Dalmatian anti-Serb riots of May 1991

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The anti-Serb riots in Dalmatia was an act of rioting that took place in the Croatian cities of Zadar and Šibenik on 2 May 1991. Croatian civilians vandalized and destroyed a lot of property of ethnic Serbs in both cities, but nobody was killed in the violence.

1 Background
2 The riots
3 The aftermath
4 See also
5 References

[edit] Background

Tensions between Croats and Serbs increased steadily through 1990 and 1991 following the electoral victory of Croatia's nationalist Croatian Democratic Union union party, led by Franjo Tuđman. Many Serbs were deeply unhappy about the prospect of living in an independent Croatia, fearing a re-run of the genocide of Serbs by the Second World War era Nazi puppet state the so-called Independent State of Croatia. These sentiments were always emphasised in public speeches by local Serb leaders like Jovan Rašković, Milan Martić, Milan Babić and by propaganda coming from Milošević's regime.

In the summer of 1990, they took up arms in the heavily Serb-populated Krajina region of Croatia, just inland from Dalmatia, sealing roads and effectively blocking Dalmatia from the rest of Croatia. The insurrection spread to the eastern region of Slavonia in early 1991, when paramilitary groups from Serbia itself took up positions in the region and started to expel non-Serbs from the area. On 1 May 1991, paramilitaries associated with the Serbian Radical Party killed a number of Croatian policemen in the Borovo Selo massacre and mutilated their bodies. This was, at the time, the bloodiest single incident in the Croatian conflict, and it caused widespread shock and outrage in Croatia. The killings produced an immediate upsurge in ethnic tensions. ^[1]

The day after the incident in Borovo, one Franko Lisica, the police chief of Polače near Benkovac in northern Dalmatia, was killed by Serbs^[2] This incident created new tensions in his home town of Bibinje near Zadar, where angry local Croats set fire to several properties of local Serbs.

[edit] The riots

Soon after these events, a group of younger people from Bibinje went to Zadar to participate in a demonstration against the Serb insurrection. The demonstration grew into a riot, and around a hundred properties were damaged, belonging to ethnic Serbs, or to Yugoslav companies such as those of JAT. Because there were many broken windows in the city centre streets, the next day the Zadar newspaper "Narodni List" printed the headline Zadarska noć kristala literally meaning "Zadar night of crystal" (intended to be a pun on kristalna noć, the Croatian translation of Kristallnacht)..^{[citation needed]}

Demonstrations were also organized in the city of Šibenik, where they involved another large group of Croats. Those protests also turned violent, with Serb-owned businesses and vehicles being attacked and destroyed.

The number of properties destroyed was reported to have been at least 168 ^[3]. A number of individual Serbs were also assaulted.^{[citation needed]}

The violence was reported to have lasted for several hours, without the police taking control. ^[4] ^[5]

[edit] The aftermath

The Yugoslav communist government later accused local HDZ officials of having instigated the violence. It claimed that

[The] action was organized by a number of the HDZ activists and the highest-ranking officials in Zadar, in the presence of Vladimir Šeks, deputy Speaker of the Croatian Parliament and Petar Šale - both of them among the highest-ranking HDZ officials at the time.^[6]

The events in Zadar were not widely reported at the time in the Western media, though the Serbian media cited the pogrom as an example of anti-Serb feeling in Croatia.^{[citation needed]}, of which the October 1991 Gospić massacre is perhaps the most notorious. It was cited in a similar context by the former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milošević during his war crimes trial. ^[7] It has been claimed .^{[citation needed]} that it was a deliberate attempt to "ethnically cleanse" the region. In this vein, these riots were characterized as a pogrom or as a Kristallnacht..^{[citation needed]}

In July, JNA and Serb forces launched the attack on Croatian-populated Dalmatia. Zadar and Šibenik will be the cities in Dalmatia most heavily hit by Serb attacks, where hundreds will be killed.