Serbian President Boris Tadic yesterday apologised for war crimes in Vukovar, the site of the bloodiest episode of the 1990s conflict in Croatia, on an historic reconciliation visit to the town.
“I am here to pay respects to the victims and to express words of apology and regret,” Mr Tadic said at the Ovcara memorial, a notorious site where around 200 people were gunned down and buried in a mass grave in 1991.
In the past year Mr Tadic and his Croatian counterpart Ivo Josipovic have visited several symbolic war sites in Bosnia and Croatia to honour the victims and expressed their regrets.
The European Union, which both Zagreb and Belgrade hope to join, is pressing for reconciliation in the former Yugoslavia which was torn apart by war in the 1990s.
“Today I am in Ovcara to honour all Croatians who were victims of crimes in Croatia,” said Mr Tadic, the first Serbian head of state to visit Vukovar since the end of the war.
“I’m doing it today in Croatia, I did it yesterday in Bosnia, and I will do it everywhere where innocent victims were killed because I believe this is the way to create the conditions for co-existence (and) reconciliation.”
“We will finish this process of reconciliation and Serbia and Croatia will be two friendly, neighbouring countries,” Mr Josipovic pledged.
The two Presidents also visited the village of Paulin Dvor where Croatian forces killed 18 Serbs and one ethnic Hungarian in December 1991, to honour Serb victims.
Before leaving Vukovar late yesterday, Mr Tadic also met with Croatian Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor.
Croatia’s proclamation of independence from the then Yugoslavia in 1991 sparked a four-year war with Belgrade-backed rebel Serbs who opposed the move. The conflict in Croatia left some 20,000 people dead.
Vukovar residents and war veterans hailed the Serbian leader’s apology but said it could not erase the wartime horrors of the three-month siege during which hundreds of people lost their lives.
“I welcome all this and it should have happened much earlier,” Sandra Horvatovic, 30, said.
Danijel Rehak, the head of an association of Croatian detainees in Serb wartime camps, said that Mr Tadic’s apology was “correct” but could not erase what happened.
“It is a nice gesture of the head of a state whose nationals committed war crimes here,” he said.
Mr Tadic dismissed any suggestion that his visit was forced upon him by international pressure.
“No one forced us to do this,” he told journalists, but added that he and Mr Josipovic were sending a message to the international community “that we are a part of the European system of values”.
Vukovar became notorious as the scene of the worst massacre of the conflict when some 200 people who had sought refuge in the town’s hospital, hoping that it would be evacuated in the presence of international observers, were herded by Serb troops to a pig farm in Ovcara and then gunned down.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), based in The Hague, has convicted two former Serb officers of the Belgrade-controlled Yugoslav army (JNA) for involvement in the massacre.
In the Vukovar region some 460 people are still missing while the number of war missing for the whole of Croatia is estimated at more than 1,000.