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Attribute
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Review Comment
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| 1. Well-written:
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1a. the prose is clear, concise, and understandable to an appropriately broad audience; spelling and grammar are correct.
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Lead
- suggest The battle was initiated when a platoon of the Croatian National Guard (Zbor narodne garde – ZNG) was ambushed by Croatian Serb forces while conducting a reconnaissance patrol.
 Y
- suggest and
then surrendered,Y
- was it a platoon conducting a recon, or a recon platoon?
- suggest The fate of the reconnaissance platoon was not known to Croatian authorities for months, adding fuel to an already volatile atmosphere in the city of Bjelovar, where the ambushed unit was originally based. This tension erupted a week later with the blockade and capture of the Yugoslav People's Army (Jugoslovenska Narodna Armija – JNA) in Bjelovar.Y
- to launch
the Operation Medak PocketY
Background
- suggest In January 1991, Serbia, supported by Montenegro and Serbia's provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo, unsuccessfully tried to obtain the Yugoslav Presidency's approval for a JNA operation to disarm Croatian security forces.Y
- suggest the JNA request was refused on 15 MarchY
- suggest The threat gradually caused the JNA toY
- suggest with the first fatalities
- suggest declared their intention to amalgamate the areas under their control with SerbiaY
- suggest Croatia doubled its police numbersY
- suggest The most effective part of the Croatian police force was the 3,000-strong special police, comprising twelve battalions organized along military lines.Y
- suggest There were also 9,000–10,000 regionally organized reserve police in 16 battalions and 10 independent companies, but they lacked weapons.Y
- suggest
As aIn responseY
- by merging the special police battalions "merging" seems a strange way of describing it, given the 12 battalions totalled 3,000 and the ZNG was 8,000-strong. Perhaps expanding the special police battalions?Y
- suggest ending sentence with brigades, then new sentence Under Ministry of Defence control and commanded by retired JNA General Martin Špegelj, the four guards brigades comprised approximately 8,000 troops.Y
- for consistency, I suggest referring to the regional police as reserve policeY
- suggest The
regionalreserve police, also expanded to 40,000, was attached to the ZNG and reorganized into 19 brigades and 14 independent battalions.Y
- suggest fully
armedequipped with small armsY
- "no command and control structure" - above brigade, I assume?
- suggest At the time, the Croatian weapon stockpileY
- suggest To replace the personnel lost to the guards brigades, a new 10,000-strong special police was established.Y
Prelude
- beyond the control ofY
- drop "encompass" and "extended"Y
- Parkac?Y
- suggest This development threatened to interdict Croatian use of the Varaždin–Osijek road as the road was within range of Croatian Serb artillery near SlatinaY
- SAO Western Slavonia should be in full initially
- suggest and expandedY
- the Croatian capitalY
- suggest SAO Western Slavonia comprised no major settlements. In order to address this deficiency, the forces of SAO Western Slavonia launched an offensive early on 19 August. The objectives of the offensive were to capture the towns of Grubišno Polje, Daruvar, Pakrac and Lipik, and consolidate the territory of SAO Western Slavonia.Y
- suggest The offensive failed after the arrival of Croatian reinforcements from Zagreb and Bjelovar, but the line of control remained in close proximity to the four towns.Y
Timeline
- suggest On 2 September, the ZNG deployed A Company, 1st Battalion, 105th Infantry Brigade to Pakrac in order to reinforce the defences of the police stationed in the area.Y
- suggest On 8 September, A Company's reconnaissance platoon was tasked to use an improvised armoured personnel carrier (APC) and scout the area around the village of Kusonje.Y
- suggest replacing "assist and allow retreat of" with "extract"Y
- suggest The relief force consisted of the rest of A Company, supported by the "Omega" special police unit, regular police, and ZNG reinforcements from Virovitica.Y
- suggest The reinforcements were unable to reach the embattled reconnaissance platoon, which was running low on ammunition. The stalemate continued until the morning of 9 September, when Croatian Serb forces used explosives to demolish a portion of the house in which the reconnaissance platoon had sought cover.Y
- suggest Eleven members of the reconnaissance platoon had been killed during the fighting, and the remaining seven had run out of ammunition. They surrendered to the Croatian Serb forces which had surrounded the house, but were then killed by their captors.Y - their description as PWs (as distinct from detainees or something similar) has a legal meaning which may not have applied to them. It is also sourced from a Croatian newspaper, and should therefore be left out unless there is a reliable non-Croatian source that describes them as such.Y (this has been removed)
Aftermath
- suggest of the fate
- suggest the sentence beginning The uncertainty... be modified in a similar way as the suggestion regarding this subject in the lead
- suggest Details of their deaths
- suggest Croatian forces recaptured Kusonje on 30 December during Operation Papuk-91, and their bodies were exhumed in January 1992. Along with the soldiers, the bodies of 23 civilians were also exhumed from a mass grave in the village of Rakov Potok. The soldiers
and civilians were re-interred in Bjelovar on 5 February 1992.
