On 18 November 1991, Serb rebels, and JNA troops crushed the Vukovar defence, entered this eastern Croatian town and took 260 persons -- wounded people, who had been treated in the hospital at the time, as well as civilians and medical staff -- from the hospital and killed 200 of them at the Ovcara pig farm on 20 November. Another 60 victims are still unaccounted-for.

According to hospital records, 3,470 wounded people were admitted to this health-care institution during the siege in 1991 and more than 2,500 operations were performed.

Present at this year's commemorations are President Ivo Josipovic, Parliament Speaker Josip Leko, Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic and General Mladen Markac, who was on Friday cleared of war crimes by the UN Tribunal in The Hague was immediately released from the tribunal's detention centre. In attendance are many MPs, government officials, Catholic Church dignitaries, including Apostolic Nuncio Alessandro D'Errico, as well war veterans and citizens who arrived in Vukovar from all parts of Croatia.

The procession will continue from the hospital to the memorial cemetery, some five kilometres away.

Vukovar Remembrance Day is held on 18 November on the anniversary of the town's fall to besieging Yugoslav army and Serb paramilitary forces in mid-November 1991.

According to the records of the town hospital, a total of 1,624 people were killed and over 2,500 were wounded during the three-month siege. After the fall, 5,000 members of the defending units and civilians were captured and kept in concentration camps, and 22,000 Croats and other non-Serbs were forced to leave the area. Vukovar was peacefully reintegrated into Croatia in January 1998. The peaceful reintegration began in January 1996 with the assistance of the UNTAES, UN Transitional Authority in Eastern Slavonia, Baranja and western Sirmium, which accomplished its key objective of peacefully reintegrating Eastern Slavonia, Baranja and Western Sirmium into Croatia in January 1998.