ZAGREB, January 14, 2019 – Vukovar Mayor Ivan Penava said Monday, ahead of the 21st anniversary of the peaceful reintegration of Croatia’s Danube region, that there was a continuity of the Great Serbia policy in Croatia, adding that Vukovar was “the epicentre of the creeping Great Serbia aggression.”
He said an example of this was the fact that Independent Democratic Serb Party president and MP Milorad Pupovac had, in 2013, supported war crimes arrestees. “What should one say when that same person visited war criminals in jail in 2016 after their verdict became final and after they were given a combined sentence of 138 years?” Penava asked, adding that “this cannot be a coincidence.”
Numerous delegations laid wreaths and lit candles at the memorial grave of Homeland War victims in Vukovar on Monday on the occasion of the 21st anniversary of the peaceful reintegration of the Danube region, which was completed during the term of the United Nations Transitional Administration of Eastern Slavonia (UNTAES) on 15 January 1998. Croatia is observing the 21st anniversary of the peaceful reintegration tomorrow.
It was the Erdut Agreement, which was signed on 12 November 1995, that enabled the peaceful restoration of Croatian sovereignty over the Croatian Danube region which was under the control of Serb paramilitaries and rebels since the launch of the Great Serbia aggression against that part of Croatia in 1991.
The Erdut Agreement on eastern Slavonia, Baranja and western Srijem was signed on 12 November 1995 in Erdut and Zagreb. It was signed by the then presidential chief-of-staff, Hrvoje Šarinić, the head of the Serb negotiating team, Milan Milanović, and the then US Ambassador to Croatia, Peter Galbraith, and UN mediator Thorvald Stoltenberg as witnesses. The treaty marked the beginning of the UN’s two-year transitional administration in the area during which Croatia restored its sovereignty over the temporarily occupied parts of Osijek-Baranja and Vukovar-Srijem counties, which enabled reconstruction in the area ravaged in the Great Serbia aggression on Croatia and the return of refugees.
The Erdut agreement was reached by Croatian President Franjo Tuđman and Serbian President Slobodan Milošević at a peace conference in Dayton, Ohio. The 14-point document provided for a two-year transitional period under UN supervision, a transitional administration, formation of a multi-national police force, local elections, and demilitarisation 30 days after the deployment of international peacekeepers. Seven provisions of the agreement dealt with human rights, refugee return, and property restitution or compensation.
The UNTAES mission was created under UN Security Council Resolution 1037 of 15 January 1996 and ended on 15 January 1998.
Two Croatian military operations in 1995 – Operation Flash, which was conducted in May that year in western Slavonia, and Operation Storm, that liberated the largest portion of the occupied territories – paved the way for the Erdut agreement and subsequently for the UNTAES mission.
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