From: U15231@uicvm.uic.edu
Newsgroups: soc.culture.bosna-herzgvna
Subject: Serbs Celebrate ''Liberation'' of Devastated Croatian Town
Date: 19 Nov 92 17:39:00 GMT
Article-I.D.: uicvm.92324.113900U15231
Organization: University of Illinois at Chicago



        VUKOVAR, Croatia (UPI) -- Hundreds of Serbs gathered Wednesday in the
war-blasted center of Vukovar to mark the first anniversary of its
capture, applauding vows by a paramilitary chief and a Yugoslav army
colonel from neighboring Serbia that the town would never be returned to
Croatia.
        ``We won't give up a square foot of this territory,'' declared
Vojislav Seselj, the president of the Serbian Radical Party and a member
of the Serbian assembly and rump Yugoslav Parliament.
        ``Serbia will never abandon you,'' said Seselj, whose paramilitary
Serbian Chetnik Movement has been accused by international human rights
investigators of committing atrocities against non-Serbs in last year's
Serb-Croat conflict in Croatia and the ongoing war in Bosnia-
Herzegovina.
        Seselj was addressing about 800 Serbs at a rally commemorating the
``liberation'' of Vukovar after a three-month siege by the Serb-
dominated Yugoslav army and Serbian paramilitary groups. Fighting left
the entire town of 50,000 in ruins and claimed an estimated 2,300
Serbian and Croatian lives. Hundreds of people, most of them Croats
taken prisoner, remain missing.
        Swept by chilly rains from dour skies, the rally took place on a
muddy, shellfire-ruined square by the Danube River, which forms the
Croatia-Serbia border.
        The crowd was framed by flame-blackened hulks of stores and office
buildings devastated in the fiercest fighting of the war, which was
halted Jan. 3 by a U.N.-brokered truce and the subsequent deployment of
a 14,000-strong U.N. peace-keeping force.
        An estimated 15,000 Serbian and Croatian civilians were trapped in
Vukovar, huddling in underground shelters to escape the daily storms of
steel loosed by Serbian forces in their bloody house-by-house advance
against Vukovar's Croatian defenders.
        Both sides are believed to have committed atrocities against members
of the rival ethnic group, civilian and military.
        Seselj shared a makeshift stage with Yugoslav army Col. Vesejlin
Slivancanin, who won fame in Serbia and infamy elsewhere on Nov. 19,
1991, by refusing in front of television cameras to allow an
International Red Cross evacuation of Croatian patients from Vukovar's
devastated hospital.
        According to a recent U.N. report, while Slivancanin blocked the
entrance of the facility, Serbian troops were hustling the patients out
a rear door.
        The bodies of some 170 patients are now believed to be buried in a
muddy field about 5 miles from the scene of the anniversary
celebrations, the site cordoned off by barbed wire and guarded by
Russian U.N. troops on orders of U.N. war crimes investigators.
        ``We will remain in our territory. This is our motherland,'' vowed
Slivancanin, who greeted the cheering crowd on behalf of the 1st
Motorized Guards Brigade, an elite Belgrade-based Yugoslav army
contingent that played a major role in the siege of Vukovar.
        The ceremony was attended by dozens of Serbian paramilitary fighters
bearing combat weapons, testimony to U.N. complaints of Serbian non-
compliance with the U.N. peace plan.
        Vukovar, where Croats had held a slight majority, was the hardest-won
piece of real estate captured by Serbian forces that overran 35 percent
of Croatia and proclaimed on those territories the independent
``Republic of Serbian Krajina.''
        Serbian leaders seek to merge their unrecognized ``state'' with rump
Yugoslavia despite a rejection of that option by the Geneva-based U.N.-
European Community peace conference.
        While some of Vukovar's residents commemorated Wednesday's
anniversary, others chose to stay away from celebratory art exhibits,
the rally and a subsequent military parade, seeing little reason to
rejoice.
        ``Vukovar was sacrified by both sides,'' said Olivera Rokvic, the
head of the devastated town museum and a survivor of the siege. ``Before
the war, Vukovar did not belong to Serbia or Croatia. We were in
between. We never bothered with nationality. That is why we were
sacrified.''
        Rokvic is among an estimated 20,000 people now living in the town and
nearby villages, 100 miles northwest of Belgrade. Many are Serbian
refugees from elsewhere in Croatia who took over the bullet-pitted,
barely habitable homes and apartments of Croats who fled.
        Since Vukovar's ``liberation,'' the rubble has been swept to the
sides of the pot-holed streets, children have returned to patched-up
schools and a new downtown bank and several cafes have opened.
        But, destruction abounds everywhere. Most streets have no electricity
or water, and there are few working telephones. Unknown numbers of
unexploded shells and landmines lie amidst rat-infested mountains of
rubble.
        Few people work. Although some production has been restored at
several factories, most live off humanitarian handouts.
        Rokvic dismissed promises by virtually bankrupt Serbia that it would
provide the funds and materials to rebuild the town, saying the future
remained desperately uncertain, the possibility of a new conflict
constantly looming.
        She gloomily predicted, ``The war is going to stop only when the
Serbs stop being Serbs and the Croats stop being Croats.''
Xref: sparky soc.culture.bosna-herzgvna:580 soc.culture.turkish:11827