Saborsko massacre
1991 massacre in Saborsko, Croatia
The Saborsko massacre (Pokolj u Saborskom, Operacija Saborsko) was the killing of 29 Croat residents of the village of Saborsko on 12 November 1991, following the seizure of the village in a Yugoslav People's Army (Jugoslovenska Narodna Armija – JNA) and Croatian Serb offensive during the Croatian War of Independence. The fall of the town occurred as part of a JNA and Croatian Serb operation to capture a Croatian-held pocket centered on the town of Slunj, southeast of Karlovac. While the bulk of the civilian population fled with the surviving Croatian forces, those who remained in Saborsko were rounded up and either killed or expelled. The bodies of the victims were retrieved from two mass graves and several individual graves in 1995.
The capture of Saborsko and the killing and expulsion of its civilian population was included in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) indictments of Milan Babić and Milan Martić, high-ranking officials of the Croatian Serb-declared wartime breakaway region of SAO Krajina. Following the war, the ICTY convicted Babić and Martić for their role in the events. Saborsko was subsequently rebuilt.
Background
In 1990, following the electoral defeat of the government of the Socialist Republic of Croatia, ethnic tensions between Croats and Serbs worsened. The Yugoslav People's Army (Jugoslovenska Narodna Armija – JNA) confiscated Croatia's Territorial Defence (Teritorijalna obrana - TO) weapons to minimize resistance. On 17 August, the tensions escalated into an open revolt by Croatian Serbs, centred on the predominantly Serb-populated areas of the Dalmatian hinterland around Knin, parts of the Lika, Kordun, Banovina and eastern Croatia.
The public source identifies “Saborsko massacre” as 1991 massacre in Saborsko, Croatia. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Saborsko, massacre and Croatia.
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This entry incorporates text from “Saborsko massacre” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.