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Vukovar 1991 and Ovčara: The Men Who Were Not Civilians (Cold Files 009)
Updated: Sep 27
On the morning of 20 November 1991, a Yugoslav People's Army major called the doctors and nurses of Vukovar hospital to a meeting. While he held them there, soldiers moved through the wards and took roughly four hundred people out of the building. Men went to the side exits. Women and children to the main gate.
The hospital was supposed to be under the protection of the International Committee of the Red Cross. An agreement signed thirty-odd hours earlier said so in writing, and named the European Community's monitors as overseers. That morning the same major refused the Red Cross convoy passage and held it at a roadblock while the buses left town by another road.
At least 194 of the people on those buses were shot that night at a farm called Ovčara and bulldozed into a pit.
Sixteen years later an international tribunal ruled this was not a crime against humanity. Twenty-four years later the World Court ruled it was not genocide. Neither court said what most readers assume, and that is the file.
The eighty-seventh day
Croatia commemorates eighty-seven days of siege. The ICTY dates it from 25 August 1991 to the fall on 18 November, which is eighty-six counted inclusively and eighty-five elapsed. Eighty-seven works from a 24 August start, and that is where it comes from. Siniša Glavašević of Croatian Radio Vukovar opened his last despatch, live from inside the city on the day it fell, with "the picture of Vukovar at the 22nd hour of the 87th day." Not a commemorative invention: a count made by a man who was there, from a start a day earlier than the tribunal chose. The tribunal's own phrase, "a three-month siege," is the version nobody can argue with.
Vukovar town held 44,639 people in the 1991 census: 21,065 Croats, 14,425 Serbs, and 9,149 counted together as Yugoslavs and others, one in five of the town.
Against it came JNA and Serb Territorial Defence units peaking near 36,000 men. Defending were around 1,800, roughly 300 police and 1,100 volunteers alongside National Guard regulars, starting with hunting rifles. Vukovar consumed 55 to 60 percent of all the ammunition Croatia had.
The number nobody can source
Every account of Vukovar carries a destruction statistic. Over 85 percent of buildings unusable. More than 700,000 shells. Up to 12,000 rounds a day. Two and a half million projectiles. Only some of it holds.
The 700,000 is an estimate by Eric Stover and Harvey Weinstein. The 12,000 belongs to Horton and describes the final phase: multiply it across the siege and you get over a million, which is how you know it was never an average. The 2.5 million is a BBC figure covering the city and its surroundings and counting everything above 20mm. That is a different measurement, not a larger one.
The 85 percent does carry a footnote. It points at an IWPR dispatch that never mentions buildings. The standard scholarly treatment of the battle quantifies nothing.
What does exist is better. Blaine Harden filed from the ruins for the Washington Post on 20 November 1991: "Not one roof, door or wall in all of Vukovar seems to have escaped jagged gouges or gaping holes..." Chuck Sudetic filed for the New York Times the next day: "Not one of the buildings seen during a daylong outing could be described as habitable."
The dead, and who counts them
The Croatian Ministry of Defence put defender losses at 879 killed and 770 wounded. CIA analysts in Balkan Battlegrounds give 1,131 Croatian civilians killed. Independent estimates put total deaths near 3,000. Croatian commemoration says "more than 3,000 civilians," the same total with the military dead relabelled.
JNA losses are worse. The JNA admitted 1,279 dead across all of Croatia. The Serbian journalist Miroslav Lazanski put 1,103 at Vukovar alone, which would make one town almost the entire war. Croatia's chief of staff claimed 6,000 to 8,000 across eastern Slavonia. No independent count exists.
Serbs were being killed in Vukovar before the siege began. The Serb National Council, a Croatian Serb body, records estimates from several dozen to over 120, publishes 114 names with death dates from May 1991, and attributes the killings principally to forces under Tomislav Merčep. A Croatian government commissioner warned in August 1991 of "violent and repressive measures... violent arrests for interrogation, and even executions."
The agreement
Vukovar surrendered on 18 November. The evacuation agreement signed that night by Major General Andrija Rašeta for the JNA and Croatian health minister Andrija Hebrang put the hospital under ICRC control and gave the European Community Monitor Mission oversight of the whole operation. The ECMM had been in Croatia since July: unarmed men in white, driving unmarked white cars, mandated to collect information, monitor human rights and report violations. Nothing in that list is an intervention.
