In Croatia

April 6 brought another milestone in one of the longest-running war crimes processes in Croatia, when the County Court in the coastal city of Split sentenced two men to prison for war crimes against mainly Serb detainees at the city's 'Lora' military prison during the 1991-95 Croatian war.

View of the burning city of Dubrovnik, in Croatia, in November 1991, after air raids and artillery attacks by the Yugoslav Army. Photo: EPA/PETER NORTHALL

The Croatian Veterans' Ministry told BIRN that preliminary findings show that human remains discovered at an illegal landfill between the villages of Pacetin and Bobota near Vukovar are those of at least ten people who were middle-aged or older.

"No one will harvest the fruits of victory because there are none; all that is left is just the bitter taste of a hangover," said a report published in Belgrade-based Vreme magazine after the fall of the eastern Croatian town of Vukovar on November 18, 1991.

Ivica Bilaver was a 13-year-old schoolboy in the autumn of 1991, when his home village of Skabrnja, near the Croatian city of Zadar, became the focus of fighting between Croatian forces and the Yugoslav People's Army and other Serbian fighters.

Milos Cvetkovic's photographs of the siege and capture of Vukovar go on display at the EndzioHub gallery in central Belgrade on Thursday evening, 30 years after the eastern Croatian town fell to the Yugoslav People's Army and Serbian paramilitaries.

Today marks the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Croatian city of Vukovar into the hands of the former Yugoslav army. The city was captured after a three-month siege and virtually destroyed to the ground by round-the-clock bombing. The first war crimes in Europe after the end of the Second World War were committed here.

The Yugoslav People's Army, aided by Serb Territorial Defence forces and paramilitaries from Serbia, launched a full-blown attack on Vukovar in eastern Croatia on August 25, 1991, beginning a siege that would last for 86 days and leave around 3,000 soldiers and civilians dead before the town's defenders had to surrender.

Serbia's President Aleksandar Vucic on Friday rejected claims that he participated in a war crime in Croatia in 1991, after a Croatian newspaper reported that a trial witness testified that Vucic threatened him with death.

Vucic told media in Belgrade that he was in Croatia several times in the 1970s and 1980s as a child and a teenager, but not in 1991.

An artillery attack on Dubrovnik by Yugoslav forces in November 1991. Photo: EPA/PETER NORTHALL.