Vukovar Hospital manager Vesna Bosanac, who was also at the helm of that institution during the war in 1991, on Wednesday said that only a few protocols from the hospital's documentation which Serbian President Boris Tadic recently gave back to the Croatian ministry of war veterans' affairs, were important, while other papers had no such relevance.
Showing the copies of the delivered documentation at today's news conference, she said the most important were three notebooks in which the hospital staff kept records of patients admitted to the hospital and treated until 18 November 1991, when the town fell into the hands of Serb rebels supported by the then Yugoslav People's Army (JNA).
Bosanac also singled out a list of 517 people killed in Vukovar while the town was under siege. She said that the list was made by Tomislav Hegedus, who was in charge of that in the hospital.
However, those four protocols are not the original hospital documentation, the return of which we demand, she said.
While recently visiting Vukovar, the Serbian President delivered to Croatian representatives 25 papers from the documentation seized by Serb forces during the occupation of eastern Croatia in the early 1990s.
Bosanac said that the hospital did not possess any original document from its archives as those papers were taken to the military hospital and the military court in Belgrade. The hospital insists on the return of documentation which was produced for each patient on 20 November, immediately after the Serb forces raided the town.
The hospital manager condemned Croatian Serb leader Vojislav Stanimirovic's claims that the hospital had been a place for hiding Croatian soldiers disguised as patients.
Branding such a statement as outrageous, she said that Stanimirovic showed disrespect for the suffering of Vukovar and for the victims in that city, including local Serb victims.
She recalled that on 20 November 1991, two days after the fall of Vukovar, 255 people, including the wounded, medical staff and civilians, were taken by the Serb forces from the hospital to the Ovcara farm outside the town. So far, it has been established that 200 of them were killed at Ovcara, and 55 are still unaccounted-for.
In those few days when the Serb paramilitaries and the JNA were raiding the city, the hospital was treating 450 wounded and patients, and of them 170 were serious or immobile patients. Besides, there were 350 medical staff members and their families and a high number of civilians who had sought shelter in the hospital.
All the time during the siege, we sent numerous appeals for help and the evacuation of the wounded as well as for the protection of the hospital against the incessant shelling. We managed to evacuate 174 wounded people, and the remaining patients were in the hospital when the town was occupied, Bosanac said.
