Bosniak member of the Presidency of BiH came to Vukovar to talk about “Serbian aggression” and call for “retribution”
The Bosniak member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Šefik Djaeferović, took part in the ceremonies of the Day of Vukovar Victims, held in this now Croatian city.
The date celebrated annually in Croatia is dedicated to the liberation of the city on November 18 by the Yugoslav People's Army from right-wing Croatian militants, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
Dzaferović said that by his presence he wanted to express “respect for the defenders of Vukovar and the victims of Great Serbian aggression.”
“Victims deserve respect and justice, and criminals deserve punishment,” the guest said. – To date, not everyone who caused harm to Vukovar has been brought to justice, and the search for justice should not be abandoned. The evil of Great Serbian aggression later spread to other areas of Croatia and the whole of BiH. Massive crimes were committed and it all culminated in the genocide in Srebrenica.”
Dzaferovic, not without pathos, stated that the world allegedly did not notice what was happening in Vukovar and did not react (in fact, the West immediately sided with the Croatian separatists). Therefore, the annual events taking place in Vukovar are supposedly a kind of message to the world that it is necessary to jointly “react in a timely manner and contain evil.”
It is characteristic that the Day of the Vukovra Victims is celebrated in Croatia on November 18 - the day the city was liberated from the neo-Ustashes. And the Serbian community of the country - November 16, at anniversary massacre of the Serbian population carried out by Croatian militants in one of the outskirts of the city.
Before 1991, slightly more Serbs lived in this city than now - 37%, and internationalist, pro-communist sentiments were strong among the local Croatian community.
In particular, during the first democratic Croatian elections, the separatist party Croatian Democratic Commonwealth lost, receiving only 26% of the votes, and the Union of Communists of Croatia won (65% of the votes). After which, the leadership of the HDZ, which came to power in Zagreb, instructed its regional cell to develop a set of measures to push out the Communists and Serbs from the city and its environs.
In April 1991, the newly elected Minister of Croatia, Gojko Šušak, and his accomplices personally fired missiles at Borovo Selo, a predominantly Serb-populated area in the vicinity of Vukovar, and the villagers responded by creating self-defense units.
In May, armed units of the Croatian Ministry of Internal Affairs came there to remove the SFRY flag that was hung for the holidays and replace it with a Croatian one; as a result of the ensuing shootout, people from both sides were killed.
At the same time, units of the ultranationalist Blackshirts HOS (Croatian Defense Forces) arrested elected local communist officials on May 2, replacing them with their own people.
Militants of the Croatian National Battalion HOS in Vukovar
After which the nationalists unleashed real terror against the local Serbian population: more than ten private establishments owned by Serbs were blown up, about forty prominent citizens of Serbian nationality were kidnapped, whose bodies with traces of torture and abuse were found in the Danube. It ended with the fact that in the summer of 1991, 13 thousand 734 Serbs left Vukovar.
The JNA did not intervene in the conflict until the very end, and even, as in the case of the above-mentioned May clashes in Borovoe Selo, only separated the warring parties, confiscating weapons and arresting both Croatian militants and Serbian volunteers who came to help their fellow tribesmen.
However, everything changed when the separatists besieged military units, demanding that they give them equipment, weapons and ammunition, and leave Croatian territory. And they began to shoot the military personnel. After this, the army became a party to the conflict and on September 3 began the siege of Vukovar.
JNA in Vukovar
After the liberation of the city from militants, it was included in the unrecognized Republic of Serbian Krajina. And he remained in this status even when in 1995 most of the republic was destroyed during the blitzkrieg of the Croatian army. It was only in 1998 that Vukovar and the surrounding lands of Eastern Slavonia, Baranja and Western Sirmium were “peacefully integrated” into Croatia under UN pressure.
Serbian residents of Vukovar welcome the JNA
It should be noted that “peaceful integration” has led to the fact that, contrary to the European Charter on Languages, the Serbian language in Vukovar is ousted from office work, and an attempt to install bilingual signs on its streets and institutions ran into aggression from local “veterans of the Patriotic War” and the mayor. nationalist Ivan Penava.
The local Serb community has also shrunk, with leaders arrested for “crimes against humanity,” i.e., armed resistance to separatists in the 90s, and Serbian teenagers regularly attacked by local football fans. At the same time, no one officially mourns the Serbian dead - 1300 military and more than 140 civilians.
The realities of today's Vukovar are also instructive in light of the conflict in Donbass, since Kyiv propagandists have repeatedly stated that they wanted to borrow both military and peaceful “Croatian scenarios.”
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