Serbian President Boris Tadic will on Thursday visit eastern Croatia, where he and his host, Croatian President Ivo Josipovic, will lay wreaths at Ovcara and Paulin Dvor, and meet in Vukovar with representatives of the families of Croats gone missing during the Homeland War and of the local Serb community, sources at the Office of the Croatian President confirmed on Tuesday.
Josipovic will welcome Tadic in Vukovar, after which the two presidents will hold a brief meeting in the offices of the city government. After that, they will visit Ovcara, the well-known place of suffering of Croatians in the 1990s Homeland War, where members of the former Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) and Serb paramilitary units on 20 November 1991, during the Serb occupation of Vukovar, killed 200 soldiers and civilians, mostly patients who had been brought there from the Vukovar Hospital. Presidents Josipovic and Tadic will lay wreaths in memory of the victims and give statements to the media.
They will then return to Vukovar, where they will meet representatives of the families of missing Croats. The meeting, according to the Office of the President, is also to be attended by Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor.
Josipovic and Tadic will leave Vukovar for Paulin Dvor, a community near Osijek where on 11 and 12 December 1991 members of the Croatian Army's 130th Brigade killed 19 civilians, of whom all but one were Serbs. The non-Serb victim was Hungarian.
The Croatian judiciary has prosecuted that war crime, sentencing Nikola Ivanic to 15 years in prison for it.
After Paulin Dvor, where they will also lay wreaths and give statements to the press, Tadic and Josipovic will return to Vukovar, where they will meet with representatives of the Serb community living in Vukovar and the surrounding area.
Tadic's visit to Vukovar is expected to end with a meeting with the Dutch Ambassador to Croatia since the Netherlands donated a ferry that now connects the two banks of the Danube River, at Vukovar and at Bac, in Serbia.
After the meeting, Josipovic is expected to see Tadic off to the ferry port, from where the Serbian president is expected to return to his country.
This is the first visit of a Serbian president to Vukovar and officials at the office of Croatian President Ivo Josipovic describe it as an important symbolic gesture that will contribute to relaxing Croatian-Serbian relations that are burdened by the past.
Tadic will pay an official visit to Croatia in late November, but both sides, according to a source from Josipovic's office, decided that Vukovar should be given the attention it deserved, which was why it was separated from Tadic's official visit that would be dominated by bilateral relations and the remaining outstanding issues between the two countries.
Officials at Josipovic's office described Tadic's visit to Vukovar as a logical course of events considering his previous visit to Srebrenica and "the statements he made there", adding that Ovcara "is another major place of suffering that could not have been avoided".
They expect that most Croatians will accept Tadic's visit to eastern Croatia as a step towards the improvement of Croatian-Serbian relations in the future, but are also prepared for possible protests by those who oppose Tadic's visit, describing protests as their legitimate right.
