page_title: Battle of Vukovar
section_title: Commemorations and memorials
hierarchical_section_title: Battle of Vukovar / Commemorations and memorials
caption_attribution_description: Memorijalno groblje u Vukovaru
context_page_description: The Battle of Vukovar was an 87-day siege of Vukovar in eastern Croatia by the Yugoslav People's Army, 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 and civilian volunteers, against as many as 36,000 JNA soldiers and Serb paramilitaries equipped with heavy armour and artillery.
context_section_description: Signs of the battle are still widely apparent in Vukovar, where many buildings remain visibly scarred by bullets and shrapnel. The riverside water tower has been preserved in its badly damaged state as a memorial. The town hospital presents an exhibition and reconstruction of the conditions in the building during the battle. At Ovčara, the site of the massacre is marked by a mass grave and exhibition about the atrocity. Local guides, some of whom lived through the battle, offer tourists the opportunity to visit these and other sites on walking and bicycle tours.
  Every November, Vukovar's authorities hold four days of festivities to commemorate the town's fall, culminating in a "Procession of Memory" held on 18 November. This represents the expulsion of the town's Croat inhabitants and involves a five-kilometre (3.1 mile) walk from the city's hospital to the Croatian Memorial Cemetery of Homeland War Victims. It is attended by tens of thousands of people from across Croatia. Local Serbs have avoided participating in the Croatian commemorations, often preferring either to leave the town or stay indoors on 18 November. Until 2003, they held a separate, low-key commemoration at the Serbian military cemetery on 17 November. Such commemorations have been held on 18 November since then. The RSK-era term "Liberation Day" has been dropped, but Serbs also avoid using the Croatian terminology, instead calling it simply "18 November". The issue of how to remember the Serb dead has posed particular difficulties. Local Serbs who died fighting alongside the JNA were buried by the Croatian Serb authorities on a plot of land where Croatian houses had once stood. The gravestones were originally topped with a sculptural evocation of the V-shaped Serbian military cap, or šajkača. After Vukovar's reintegration into Croatia, the gravestones were repeatedly vandalised. The Serb community replaced them with more neutral gravestones without overt military connotations. Vukovar Serbs report feeling marginalised and excluded from places associated with Croatian nationalist sentiment, such as war monuments. The Croatian sociologist Kruno Kardov gives the example of a prominent memorial, a large cross made from white stone, where the Vuka flows into the Danube. According to Kardov, Serbs rarely if ever go there, and they feel great stress if they do. A Serb boy spoke of how he wanted to know what was written on the monument but was too frightened to go and read the inscription; one day he got up the courage, ran to the monument, read it and immediately ran back to "safety". As Kardov puts it, Vukovar remains divided by an "invisible boundary line ... inscribed only on the cognitive map of the members of one particular group."
  The battle is widely commemorated in Croatia. Almost every town has streets named after Vukovar. In 2009, the lead vessel of the Croatian Navy's two newly launched Helsinki-class missile boats was named after the town. The Croatian Parliament has declared 18 November to be the "Remembrance Day of the Sacrifice of Vukovar in 1991", when "all those who participated in the defence of the city of Vukovar – the symbol of Croatian freedom – are appropriately honoured with dignity."
  As a symbol of Croatia's national identity, Vukovar has become a place of pilgrimage for people from across Croatia who seek to evoke feelings of "vicarious insideness", as Kardov describes them, in the suffering endured during the country's war of independence. Some gather in front of the town's main memorial cross on New Year's Eve to pray as the year ends, though such sentiments have attracted criticism from local Croats for not allowing them to "rejoice for even a single night", as one put it. The town has thus become, in Kardov's words, "the embodiment of a pure Croatian identity" and the battle "the foundational myth of the Croatian state". This has led to it becoming as much an "imagined place", a receptacle for Croatian national sentiment and symbolism, as a real place. Kardov concludes that it is questionable whether Vukovar can ever once again be
caption: The Memorial Cemetery of Homeland War Victims was built between 1998 and 2000. It is marked with 938 marble crosses.
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