On the evening of 19 November the ICRC's Nicolas Borsinger talked his way into the hospital by claiming an appointment with a general. The next morning Major Veselin Šljivančanin refused the convoy passage. The trial judgement devotes a section of its findings to the blocking of ECMM and ICRC access.
Ovčara
About 300 of those taken from the hospital were loaded onto buses, held two hours at the JNA barracks, and driven under guard to a farm at Ovčara. They were stripped of valuables and forced through a gauntlet, beaten with sticks, rifle butts, poles, chains and crutches, and beaten again inside the hangar with iron rods. An excavator dug a pit that afternoon.
That evening Mile Mrkšić ordered the JNA military police guarding the prisoners withdrawn. Territorial Defence and Leva Supoderica paramilitaries took them out in groups of ten to twenty and shot them.
In 1996 a Physicians for Human Rights team led by Dr William Haglund exhumed the grave. They recovered 200 sets of remains: 198 male, two female, one of them heavily pregnant. Ninety-five percent had died of gunshot wounds, two-thirds of the wounds to the head. A peer-reviewed study reports 192 identified, and forty-eight of the Ovčara victims are still missing. Dr Vesna Bosanac, the hospital's director, testified in 2013 that 93 of the 193 identified victims had been patients in her hospital. The youngest named dead were sixteen and seventeen.
Seven numbers for one massacre
Ovčara is quoted as 194, 200, 255, 260, 261, 264 and 265. None of those is a mistake. They count different things.
The UN prosecutor's office alone used three: the Mrkšić indictment alleged at least 264, the Milošević indictment approximately 255, the Hadžić indictment approximately 260. The Humanitarian Law Center totals 265, including seventeen found in surrounding graves. Two hundred came out of the primary grave, and 261 is that 200 plus 61 presumed in graves not yet found. And 194 is what the Trial Chamber found proven.
The gap between charged, recovered and proven is not a contradiction. It is what a court is for. But it means anyone who writes "264 were murdered at Ovčara" is quoting an allegation as a finding.
Not a crime against humanity
On 27 September 2007 the ICTY convicted Mrkšić and Šljivančanin and acquitted Miroslav Radić outright. Every crimes against humanity count was dismissed against all three. The reason given at the time: the victims had been "specifically identified and selected because of their known, or believed, involvement in the Croatian forces in Vukovar. The Serb forces who mistreated the victims and murdered them acted on the understanding that the victims were prisoners of war, not civilians."
Almost no account goes past that sentence, and the sentence did not survive. In 2009 the Appeals Chamber held it was an error of law: the Trial Chamber "erred in law... in concluding that, for the purposes of Article 5 of the Statute, the victims of the underlying crime must be civilians."
Then it upheld the acquittal anyway, on a narrower ground. Article 5 requires the accused's acts to form part of an attack directed against a civilian population. The killers at Ovčara believed they were acting against the Croatian army, and that severed the connection.
There is a second turn in it. What the killers believed about these men cost the crimes against humanity counts. What the men actually were, prisoners, out of the fight, carried the war crimes counts under the laws and customs of war. The belief and the fact pointed opposite ways.
Helpers, not commanders
All three were charged under both individual and command responsibility. No command responsibility conviction resulted. No ordering. No joint criminal enterprise.
Mrkšić was convicted of aiding and abetting murder, torture and cruel treatment, for withdrawing the guard. Twenty years. Šljivančanin was convicted of aiding and abetting torture, for standing in the hangar and doing nothing, and given five. The Appeals Chamber added a murder conviction by omission and raised him to seventeen. A review in 2010, on new testimony from a JNA lieutenant colonel, vacated that conviction and cut him to ten. He was released in 2011 and later took a place in the leadership of Serbia's ruling party. Mrkšić died in custody in Portugal in 2015.
Three other men indicted over Vukovar died before judgement: Slavko Dokmanović, the town's former mayor, four days after his trial closed in 1998; Goran Hadžić, the last ICTY fugitive, in 2016; and Slobodan Milošević, charged over Croatia only in October 2001, ten years after the event. Genocide was never among his Croatian counts. Vojislav Šešelj, whose volunteers fought at Vukovar, was acquitted for Ovčara.
