Erdut massacre

Erdut killings
Erdut Erdut on the map of Croatia, JNA/Croatian Serb-held areas in late 1991 are highlighted in red
Location	Erdut, Croatia
Date	10 November 1991 – 3 June 1992
Target	Hungarian and Croat civilians
Attack type	Mass murder, ethnic cleansing
Deaths	37
Perpetrators	SAO SBWS Territorial Defence Forces, Serb Volunteer Guard

The Erdut killings were a series of murders of 37 Hungarian and Croat civilians in the village of Erdut, Croatia committed by Croatian Serb forces and Serb Volunteer Guard paramilitaries between November 1991 and June 1992, during the Croatian War of Independence. Twenty-two Hungarians and 15 Croats were killed. The first killings occurred on 10 November 1991, when twelve civilians died. Eight more were killed over the following several days. Five more civilians were killed on 10 December, and another seven on 16 December. Four others were killed on 21 February 1992 and the final one was killed on 3 June. The bodies of these victims were either buried in mass graves or thrown into nearby wells.

Most of the victims were exhumed in 1998, after the area reverted to Croatian control following the signing of the Erdut Agreement in 1995. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) charged several Serbian and Croatian Serb officials, including Slobodan Milošević, Jovica Stanišić, Franko Simatović and Goran Hadžić, for their alleged involvement in the killings. Milošević and Hadžić died before their trials could be completed. Stanišić and Simatović were initially acquitted, but their acquittals were overturned on appeal, and they are being retried.

In 1990, following the electoral defeat of the government of the Socialist Republic of Croatia by the Croatian Democratic Union (Croatian: Hrvatska demokratska zajednica, HDZ), ethnic tensions between Croats and Serbs worsened. The Yugoslav People's Army (Jugoslovenska Narodna Armija – JNA) confiscated the weapons of Croatia's Territorial Defence (Teritorijalna obrana - TO) forces to minimize resistance. On 17 August, 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. This revolt was followed by two unsuccessful attempts by Serbia, supported by Montenegro and Serbia's provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo, to obtain the Yugoslav Presidency's approval for a JNA operation to disarm Croatian security forces in January 1991.