Eastern Slavonia was another front. The Serb minority living there (all areas being mixed there too) was used as fifth column against Croatia and in the interest of waging war for the preservation of the Serb-centered state of Yugoslavia. The heaviest one was the battle of Vukovar. The attackers found a fierce resistance from the part of Croats living there and for that reason battle lasted almost three months. The Serb-Yugoslav Army suffered heavy losses as well: more than one thousand dead, by their own admission. Some of the most brutal massacres (
1,
2,
3) were committed there (in the Eastern Slavonia in general), with many mass-graves still being dug out. Aside from Vukovar, another goal of the Yugoslav Army was to occupy
Osijek and
Vinkovci, another two major towns of Eastern Slavonia. They falied in it due to almost suprahuman efforts of the defenders of these two towns. especially brutal was the siege of Osijek, because of the indiscriminate shelling of civilian tragets, as the result of which about one thousand people were killed.
The occupied parts of Eastern Slavonia were reincorporated into Croatia through the process of the so-called "peaceful reintegration", supervised by the UN (1995-1997).
The most notoriously known and publicized (and for good reason) was the Battle for Vukovar.
The Battle of Vukovar was an 87-day siege of the Croatian city of Vukovar by a multitude of Serbian forces during the Croatian War of Independence in 1991.
During the three-month siege, the old city of Vukovar, located on the border of Croatia and Serbia on the Danube river, witnessed the most horrific devastation in its history, as well as numerous tales of human ingeniousness and endurance. The city was almost completely destroyed when it was finally occupied by the Serbian forces, and its Croat inhabitants exiled or killed.