Talk:Gospić massacre/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Zawed (talk · contribs) 22:31, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

I will take this one on, comments to follow. Zawed (talk) 22:31, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

Lead

• "Most of them were arrested on 16–17 October, based on lists drawn up nearly a week beforehand." As Orešković and Norac did not draw up the lists, I suggest including a sentence on why the list was drawn up and who by. If you don't want to expand the lead that much, perhaps delete the reference to the lists.
  • Done (trimmed).

Background

• This sentence isn't clear to me "...specifically as the Battle of Gospić continuing through much of September." I would suggest rephrasing this portion of the paragraph to something like: "By the end of August the fighting intensified in Lika as well, including in Gospic where fighting continued through much of September". Then you have context for "the town" in the following sentence.
• "the bulk of town's population": "the bulk of town's its population"? (to avoid repetition of town).
  • Done.
• "As the Serb civilian population started to return in late September...": the Serbs were less than half the town's original population. Did the Croats not return as well? Perhaps delete the reference to "Serb" here.
  • Done.
• I don't think "Fifth Column" should be title case.
  • Lowercase now.
• "The Battle of Gospić was followed by the killing of civilians in Široka Kula by Serbian paramilitaries on 13 October, [16] which served as a pretext for the persecution of Serbs in Gospić.[13]" This sentence seems a bit "tacked" on here and out of place. It feels like it should open the "Killings" section, with a bit of rewriting, as a lead in.
  • Done.

Killing

• This section doesn't explicitly state that the arrests were based on the list mentioned in the background section.
  • Fixed.
• "The civilians, especially Serbs, were led away at gunpoint from bomb shelters." Two issues here: 1) the way this is worded suggests that a few civilians were not Serbs 2) what were they doing in bomb shelters? Presumably sheltering, but the fighting was over by that point?
  • 1) Exactly - some of them were Croats, 2) artillery bombardment of Gospić continued after the battle to control the city itself was concluded - the artillery attacks peaked around 1 November. I added info about continued bombardment to make more sense about the shelters.

Aftermath

• "24 additional corpses...": i don't think a number should start a sentence, try Twenty-four.
  • Done
• "Debelo brdo": brdo or Brdo?
  • Good catch. Fixed
• "Six of these had been buried in individual graves, and the other eighteen in a mass grave, but relatives of the six victims who had been interred individually, reburied the bodies elsewhere.": Suggest rewriting to better link the six victims and their reburial. For example, "Eighteen were buried in a mass grave while six others were buried individually, but these were disinterred and reburied elsewhere by relatives.
  • Reworded as suggested.
• "That led to sacking of the seven active duty officers, including Norac, by President Stjepan Mesić.": The reference to Norac here is redundant as he is mentioned again in the following sentence.
  • Removed the redundant mention.

Trial of Orešković et al.

• The "et al" of the heading should be in italics.
  • Fixed
• "The case was ultimately appealed all the way to the Supreme Court of Croatia in 2004, which upheld the first-instance convictions of Orešković, Norac and Grandić, as well as the acquittal of Rožić and Čanić. Orešković was sentenced to 15 years in prison, while Norac received a sentence of 12 years in prison. Grandić was imprisoned for a term of 10 years.[15] Rožić and Čanić were acquitted due to lack of evidence against them." It seems the order of these two sentences should be reversed, as the second sentence is about their convictions while the first is about their appeal against those convictions.
  • Reordered as suggested

Other stuff

• No issues with the references that I could see.
• No duplicate links.
• No disambig links.
• Checklink tool indicates one deadlink - refer cite 16 (but link appears to work OK for me).
  • Updated url to resolve this.
• Image tag OK.

I made a few corrections to what I thought were mistakes in spelling/grammar as I worked my way through the article, I don't think I altered the meaning of anything. I will check back in a few days. Zawed (talk) 23:27, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

Thank you very much for your time and effort volunteered to review this article. I believe I have addressed all the issues you raised above by now. Cheers--Tomobe03 (talk) 13:52, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

Looks good. I made a slight tweak to the reference to artillery bombardment, I hope it is OK. Passing as GA now. Zawed (talk) 22:56, 2 January 2014 (UTC)