COMMEMORATION HELD IN E. CROATIA FOR KILLED SOLDIERS, CIVILIANS

VUKOVAR, Nov 19 (Hina) - The 11th anniversary of the killing of 137 Croatian soldiers and civilians, who were executed after units of ex-Yugoslavia's federal army (JNA) and Serb paramilitary troops entered the Borovo Naselje suburb of the eastern town of Vukovar, was marked on Tuesday. #L# A commemoration was held in front of the ruins of the Borovo Commerce building on the premises of the local shoe factory Borovo, which during the 1990s war housed the in-patient clinic of Vukovar's general hospital. About 600 soldiers and civilians, including 200 with serious injuries, were at the in-patient clinic when the Serb paramilitaries got in, and 137 were killed, said Ivan Psenica, president of "Vukovar Mothers", an association of parents and families of abducted Croatian soldiers. Some were killed on the spot, some in central Borovo Naselje, while some were taken to the bank of the Danube River in Borovo, where they were executed, he said. More than a thousand people marking the Vukovar tragedy then marched down Borovo Naselje streets, headed for the Our Lady of Fatima church, demolished in the war, on whose ruins the chaplain of the army's fifth brigade, Alojz Kovacek, said mass. The Serb siege of Vukovar began in late August 1991, lasting almost 90 days, until the Vukovar defence was broken down on 18 November. Twenty-two thousand Croats and other non-Serbs were expelled from this eastern town. According to official data, 10,500 have come back. A dozen thousand Croatian soldiers and civilians passed through Serb concentration camps, while 620 persons from Vukovar-Srijem County, of whom most went missing in Vukovar, are still being traced. Nobody has yet accounted before the UN war crimes tribunal at The Hague for war crimes committed in Vukovar. The tribunal has indicted three former JNA officers. Yugoslavia has extradited only Mile Mrksic, a former guard brigade commander from Belgrade who has pleaded not guilty to every count of the indictment. The other two, Major Veselin Sljivancanin and First Lt. Miroslav Radic, are unavailable to the tribunal. (hina) ha sb