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The Battle of Vukovar ((クロアチア語:Bitka za Vukovar), (セルビア語:Битка за Вуковар, ''Bitka za Vukovar'')) was an 87-day siege of Vukovar in eastern Croatia by the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA), supported by various paramilitary forces from Serbia, between August and November 1991. Before the Croatian War of Independence the Baroque town was a prosperous, mixed community of Croats, Serbs and other ethnic groups. As Yugoslavia began to break up, Serbia's President Slobodan Milošević and Croatia's President Franjo Tuđman started to pursue nationalist politics. In 1990, an armed insurrection was started by Croatian Serb militias, supported by the Serbian government and paramilitary groups, who seized control of Serb-populated areas of Croatia. The JNA began to intervene in favour of the rebellion, and conflict broke out in the eastern Croatian region of Slavonia in May 1991. In August, the JNA launched a full-scale attack against Croatian-held territory in eastern Slavonia, including Vukovar. Vukovar was defended by around 1,800 lightly armed soldiers of the Croatian National Guard (ZNG) and civilian volunteers, against 36,000 JNA soldiers and Serb paramilitaries equipped with heavy armour and artillery. During the battle, shells and rockets were fired into the town at a rate of up to 12,000 a day.〔 At the time, it was the fiercest and most protracted battle seen in Europe since 1945, and Vukovar was the first major European town to be entirely destroyed since the Second World War.〔Borger, 2011〕 When Vukovar fell on 18 November 1991, several hundred soldiers and civilians were massacred by Serb forces and at least 31,000 civilians were expelled from the town and its surroundings.〔''Prosecutor v. Milosevic'', 23 October 2002〕 Most of Vukovar was ethnically cleansed of its non-Serb population and became part of the self-declared Republic of Serbian Krajina. Several Serb military and political officials, including Milošević, were later indicted and in some cases jailed for war crimes committed during and after the battle. The battle exhausted the JNA and proved a turning point in the Croatian war. A ceasefire was declared a few weeks later. Vukovar remained in Serb hands until 1998, when it was peacefully reintegrated into Croatia. It has since been rebuilt but has less than half of its pre-war population and many buildings are still scarred by the battle. Its two principal ethnic communities remain deeply divided and it has not regained its former prosperity. ==Background== Vukovar is an important regional centre on Croatia's eastern border, situated in eastern Slavonia on the west bank of the Danube river. The area has a diverse population of Croats, Serbs, Hungarians, Slovaks, Ruthenians and many other nationalities, who had lived together for centuries in relative harmony before the Croatian war. It was one of the wealthiest areas of Yugoslavia before the war.〔''Prosecutor v. Mrkšić, Radić & Šljivančanin – Judgement'', 27 September 2007, p. 8.〕 Vukovar's long-standing prosperity was reflected in one of Croatia's finest ensembles of Baroque architecture. The region underwent major demographic changes following the Second World War, when its ethnic German inhabitants were expelled and replaced with Serb and Montenegrin settlers from elsewhere in Yugoslavia. In the last Yugoslav census in 1991, the Vukovar municipality, which included the town and surrounding villages, was recorded as having 84,189 inhabitants, of whom 43.8 percent were Croats, 37.5 percent were Serbs and the remainder were members of other ethnic groups. The town's population was 47 percent Croat and 32.3 percent Serb. From 1945, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was governed as a federal socialist state comprising six newly created republics – Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia.〔BBC News, 28 January 2003〕 The current border between Serbia and Croatia was defined in 1945 by a Yugoslav federal government commission which assigned areas with a majority Serb population to the Socialist Republic of Serbia and those with a Croatian majority to the Socialist Republic of Croatia. This left a large Serb minority in Croatian territory. After Yugoslavia's leader Josip Broz Tito died in 1980, long-suppressed ethnic nationalism revived and the individual republics began to assert their authority more strongly as the federal government weakened. Slovenia and Croatia moved towards multi-party democracy and economic reform, but Serbia's authoritarian communist President Slobodan Milošević opposed reform and sought to increase the power of the communist Yugoslav government. In 1990, Slovenia and Croatia held elections that ended communist rule and brought pro-independence nationalist parties to power in both republics. In Croatia, the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) party of Franjo Tuđman took office, with Tuđman as President. Tuđman's programme was opposed by many members of Croatia's Serbian minority, towards whom he was overtly antagonistic.〔 The Serb Democratic Party (SDS) of Croatia, supported by Milošević, denounced the HDZ as a reincarnation of the nationalist-fascist ''Ustaše'' movement, which had massacred hundreds of thousands of Serbs during the Second World War.〔Bassiouni, Annex IV. 28 December 1994〕 From mid-1990, the SDS mounted an armed rebellion in Serb-inhabited areas of Croatia and set up the self-declared Serbian Autonomous Oblast of Krajina with covert support from the Serbian government and Serbian paramilitary groups. The Croatian government rapidly lost control of large areas of the republic.〔 In February 1991, the Krajina Serbs declared independence from Croatia and announced that they would unite with Serbia. Other Serb communities around Croatia also announced that they would secede and established their own militias. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Battle of Vukovar」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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