ZAGREB, November 4, 2018 - The central commemorative event marking the 27th anniversary of the fall of the eastern Croatian city of Vukovar into the hands of Serb rebels supported by the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) will be held on 18 November, mayor Ivan Penava has said.

The main commemoration will start outside the city hospital where 3,500 wounded people had been treated during a siege by the JNA and Serb paramilitary troops in 1991. Participants in the commemoration, including war veterans and families of the war victims, will march through the town and stop at the Memorial Cemetery where wreath-laying ceremonies will be held by top state officials.

On 19 November, the town will remember the victims killed in Vukovar's suburb of Borovo Naselje and on 20 November commemorations will be held in tribute to the victims tortured and killed in the Velepromet prisoner-of-war camp and at Ovčara.

The Velepromet camp was set up by the JNA and paramilitaries in the Velepromet company's compound in Vukovar's Sajmište district in mid-September 1991. About 10,000 prisoners passed through it and over 700 were killed, according Danijel Rehak, head of the association of former inmates of Serb-run concentration camps.

Ovčara was another site of atrocities committed by the occupying forces on 20 and 21 November 1991. The exact number of the people killed at Ovčara is unknown, but 194 cases have been documented before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The youngest victim was 16 years old and the oldest 77. The majority of victims were patients transported from the Vukovar general hospital to that farm, several kilometres away from the town.

Croatia's parliament decided in 1999 that Vukovar Remembrance Day would be observed on November 18, the day of the town's fall. Vukovar Remembrance Day is observed in memory of 18 November 1991 when the city's defence lines were broken after a three-month siege. The besieged town was defended by around 1,800 members of the National Guard Corps, police and volunteers of the self-organised Croatian Defence Force (HOS), organised into the 204th Croatian Army Brigade.

After the ravaged city fell into the hands of the JNA and Serb paramilitaries, around 22,000 local Croats and members of other ethnic groups were expelled and several thousand Croatian soldiers and civilians were taken to Serb-run prison camps. Numerous crimes were committed against the defence forces and civilians. According to data from the Vukovar Hospital, 1,624 Croatian soldiers and civilians were killed and 1,219 were wounded during the siege of the city. Around 3,600 Croatian soldiers and civilians were killed in the aggression on and subsequent occupation of the city.

Vukovar was peacefully reintegrated into Croatia in January 1998. The peaceful reintegration began in January 1996 with the assistance of the UNTAES (UN Transitional Authority in Eastern Slavonia, Baranja and Western Sirmium).

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ZAGREB, October 24, 2018 - The temporary principal of the Danube intercultural school in Vukovar, Zlatko Hegeduš, said on Tuesday that the project had not come to life yet because the construction of the school had not begun yet, with only the building for preschoolers built, and no parent has expressed interest in enrolling preschoolers.

ZAGREB, October 14, 2018 - The Vukovar-Srijem County Police Department said that the protest rally against inefficiency in war crimes prosecution, held in Vukovar on Saturday, drew around 9,000 people and was peaceful, with no reports of disturbance of public order.

ZAGREB, October 13, 2018 - A protest rally initiated by Vukovar Mayor Ivan Penava slightly over a month ago because of discontent with the work of state institutions in prosecuting war crimes started in that eastern town on Saturday afternoon.

ZAGREB, October 6, 2018 - A new playground for children was opened in the Adica park in the eastern Croatian town of Vukovar on Friday, the construction of which was financed by the Hungarian government within a project that foresees the construction of five kindergartens in Croatian towns with ethnic Hungarian population.

ZAGREB, October 6, 2018 - Vukovar Deputy Mayor Srđan Milaković from the ranks of the Serb minority said on Friday that ethnic Serbs from Vukovar too have reason to ask that a protest rally announced for October 13 be an incentive for state institutions, after 27 years, to shed light on the fate of all war victims, including Serb civilians, and to bring those responsible to justice.

ZAGREB, September 22, 2018 - The leader of the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) party and Prime Minister Andrej Plenković said on Friday evening that the party's main committee had concluded by consensus that all war crimes that had occurred in Croatia should be investigated, notably those in Vukovar and Ovćara, but that it did not want the protest Vukovar Mayor Ivan Penava planned to hold in that town over inefficiency in war crimes prosecution to be politicised or manipulated.

Minister Gabrijela Žalac and Commissioner Corina Creţa held a dialogue with citizens.

ZAGREB, September 19, 2018 - Prime Minister and Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) leader Andrej Plenković called on Tuesday for preventing politicisation and manipulation of Vukovar Mayor Ivan Penava's plan to organise a protest rally against inefficiency in war crimes investigations, stressing that Penava's plan had taken on dimensions in the public sphere that did not necessarily concern only the identification of war criminals.