Memorialising the ‘Martyred City’: Negotiating Vukovar’s Wartime Past

Abstract

In 1991, the model Brotherhood and Unity city of Vukovar was surrounded by the Yugoslav National Army (JNA¹) and Serb paramilitary groups, who besieged it for three months leaving no building unscathed. Vukovar became Croatia’s ‘Stalingrad’. This battle for what has now become known as the ‘Martyred City’ or ‘Hero City’ marked the beginning of the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia and served as a harbinger of the urbicide which followed in Mostar and Sarajevo. Ethnically cleansed of Croats, Vukovar became a part of the selfproclaimed Republic of Serbian Krajina (RSK) (a set of discontiguous areas along what are today Croatia’s borders with Bosnia Herzegovina and Serbia, in which ethnic Serbs lived in large numbers Figure 7.1). After the Srebrenica massacre of Bosnian Muslims in July 1995, the army of the Republika Srpska located in Bosnia became the target of heightened NATO operations. Croatia took advantage of this shift in international opinion to launch its own military campaigns against the Krajina areas in what is today Croatia. It was the pressure on these Serb controlled areas on both sides of the modern border which led to the Erdut Agreement (for Eastern Slavonia) and the Dayton Agreement (for Bosnia and Herzegovina). Between 1995 and 1998, Vukovar was the only city of the RSK to be peacefully (re)integrated into the Republic of Croatia by the UN — all other RSK cities were taken by force by the Croatian army in the summer of 1995.