Commemorations held at the Velepromet concentration camp and Ovčara

After enduring days of abuse many of the Croatians interred in the Velepromet concentration camp would be transferred to other camps within Serbia, such as Sremska Mitrovica, after which all trace of them was lost. 

Commemorations within the Homeland War Victims Remembrance Day continued in Vukovar on Monday at the Velepromet concentration camp. The Velepromet camp was established on November 16th of 1991 by the Yugoslav People's Army in the final days of the Battle of Vukovar during the Croatian War of Independence. Control over the facility was shared with Serb paramilitary forces. Originally an industrial storage site, the facility was located on the southern outskirts of the city, in close proximity to the JNA barracks. It consisted of eight warehouses surrounded by a wire fence.

After the fall of Vukovar there were 2 000 detainees in the camp, by March of 1992, when it was closed after the United Nations Protection Force deployed to the area, roughly ten thousand Croatian prisoners of war were interred in the camp. Detainees usually spent several days in Velepromet, during which they were routinely interrogated and beaten, while female inmates were raped systematically. As many as eight hundred of the inmates were killed in the camp, however, a precise figure is difficult to determine as it includes roughly seven hundred people are still listed as missing and presumed dead.

A commemoration was also held at the Ovčara farm on the outskirts of the city, where on November 20th Serb and JNA forces forcibly transferred the wounded civilians and defenders and the medical staff from Vukovar Hospital and summarily executed more than 260 of them and dumped them into a mass grave. The youngest victim was sixteen years old and the oldest eighty-four. Among those murdered at the Ovčara site were CroatianRadioTelevision journalist Siniša Glavašević and cameraman Branimir Polovina. Today's procession to the Ovčara memorial was led by the children of the Croatian soldiers who were killed there.

Source: HRT