Talk:Battle of Vukovar/Archive 2

Fair use rationale for Image:UCK NLA.jpg
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BetacommandBot (talk) 11:24, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

Tomislav Mercep
"As the situation in Eastern Slavonia deteriorated, Serb and Croatian[citation needed](source these Croatian paramilitary units please,otherwise it will go) paramilitary groups mounted a sporadic campaign of violence and intimidation against each other and against civilians. In Vukovar itself the local militia commander, Tomislav Merčep, gained a reputation for brutality against local Serbs and was eventually removed from his post by the Croatian government. At least 80 Serb civilians were claimed to have been killed or disappeared in these incidents.[6]

The source provided for this accusation is a tabloid,not a newspaper or anything reliable.Please provide ICTY document-link or something reliable where that statement is confirmed.--(GriffinSB) (talk) 10:02, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

I gave you 4 days to provide a reliable weblink to confirm this. I'm removing it.--(GriffinSB) (talk) 16:29, 27 April 2008 (UTC)


 * I have never contributed to this article, but I applaud ChrisO's efforts to achieve a good NPOV article here. The Feral Tribune was highly regarded among Western journalists as one of the few (if not the only) truly independent news sources in Croatia during the Tudjman era. You may consider it a tabloid, but it has won many prestigious international awards.  This same information has also appeared in other Croatian news publications within the past few years (some, like those in Globus, are available in English).  Rather than simply deleting all of this information, why didn't you add another source if you did not care for Feral Tribune?   A good faith editor always looks for good supporting sources before deleting something he considers to be badly sourced.


 * Regional Report: Vukovar Serb Killings Investigated (Hedl recently received a Knight International Award for excellence in journalism.)


 * I ran across this article on Mercep based on a declassified CIA report. I think this same story was also released by HINA (Croatian news service).
 * Actual declassified CIA report


 * I see you have also removed other pieces of information without mentioning it on the talk page, such as the information about the municipal assembly. Would you care to explain why you have removed these other portions of the article?  Civilaffairs (talk) 21:52, 8 May 2008 (UTC)Civilaffairs

It says that dozens of Serbs are said to have been murdered by Croatian paramilitaries shortly before Vukovar fell.Said by who???There must be more info about these events. But the thing i had problem with is that someone tried to put this in to the prelude for battle to ones more try to whitewash/minimize/"justify" warcrimes comitted by Serbian forces.

municipal assembly??? I don;t know what you're talking about.Please explain.--(GriffinSB) (talk) 22:40, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

Prisoners
How many Croatian comabatants were captured and how many survived captivity? --Captain Obvious and his crime-fighting dog (talk) 13:07, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

Not many soldiers survived. The remaining number of soldiers were executed at Ovcara farm site.

Also, if any commander was captured, he should get. --Captain Obvious and his crime-fighting dog (talk) 13:34, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

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Protect article!
This article should be protected from editing to deal with vandalism. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dvatel (talk • contribs) 12:30, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Protection needed
Well, it's really obvious that this articly need protection! —Preceding unsigned comment added by AurgelmirCro (talk • contribs) 15:35, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Oh, GOD!!!
People, this is really moronic - I mean, using croatian source for number of JNA soldiers is really apsurd. 80 000??? Are you all that crazy? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.150.79.36 (talk) 06:33, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

What are we supossed to do? Are we supossed to use Serbian sources which claimed that Croats were bombing themselves, stealed organs and throw newly born children to lions ? Sorry...Serbian JNA is not trustworthy... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.138.83.246 (talk) 22:02, 13 March 2010 (UTC)

Casualties inconsistency
The numbers of Serb casualties vary greatly between the different language versions of the article. Especially the numbers of destroyed armoured vehicles and aircraft. This needs to be brought in line. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.138.154.65 (talk) 20:16, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

Multiple unaddressed article issues
-- Cirt (talk) 12:09, 22 November 2010 (UTC)
 * 1) The lead of this article is too short. It does not adequately summarize the entire articles contents and function as a standalone brief on the subject. It fails WP:LEAD.
 * 2) The lead requires cleanup, the lede/intro should not contain the large and awkward blockquote formatting - that should be lower in the main article body text, and then summarized in the lede, per WP:LEAD.
 * 3) The article needs referencing improvements. Multiple cites are needed throughout. The article fails WP:V policy in many places.