In Serbia the Ovčara cases ran fourteen years: indicted in 2003, convicted in 2005, quashed in 2006, retried in 2009, upheld in 2010, undone by a Constitutional Court fair-trial ruling and quashed again in 2014, defendants released pending retrial in 2015, final judgment in 2017. In all, 24 indicted, 11 convicted with sentences from two to twenty years, nine acquitted. Only direct perpetrators, nobody from the chain of command.
Not genocide either
On 3 February 2015 the International Court of Justice rejected Croatia's genocide claim by fifteen votes to two, and Serbia's counter-claim unanimously.
Croatia won the first half. The Court found that killings and serious bodily and mental harm had been inflicted on Croats in eastern Slavonia, and that these were genocidal acts. It lost the second. Intent to destroy the group had to be the only reasonable inference from the pattern of conduct, and it was not: the acts appeared aimed at forced displacement rather than physical destruction.
On Ovčara it wrote that "the conclusions of the ICTY indicate that the intent of the perpetrators of the ill-treatment at Ovčara was not to physically destroy the members of the protected group, as such, but to punish them because of their status as enemies, in a military sense."
Read that opening clause again. The second court did not arrive independently. It read the first and adopted its conclusion.
Neither court said Vukovar was not a crime against a people. The Hague accepted there was a widespread attack on Vukovar's civilians and held only that these killings could not be tied to it. The World Court found genocidal acts against Croats established and threw the claim out because the purpose was expulsion rather than destruction. What both said is narrower and colder. These men, on that night, were not killed as Croats. They were killed as prisoners.
What is true about the world watching
Vukovar was not the first mass atrocity in post-war Europe, or of its own war. Eighty died at Tovarnik in September 1991, seventy at Lovas in October, around a hundred Serb civilians at Gospić the same week, sixty-seven at Škabrnja and Nadin as Vukovar surrendered.
Nor did it simply happen on television. Alan Davis of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting records never persuading British broadcasters that Vukovar was worth covering, until the shelling of Dubrovnik, a tourist town, caught their attention. The daily record came from Croatian Radio Vukovar. Glavašević had broadcast on 9 November that "if Vukovar falls, and if its citizens die in the massacre, which is clearly the enemy's plan, then the culprit for this should first be sought in Zagreb." Two days after the eighty-seventh day he was killed at Ovčara, aged 31.
The defensible version is narrower and worse. Vukovar was the first atrocity Europe watched with its own monitors on the ground and its own signed agreement in its hands, and did nothing about. The Security Council's arms embargo, unanimous and under Chapter VII, arrived on 25 September while the siege ran, and applied equally to a side that had inherited an army and a side fighting with hunting rifles. UNPROFOR deployed in March 1992 and froze the result in place until 1998.
The town that is half a town
Vukovar's water tower still stands, fifty metres of shot concrete, and the memorial that operates it records 640 direct hits. The Memorial Cemetery holds 938 exhumed bodies under 938 white crosses, one of them a six-month-old.
In 1991 the town had 44,639 people. In 2021 it had 23,175. The category that collapsed is the third. Yugoslavs and others were one in five of Vukovar in 1991 and are one in fourteen now. Some of that group left. Most of it simply stopped being a box anyone ticks.
Croat and Serb children in Vukovar are still taught separately.
Sources consulted
ICTY, Mrkšić, Radić and Šljivančanin (IT-95-13/1): indictment, judgements, case information sheet
ICTY press release on the Mrkšić et al. judgement, 27 September 2007
ICJ, Croatia v. Serbia, Judgment of 3 February 2015
ICTY indictments of Slobodan Milošević (Croatia) and Goran Hadžić
Humanitarian Law Center, Ovčara case records
Serb National Council, Vukovar victims
Ekštajn, Kružić and Bašić, forensic study of the Ovčara grave, 2021
CIA, Balkan Battlegrounds, 2002
Blaine Harden, Washington Post, 20 November 1991; Chuck Sudetic, New York Times, 21 November 1991
BIRN, Last Despatches: Siniša Glavašević
Alan Davis, IWPR, 2021
Croatian Bureau of Statistics, 1991 and 2021 censuses
Next file: Malaya, 1948. Twenty-four unarmed villagers at Batang Kali, and the colonial emergency that wrote the template Kenya followed.
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