Š 2012 Helena Oliveira
Helena Oliveira
KUPARI
‘It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderes are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets’. -Voltaire
September 15,1991: Yugoslav Navy Ships Visible in The Area Around The Bay of Kupari (Croatia)
October 4,1991: A First Shot at The Hotels
October 18,1991: Several Hotels Damaged by Advancing JNA (Yougoslav Peoples’ Army) Forces
October 25,1991: Serbian Forces Push Up Coast Toward Dubrovnik
Serbian-dominated army and naval forces drove Croatian forces from coastal villages southeast of the besieged city of Dubrovnik today, pushing into positions just three miles from the Adriatic port's historic Old City walls.
Casualty figures from the fighting today were unavailable. At least 2,000 to 3,000 people have been killed and thousands wounded in the fighting in Yugoslavia since Croatia declared independence on June 25.
Under a barrage of shelling from landbased and seaborne artillery, army units mounted a successful amphibious assault on the beaches of Kupari, a village with a military resort. Croatian troops had driven attacking Serbian units from the village on Wednesday, 23rd.
Serbian officers said three days ago that the army would mount a decisive push to drive Croatian units from Dubrovnik, which has been completely surrounded by Serbian forces and without electricity and normal water and telephone service for three weeks.
The fighting today was reported to be the heaviest yet in the siege around the centuries-old stone town, whose population is about 90 percent Croatian. Continuing firefights were also reported among the hotels in the villages of Srebrano and Mlini.
"Croatian forces are back at the outskirts of the city," a deputy commander of the breakaway republic's National Guard, Davor Domazet, said in Zagreb, the Croatian capital.
In New York, United Nations officials said today that Unesco would send a delegation to Dubrovnik to try to save the historic Old City from destruction by appealing to the warring sides to honor international conventions on the protection of historic sites. European Community observers said many people today fled from mountainside villages above Dubrovnik and into the walled inner city. As fighting escalated in Dubrovnik and other regions around Croatia, the pro-Serb members of Yugoslavia's rump federal presidency announced that they would boycott a session of the European Community's peace talks on Yugoslavia in The Hague on Friday.
“The Yugoslav presidency cannot participate," the council's Vice President, Branko Kostic, said in a letter to the chairman of the European Community negotiating effort, Lord Carrington of Britain. "If there is no change in the manner in which this conference has been carried on until now, it brings into question the further participation of the Yugoslav presidency." The Serbian-dominated army, which still calls itself the Yugoslav National Army despite its now overt alignment with Serbia, vehemently denied again Croatian reports that its units shelled Dubrovnik's Old City on Wednesday. An army statement called the report "lies and fabrications�.