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Serbian leader apologises at Croatia massacre site
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Serbian leader apologises at Croatia massacre site
AFP - Friday, November 5
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VUKOVAR, Croatia (AFP) - – Serbian President Boris Tadic Thursday apologised for war crimes in Vukovar, the site of the bloodiest episode of the 1990s war 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," Tadic said at Ovcara memorial, a notorious site where around 200 people were gunned down and buried in a mass grave in 1991.
"By admitting the crimes, apologising for them and regretting them we are creating possibilities for forgiveness and reconciliation," he added.
Tadic was in Vukovar with his Croatian counterpart Ivo Josipovic to pay tribute to victims of the conflict, 19 years on from the start of a three-month siege during which hundreds of people lost their lives.
"Many barriers will have to be broken to reach a real reconciliation between Croat and Serb people ... which should be our ultimate goal."
His visit is the first to Vukovar by a Serbian head of state since the end of the war.
"We will finish this process of reconciliation and Serbia and Croatia will be two friendly, neighbouring countries," Josipovic pledged.
Croatia's proclamation of independence from the former 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.
While some in Vukovar hailed the visit there was also anger at Tadic's gesture which many dismissed as political manoeuvring.
Several dozen protesters lined the road to the Ovcara memorial on the outskirts of town where Tadic spoke, holding banners reading, "You Cannot Wash Away Our Blood" and "Apologies But No Regrets".
Tadic dismissed any suggestion that this visit was forced upon him by international pressure.
"No one forced us to do this," he told journalists.
However, Tadic said that he and Josipovic, whose countries both seek European Union membership, 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 Serbia itself another 14 people, former army officers and paramilitaries, were also convicted for the killings.
At the memorial site, dozens of victims' relatives held candles and prayed ahead of the arrival of Tadic and Josipovic.
"I consider the arrival of President Tadic an act of violence because we are still looking for our missing but the only way to answer to violence is with prayer," Vilma Vibovic, who still has three missing family members, told journalists.
In the Vukovar region some 460 people are still missing while the number of war missing for the whole of Croatia is estimated at over a thousand.
Tadic met with families of Croats still reported missing since the war and handed over documents related to the evacuation of the hospital. After the fall of the town all of the hospital's documentation and patient files disappeared. Families of the missing hope these papers can shed light on what happened to their loved ones.
"There is no reason ... for the truth not to be revealed. I brought a part of the documents from the Vukovar hospital and we will continue to search for all other documents," Tadic promised.
After Vukovar's fall, during which it was virtually razed, some 22,000 non-Serbs were expelled. After the war, the town and its region were placed under United Nations administration and reintegrated into Croatia in 1998.
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