Today is the Day of Remembrance of the Murdered Children of Sarajevo.
According to official data, 1,601 children died during the four-year siege of Sarajevo (1992-1995), the capital of BiH.
According to court verdicts in international and domestic courts, at least 53 children in Sarajevo were killed by a sniper, and more than 14 thousand were wounded. Most of them were killed on playgrounds in front of buildings, where shrapnel often ended their childhood forever.
For the crimes against children committed during the siege of Sarajevo, so far no one has been held accountable.
In 2019, the Government of Sarajevo Canton made a decision that May 5 will be commemorated as the Day of Remembrance for the Murdered Children of Sarajevo.
Since February 2020, the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina has been collecting personal items of children killed during the siege of Sarajevo, which are displayed in the memorial ‘White Room’.
The terror against the citizens of Sarajevo lasted for 1,425 days. Attacks on civilians from the positions of the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS), according to the judgments of the Court in The Hague, took place everywhere and at any time of the day or night.
Stanislav Galić was sentenced to life imprisonment before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague for the siege of Sarajevo, while Dragomir Milošević, both former commanders of the Sarajevo-Romanian Corps who besieged Sarajevo for 44 months, received 29 years in prison.
Part of the life sentences of Radovan Karadžić, the wartime president of Republika Srpska (RS), and Ratko Mladić, the wartime commander of the RS Army, refer precisely to terrorizing the civilian population of Sarajevo.
So far, 12 people have been prosecuted before the domestic judiciary for crimes in the besieged parts of the city.
Former President of the Republic of Serbia Slobodan Milošević was also accused before the Hague Tribunal for crimes committed in Sarajevo, but he died during the trial in March 2006, after which the process was suspended.
Biljana Plavišić, the former president of the Republika Srpska, pleaded guilty to participating, among other things, in the crimes in Sarajevo, after which she was sentenced to 11 years in prison before the judges of the Hague Tribunal.
