Women in Black regarding 19th anniversary of crimes committed in Vukovar
November 18th, 2010 is the nineteenth anniversary of the fall of Vukovar, after the siege that lasted 87 days. On November 20th, 1991, after the fall of the city, the command of the JNA surrendered more than 200 prisoners and Croat civilians from the Vukovar hospital to the members of Territorial defence and paramilitary forces, who later killed prisoners at the Ovčara farm.
Except direct perpetrators, no one else was indicted for these crimes - especially their superiors, the officers of the former JNA. ICTY Judgement in "Vukovar Hospital" trial case, against Mile Mrksic, Veselin Sljivancanin and Miroslav Radic, significantly contributed to minimizing the role of the former JNA; hence, so far, the role of the JNA in the attack on Vukovar has not been adequately investigated.
President Tadić, who made the first steps towards reconciliation by going to Vukovar and apologizing to victims, must continue this policy with clear distance from the nationalist discourse and by concrete action, particularly by revealing the full truth about crimes committed in the name of the Serbian people. The authorities in Serbia have an obligation to secure the right to truth, the right to justice and the right to compensation for the victims of war crimes, if they want to demonstrate that they are indeed, not only declaratively, committed to European values.
We demand from Serbian representatives:
- • To reveal the full truth about the missing persons by opening archives of the Serbian Army, which holds the most reliable data on the missing, and to discover the locations of mass graves of Croatian victims in Serbia;
- • To establish accountability of the leadership of the former JNA for the aggression against Croatia and to initiate court proceedings for crime of urbicide in Vukovar, since the responsibility of civilian and military leadership of Serbia and Yugoslavia for the destruction of Vukovar was never investigated and established.
- • To initiate trial procedures for the establishment of concentration camps and for killing and torture of Croatian civilians and soldiers in the camps in Stajicevo, Begejci, S. Mitrovica, Aleksinac, Nis and Belgrade. Since the autumn of 1991, after the fall of Vukovar, thousands and thousands of Vukovar civilians and soldiers went through aforementioned and other camps in Serbia; Serbia still denies the existence of the camp although there are numerous testimonials about them.
- • To set the memorials at the camp sites in Stajicevo and Begejci (near Zrenjanin), and to organize and support other forms of symbolic reparations to victims and their families.
- • To re-examine attitudes about the wars of the nineties of the twentieth century and about the responsibility of Serbia for them - the truth about these events must become part of the formal education system and an undeniable historical truth in order to change the moral and value systems, and cultural patterns.
On the occasion on the 19th anniversary of crimes committed in Vukovar, on November 19th, Women in Black will attend the commemoration for the victims of these crimes, along with family members of victims and the citizens of Vukovar.
Belgrade, November 18th, 2010.