“Was Sarajevo a besieged and blocked city?” is the title of the conference that was held on April 21st in Belgrade, with the support of the Representation of the Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) entity Republika Srpska (RS) in Serbia.
At the event, held in the Media Center of the Journalists’ Association of Serbia, the participants assessed that the siege of Sarajevo is a “media and political lie” and a “propaganda machine”.
The capital of BiH was under siege from 1992 to 1996 by the forces of the Army of RS (VRS) and the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA).
In that period, according to the final judgments of the international court, the local population was exposed to systematic and daily terror.
The participants of the conference referred to the Report on the Suffering of Serbs in Sarajevo from 2021, which was financed by the Government of the RS, and which was contested and criticized by transitional justice experts.
Their theses, however, are refuted by the judgments of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague and the documents of the United Nations (UN).
Some of the claims made at that meeting are being checked.
Tomislav Kovac, former major general of the RS police, who was issued a red warrant by Interpol in 2018 at the request of BiH, spoke at the conference, among others, on charges of participation in the genocide of Bosniaks in Srebrenica in 1995.
Kovac, who lives in Serbia, denies these accusations. During the siege of Sarajevo, he was the commander of the police station in the settlement of Ilidza.
He stated at the conference:
“In Ilidza, although we were dying every day, we provided them with a normal supply of water in Sarajevo. The source of the river Bosna is located in Ilidza. The main sources of water for Sarajevo are located there. We ensured that all the time, we gave them water, we gave them electricity, we gave them gas, and in all this, we fought against them and died.”
However, a UN study entitled “Study on the war and the siege of Sarajevo” states, using international media reports from the city under siege, that “during the siege, the destruction of electrical, gas, telephone, and water facilities was used as a weapon against the inhabitants of the city.”
“Drinking water in the city depends on the supply of the main pumping station. Power lines are often cut due to fighting or by forces that use an attack on the utility system as a weapon against civilians.
On several occasions, the besieging forces allegedly shut off the city’s main water supply and refused to allow work crews to repair and supplement the necessary water purification systems.
The water cut-off led to long queues in front of water sources in the city. These long queues attracted sniper and grenade fire from the besieging forces on several occasions and resulted in the deaths of many civilians,” the UN report said.
Moreover, the UN also states that civilians were exposed to sniper fire as they were forced to carry containers filled with water from the few remaining water sources.
“These heavy containers are often carried for kilometers by hand or wheeled on bicycles, baby carriages, and shopping carts,” the UN said.
The RS Army and Police did not attack Sarajevo
One of the speakers was Simo Tusevljak, chief inspector of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the RS for war crimes investigations.
At the conference in Belgrade, he also said this:
“Nowhere did members of the VRS or RS police attack Sarajevo. We were only defending what was ours, where our families lived.”
The verdicts of the ICTY, however, say that attacks on civilians from the positions of the VRS took place constantly and everywhere.
During the 1.425 days that the siege of Sarajevo lasted, nearly 14.000 people were killed. On average, 329 missiles fell on the city per day. Civil, cultural, and religious objects were their target.
Among the more important buildings that suffered destruction was the building of the Presidency of the Republic of BiH and the City Hall, which burned down on April 25th, 1992, along with two million books and 300 manuscripts of inestimable value.
‘Media and political lies’
Mladjan Cicovic, head of the Representation of the RS in Serbia, stated in his welcome address:
“The historical obligation of this generation is to debunk and cancel all media and political lies established by the representatives of the other side in the war in BiH from 1992 to 1995.”
The siege of Sarajevo was one of the longest siege in the history of modern warfare and is the longest siege of a capital city ever. It began on April 5th, 1992, and ended on February 29th, 1996.
Stanislav Galic was sentenced to life imprisonment before the ICTY in The Hague, while Dragomir Milosevic was sentenced to 29 years in prison for the siege of Sarajevo.
Both are former commanders of the Sarajevo-Romanija Corps of the VRS.
In the judgments of the ICTY, it was established that the units of the Sarajevo-Romanija VRS Corps deliberately targeted civilians while conducting a campaign of terror with the aim of putting pressure on the authorities in Sarajevo.
Part of the life sentences of Radovan Karadzic, the wartime president of RS, and Ratko Mladic, the wartime commander of the VRS, refers precisely to terrorizing the civilian population of Sarajevo, Radio Slobodna Evropa reports.
