Some sort of justice for Sarajevo
A few months ago, my sister and I spent a long weekend visiting Sarajevo [my account here]. We heard Bosniak and Serb accounts of the siege of the city – the longest siege in the history of modern warfare, lasting from 5 April 1992 to 29 February 1996 or a total of 1,335 days. This siege was carried out by the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) and Bosnian Serb forces (VRS). It is estimated that more than 12,000 people were killed (including 1,500 children) and 50,000 wounded during the siege, 85% of them civilians.
Today it is reported that Dragomir Milosevic (no relation to Slobodan Milosvic) , a former Bosnian Serb general who led the siege, has been sentenced by the international tribunal at The Hague to 33 years in jail for murder, inhumanity, and the calculated terrorising of hundreds of thousands of civilians. This is some sort of justice for the people of Sarajevo at last.
During our time in the city, we visited Zelena Pijaca Marklale (the Markale produce market) which was the scene of the most infamous atrocity of the siege when on 5 February 1994 a Serb-fired mortar killed 67 civilians and wounded another 200.
Later that weekend, we were told by a Serb source that independent experts had demonstrated that a mortar shell could not have caused such a death toll, that this account was Muslim propaganda, and that instead the Muslims had planted a bomb that caused the deaths in order to win support from the international community.The international court ruled this week that the Serb forces led by Dragomir Milosevic carried out the atrocity.
Even today, many of the Serb war leaders – notably Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić – are still free. But the message from this week’s court ruling, both to them and to all those committing crimes against humanity, must be that eventually you will be caught and punished.