- suggest According to the JNA intelligence reports, during the period from the exhumation to the re-interment, 32 Serb-owned houses in Bjelovar were demolished in retribution for the killings.
- following the arrival
- suggest dropping "Regardless,"
- These included
- drop In those circumstances,
- 10:20 is automatically the morning, suggest dropping the "However," and going with At 10:20 on 8 September
- of
the UNPROFOR
- suggest All those killed were members of the ZNG 105th Brigade
- came on the heels
- suggest deleting "made" and changing the rest to resulted in the Croatian government losing its patience with the situation. This contributed to the launching of Operation Medak Pocket the following day.
- suggest using "people" instead of "persons"
- were the people prosecuted convicted in absentia? What were their names? Given the siege and the executions are notable, the perpetrators should be named.
- The source I found appears to be very reliable at establishing that the trials/convictions took place, but it does not say what were the names of the perpetrators (only initials of the names are given) or were the trials in absentia or not. A source which is less than reliable (no editorial oversight AFAIK) [1] indicates the trials took place in absentia - but I'm reluctant to use anything from that source. I'll see if there's anything else (reliably sourced) available on those points and include it in the passage.--Tomobe03 (talk) 12:55, 4 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
- I managed to find some info in the archive of the Supreme Court [[2]]. Unfortunately, the publicly available archive does not contain full names of defendants or even convicted people, but it indicates that the four were in custody since 14 May or 16 May 1995 (i.e. they were not tried in absentia), that the trial was completed in 1998 and that the Supreme Court decided on the appeals on 4 May 1999. I also learned the number of the case file "I Kž-354/1998-5", so hopefully there will be names of those convicted somewhere.--Tomobe03 (talk) 13:40, 4 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
- containing the names
- of the civilian
- In 2014, a feature film Number 55 was released, based on the 1991 events in Kusonje.
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1b. it complies with the Manual of Style guidelines for lead sections, layout, words to watch, fiction, and list incorporation.
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- see above suggestions for prose in the lead
- I ran a script to fix dashes
- suggest the use of language templates
- Done. I applied either Croatian or Serbian depending on who were the particular force reporting to, therefore for example Serbian (Jugoslovenska Narodna Armija) rather than Croatian version (Jugoslavenska Narodna Armija) for the JNA, and Croatian (Teritorijalna obrana) rather than Serbian (Teritorijalna odbrana) for the TO.--Tomobe03 (talk) 13:05, 4 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
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| 2. Verifiable with no original research:
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2a. it contains a list of all references (sources of information), presented in accordance with the layout style guideline.
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2b. reliable sources are cited inline. All content that could reasonably be challenged, except for plot summaries and that which summarizes cited content elsewhere in the article, must be cited no later than the end of the paragraph (or line if the content is not in prose).
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2c. it contains no original research.
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see comment on PW
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| 3. Broad in its coverage:
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3a. it addresses the main aspects of the topic.
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the perpetrators should be named Given the apparent difficulty in naming the perpetrators, I believe that this subcriteria is now met.
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3b. it stays focused on the topic without going into unnecessary detail (see summary style).
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4. Neutral: it represents viewpoints fairly and without editorial bias, giving due weight to each.
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see comment on PW
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5. Stable: it does not change significantly from day to day because of an ongoing edit war or content dispute.
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| 6. Illustrated, if possible, by media such as images, video, or audio:
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6a. media are tagged with their copyright statuses, and valid non-free use rationales are provided for non-free content.
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- The image File:Kusonje.jpg is almost certainly not the work of the uploading editor, just look at the date and the fact that it exists on several websites, including mup.hr/89103.aspx, which was probably the original one. It appears from my understanding of the website that MUP approval must be sought before re-use.
- I had no idea that the image was featured at the MUP site - and the site offers no information on their copyright policy, so I'm removing the image for the time being. I'll try to find out more about MUP copyright policy for starters and see what can be done then.--Tomobe03 (talk) 10:54, 4 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
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6b. media are relevant to the topic, and have suitable captions.
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- I have a query about the caption for the photograph, but I won't worry about it unless it can be shown it is PD
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7. Overall assessment.
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Placing on hold for seven days for comments to be addressed Passing, well done.
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