Regardless of its military outcome, the siege of Dubrovnik is primarily remembered for the large-scale looting by JNA troops and the artillery bombardment of Dubrovnik, especially its Old Town. The reaction of the international media and media coverage of the siege reinforced an opinion, already taking shape since the fall of Vukovar, that the conduct of the JNA and the Serbs was barbaric and intent on dominating Croatia, regardless of the destruction of priceless cultural heritage that occurred in the process. Serbian authorities thought the international community had no moral grounds to judge because they did not interfere when hundreds of thousands of Serbs were killed in Croatian concentration camps during World War II. Besides the protests made by Mayor Zaragoza, Vance and the ECMM, 104 Nobel Prize laureates published a full-page advertisement in "The New York Times" on 14 January 1992 at the incentive of Linus Pauling, urging governments throughout the world to stop the unrestrained destruction by the JNA. During the siege, UNESCO placed Dubrovnik on its list of World Heritage in Danger. Because the siege shaped international opinion of the Croatian War of Independence, it became a major contributor to a shift in the international diplomatic and economic isolation of Serbia and rump Yugoslavia, which came to be viewed as an aggressor-state in the West. On 17 December 1991, the European Economic Community agreed to recognize the independence of Croatia on 15 January 1992.