Genocide
The article lacks information about the massacres committed against the Serb population in Vukovar by the Ustashe that provoked the JNA to intervene. It was like in WW2. The following article has been published by the US-based International Strategic Studies Association. The ISSA article also deals with the anti-Serb propaganda campaign.

"December 31, 1992 Hiding Genocide

Croatia has resumed its "liquidation" of Serbs, while arguing that "ethnic cleansing" is a Serbian creation

"The Big Lie" technique is alive and well. Croatia has used the media and skilful image manipulation to hide its renewed genocide against the Serbs while at the same time ensuring that Serbs are themselves wrongly accused of the same type of crime, and more. Editor-in-Chief Gregory Copley reports from the Balkans. ... The late 1991 battle for Vukovar was portrayed in the Western media as a battle between heroic Croatian defenders against overwhelming Yugoslav (ie: Serbian) modern military might. Significantly, as in World War II Germany when the concentration camp ovens kept burning as the Allied forces swept toward them, Croats in Vukovar from June 1 to November 23, 1991, were busy exterminating those Serb families who had not been able to flee. It was for this reason that the JNA — the Yugoslav Army — fought back into Vukovar.

At least 1,000 Serbs, mostly women, old people and children, were shot, knifed, axed or bludgeoned to death systematically, one-by-one, in two main centers; one the Borovo Footwear Factory, the other the Rowing Club of Vukovar. Many of the bodies were dumped into the Danube, left to float down to Belgrade. And in many instances, the Croats took pictures, or recorded the deaths. One visiting Croat female journalist, during the Vukovar fighting, unfamiliar with firearms, asked one of the young gunmen to cock a pistol for her so that she could feel what it was like to kill a Serb. She shot, indiscriminately, an old Serb woman who was standing under Croat guard.

One Serb, Branko Stankovic, was captured after being wounded in the leg by Croat forces. He was taken to a hospital where he was forced to make a television broadcast for Croatian television, saying how well he and other prisoners were being treated. He was then taken out and killed. Photographs of his tortured, mutilated body were subsequently found. So, too, were a significant variety of specially made implements for torturing and killing.

Vukovar has seen it before: Between August 8 and September 16, 1942, some 10,000 Serbs were killed and scores of thousands more were tortured by their Croat captors.

But the Vukovar tragedy of 1991 is but one of thousands of new killings which have occurred during the past year or so of independence in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. There were similar atrocities in the Croatian town of Gospic in mid-October 1991. And in Glina, another World War II massacre site revisited by Ustaše in December 1991. And Kupres. There, 1,036 Serbs were killed in World War II under the orders of the Ustaše (who killed 889 of the Serbs), by Italian troops and by German troops. A still unknown number of Serbs were butchered by several Croatian military formations, the HOS, ZNG and foreign mercenaries, in early April 1992.

What is significant is that the slogans of the Croats are those of the Ustaše of World War II and pre-World War II. The weapons used for ritual killing are also, symbolically, virtually the same. The knife is a favorite, and many special knives were made during the Vukovar killings. These, along with the Serb victims, were found later."

http://web.archive.org/web/20060102132846/http://128.121.186.47/ISSA/reports/Balkan/Genocide.htm

James Harff, of PR firm Ruder Finn that was hired by the Tudjman regime and the Izetbegovic regime, explained the anti-Serb propaganda campaign in an interview with a French journalist in 1993:

"President Tudjman [of Croatia] was very careless in his book "Wastelands of Historical Reality". Reading this writtings, one could accuse him of of antisemitism. In Bosnia, the situation was no better: President Izetbegovic strongly supported the creation of a fundamentalist Islamic state [there] in his book "The Islamic Declaration". Besides, the Croatian and Bosnian past was marked by a real and cruel anti-semitism. Tens of thousands of Jews perished in Croatian camps. So there was every reason for intellectuals and Jewish organizations to be hostile towards the Croats and Bosnians. Our challenge was to reverse this attitude. And we succeded masterfully."

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=James_Harff —Preceding unsigned comment added by 190.79.189.199 (talk) 14:30, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

new external link
I haven't vetted the external link section lately, so there could be more junk, but the new addition is just egregious:


 * Hiding Genocide - Article on Croatian crimes in Vukovar by the International Strategic Studies Association

It needs to be explained how it is a reliable source, what with the date and starting off with the Ustaše... --Joy &#91;shallot&#93; (talk) 15:59, 24 January 2011 (UTC)