responsive to nationalist appeals. The journalist Paolo Rumiz describes how they "tried to win their coethnics over to the patriotic mobilization, and when they had no success with that, they killed them, plundered their property and goods, or drove them away. The old settlers would not let themselves be stirred up against other nationalities." When Croats fled the fighting they often gave their house keys for safekeeping to their Serb neighbours, whom they trusted, rather than to the Croatian police. The political scientist Sabrina P. Ramet notes that a distinctive feature of the war in eastern Slavonia was "the mobilization of those who were not integrated into the multi-cultural life of the cities against urban multi-culturalism." Former Belgrade mayor Bogdan Bogdanović characterised the attack on Vukovar as an act of urbicide, a deliberate assault on urbanism.
Opposing forces
By the end of July 1991, an improvised Croatian defence force in Vukovar was almost surrounded by Serbian militias in the neighbouring villages. Paramilitaries, JNA soldiers and Serbian Territorial Defence (TO) conscripts were present in Serb-inhabited areas. There was a small JNA barracks in Vukovar's Sajmište district, surrounded by Croatian-controlled territory. Although the two sides were commonly referred to as "Croatian" and "Serbian" or "Yugoslav", Serbs and Croats as well as many other of Yugoslavia's national groups fought on both sides. The first commander of the attacking force was Macedonian. Serbs and members of other ethnicities made up a substantial portion of the Croatian defenders.
Croatian forces
The Croatian force in Vukovar comprised 1,800 men assembled from units of the newly created Croatian National Guard, including 400 members of the 3rd Guards Brigade and the 1st Guards Brigade. The 4th Battalion of the 3rd Guards Brigade was stationed in the city from the beginning, while elements of the 1st Guards Brigade arrived retreating from elsewhere in western Syrmia. In addition to the guardsmen there were 300 police officers and 1,100 civilian volunteers from Vukovar and nearby communities. The bulk of the force had initially been organised in an improvised manner. In late September 1991, it was formally reorganised as the 204th Vukovar Brigade, also known as the 124th Brigade.
Volunteers arrived from other parts of Croatia, including 58 members of the far-right paramilitary Croatian Defence Forces (HOS), backed by Dobroslav Paraga's extreme nationalist Croatian Party of Rights (HSP). The defenders were a cross-section of Vukovar society. As many as one-third were non-Croats, including Serbs, Ruthenians, Hungarians and members of other ethnicities. About 100 of the defenders were Serbs. "We had complete confidence in them", one Croatian veteran later said. "They defended Vukovar alongside us."
Croatian forces in Vukovar were commanded by Mile Dedaković, a former JNA officer who had joined the ZNG and volunteered to take charge of the town's defences. During the battle, he went by the nom de guerre Jastreb ("Hawk"). Gojko Šušak, by now Croatia's Minister of Defence, used Dedaković as an example of how Serbs were also taking part in Vukovar's defence. The claim was later reprinted by independent sources, but was false.
Dedaković's second-in-command, Branko Borković, was another former JNA officer who had volunteered for service in Vukovar. The two men established a unified command structure, organised the defenders into a single brigade and implemented an integrated defence system. A defensive ring of six sectors was established, each assigned to one unit within the 204th Brigade. The defenders used a network of cellars, canals, ditches and trenches to redeploy around the sectors as needed.
At the start of the battle, they were poorly armed and many were equipped only with hunting rifles. They relied mostly on light infantry weapons, but obtained a few artillery pieces and anti-aircraft guns and improvised their own land mines. They also obtained several hundred anti-tank weapons such as M79 and M80 rocket launchers, but were critically short of ammunition throughout the battle. The capture of JNA barracks somewhat improved the situation as Vukovar had the priority in the supply of arms. It is estimated that the Vukovar battlefield consumed around 55–60 percent of all ammunition available to the Croatian forces.
Yugoslav and Serb forces
The attacking force included JNA soldiers conscripted from across Yugoslavia, members of the TO, Chetniks (Serbian nationalist paramilitaries), local Serb militiamen and units of the Yugoslav Navy and the Yugoslav Air Force. At their peak, the Yugoslav and Serb forces in the vicinity of Vukovar numbered about 36,000. They were equipped with heavy artillery, rockets and tanks and supported by aircraft and naval vessels on the Danube.