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Joint Croat-Serb Police Begin Patrolling Slavonia
A U.N. spokesman in Vukovar, the biggest town of the oil-rich, fertile enclave bordering Serbia proper, told Reuterss the police force would eventually number up to 1,300. It was the first time Croats and Serbs had policed the area together since May 1991, when the first ethnic fighting broke out in Borovo Selo, near Vukovar. Croatian state radio quoted the U.N. administrator for the region, retired U.S. General Jacques Klein who attended an inauguration ceremony on a former front line, as saying patrols formally started to operate on Monday. "The police will be wearing neutral uniforms, neither Croat nor Serb, and will enforce law and order in the region," the spokesman said. But they would be paid from funds provided by the Croatian government, he added. Minority Serbs rebelled against Croatia's independence drive from former Yugoslavia in 1991, proclaimed their own state and expelled thousands of non-Serbs from the territory they controlled. Croatian troops stormed three Serb separatist enclaves last summer, sending almost 200,000 Serbs fleeing for safety to Serbia and Bosnia. Agreement on Eastern Slavonia was reached last December on the fringes of the Dayton peace talks for Bosnia. The accord envisages the region's peaceful reversion to Zagreb's rule, with the help of the U.N. administration and some 5,000 peacekeepers. After the opening of a vital motorway, restoration of telephone and transport communications, the area's demilitarisation, monitored by the U.N., was completed on June 21. More than 1,000 Croat and Serb policemen have finished special training courses held in the region or in nearby Hungary. The composition of the force is supposed to reflect the area's pre-war ethnic composition, the spokesman said. |
ZAGREB, July 1 (Reuters) - Joint Croatian-Serb police under U.N. administration on Monday began patrolling Eastern Slavonia, the last enclave in Croatia held by rebel Serbs, in a sign the area could make a peaceful return to Zagreb's rule.
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EASTERN SLAVONIA
History of Eastern Croatia
VukoWar, Where War Struck Slavonia Hardest
Basic Agreement on the District of Eastern Slavonia As signed November, 1995
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