Siege of Sarajevo

Siege of Sarajevo
	Part of the Bosnian War
	; Bosnian government parliament building burns after being hit by Serbian tank fire. Photo by Mikhail Evstafiev
Date	April 5 1992 - February 29 1996
Location	Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Result	Siege lifted due to the Dayton Agreement
Belligerents
ARBiH (1992-95); NATO (1995)	JNA (1992); VRS (1992-95)
Commanders and leaders
Jovan Divjak; Mustafa Hajrulahović; Vahid Karavelić; Nedžad Ajnadžić	Stanislav Galić (1992-94); Dragomir Milošević (1994-95);
Strength
40,000 (1992)	30,000 (1992)

The Siege of Sarajevo was the longest siege in the history of modern warfare, lasting from April 5 1992 to February 29 1996.

It was fought during the Bosnian War between the forces of the Bosnian government, who had declared independence from Yugoslavia, and the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) and Bosnian Serb forces (VRS), who sought to destroy the newly-independent state of Bosnia and Herzegovina and create the Serbian state of Republika Srpska (RS).

It is estimated that more than 12,000 people were killed and 50,000 wounded during the siege, 85% of them civilians. Because of killing and forced migration, by 1995 the population decreased to 334,663 - 64% of the prewar population.[1]

Warfare

Build-up

From its creation following World War II, the government of Yugoslavia kept a close watch on nationalism among the Yugoslav peoples, as it could have led to chaos and the breakup of the state. With longtime Marshal Tito's death in 1980, this policy took a dramatic reversal.

Start of the war

Serb militants in Sarajevo. Photo by Mikhail Evstafiev

The first casualty of war is a point of contention between Serbs and Bosniaks. Serbs contend that the first casualty was Serb Nikola Gardović, a groom's father killed at a Serb wedding procession on the first day of the referendum, March 1, 1992. Bosniaks contend that this was one of a number of politically oriented killings in the first quarter of that year.

On April 5, the day of the declaration of independence, massive anti-war marches took place in the city, with the largest group of protesters moving towards the parliament building. At that point, Serb gunmen fired upon the crowd from the Serbian Democratic Party headquarters, killing two persons. These persons, Suada Dilberović and Olga Sučić, are considered by Bosniaks to be the first casualties of the war in Bosnia and the siege of Sarajevo; today, the bridge where they were killed is named in their honor. On the same day, Serb paramilitaries attacked the Sarajevo police academy, commanding strategic positions in Vraca, high above the city.

Early fighting for the city

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A map of the initial JNA offensive

In the months leading up to the war, the JNA forces in the region began to mobilize in the hills surrounding the city. Artillery and various other equipment that would prove key in the future besieging of the city was implemented at this time. In April of 1992, the Bosnian government demanded that the government of Yugoslavia remove these forces. Milošević's government agreed to withdraw those forces who were not of Bosnian nationality, an insignificant number. Those Bosnian Serb forces in the army were transferred to the VRS, which had declared independence from Bosnia a few days after Bosnia itself seceded from Yugoslavia.

On May 2, 1992, a complete blockade of the city was officially established by the Bosnian Serb forces. Major roads leading into the city were blocked, as were shipments of food and medicine. Utilities such as water, electricity, and heating were cut off. The number of Serbian forces around Sarajevo, although better armed, was inferior in number to the Bosnian defenders within the city. Hence, after the failure of initial attempts to take over the city by the attacks of JNA's armored columns, the besieging forces continuously bombarded and weakened the city from the mountains, fortified into at least two hundred reinforced positions and bunkers.

The siege of Sarajevo

Norwegian UN soldier at the Sarajevo airport. Photo by Mikhail Evstafiev

The second half of 1992 and first half of 1993 were the height of the siege of Sarajevo. Various atrocities were committed during heavy fighting. Serbian forces from outside the city continuously shelled the government defenders. Most of the major military positions and arms supplies within the city were in Serbian control. Snipers roamed the city all over as Pazite, Snajper! ("Beware, Sniper!") became a common sign. Some streets were so dangerous to cross or use that they became known as "sniper alleys". Some neighborhoods of the city were taken over by the Serbs, especially in Novo Sarajevo, as Serbian offensives into parts of the city were met with success. To counterbalance the siege, the Sarajevo Airport was opened to United Nations (UN) airlifts in late June of 1992. Sarajevo's survival became strongly dependent on them.

The Bosnian government forces had greatly inferior weaponry to the besiegers. Some Bosnian black market criminals who had joined the army at the outset of the war illegally smuggled arms into the city through Serb lines, and the raids on Serb held positions within the city too helped the cause. The Sarajevo Tunnel, completed in mid-1993, allowed supplies to come into the city, and people to get out. The tunnel was one of the major ways of bypassing the international arms embargo and providing the city defenders with weaponry, and it was said the tunnel saved Sarajevo. However, by April 1995 there were only 20 artillery pieces and five tanks in the defence of the city. The strength of the First Corps lay in its considerable supplies of rocket-propelled grenades, anti-aircraft missiles, and anti-tank missiles, but they could not really be used in the offensive actions needed to break out of Sarajevo. [2]

Vedran Smailović playing in the partially destroyed National Library in Sarajevo in 1992. Photo by Mikhail Evstafiev

Reports indicate an average of approximately 329 shell impacts per day during the course of the siege, with a high of 3,777 shell impacts on July 22 1993. The shellfire caused extensive damage to the city's structures, including civilian and cultural property. By September 1993, reports concluded that virtually all buildings in Sarajevo had suffered some degree of damage, and 35,000 were completely destroyed. Among these buildings targeted and destroyed were hospitals and medical complexes, media and communication centers, industrial targets, government buildings, and military and UN facilities. Some of the more significant of these were the building of the presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the National Library, which burned to the ground along with thousands of irreplaceable texts.

Funeral of a civilian killed in Sarajevo. Photo by Mikhail Evstafiev

The shelling of the city took a tremendous toll on lives. Mass killings due primarily to mortar shell impacts made headline news in the West. On June 1 1993, 15 people were killed and 80 injured during a football game. On July 12 of the same year, 12 people were killed while in line for water. The biggest of these however was the first Markale marketplace massacre on February 5, 1994 , in which 68 civilians were killed and 200 were wounded.

In response to the Markale massacre, the UN issued an ultimatum to Serb forces to withdraw heavy weaponry beyond a certain point in a given amount of time or face air strikes. Near the end of the given time, Serb forces complied. City shelling drastically decreased at that point, which could perhaps be seen as the beginning of the end of siege.

NATO and Croatian intervention

In 1995, after the second Markale massacre, in which 37 people were killed and 90 were wounded, the international forces firmly turned against the besiegers. When the Serb forces raided a UN-monitored weapons collection site, NATO jets attacked Bosnian Serb ammunition depots and other strategic military targets. On the ground fighting escalated, this time with the joint Bosnian and Croatian forces on the offensive, and the Serbs slowly lost more and more ground both in Sarajevo area and elsewhere. Heating, electricity, and water would eventually come back to the city as well.

A cease fire was reached in October 1995, and the Dayton Agreement was reached later that year bringing peace to the country. A period of stabilization and return to normalcy followed, with the Bosnian government not officially declaring the siege of Sarajevo over until February 29, 1996.

Aftermath

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Scars remain across the city, serving as poignant reminders of the destruction

Sarajevo was heavily damaged during those four years. The manuscript collection of the Oriental Institute in Sarajevo, one of the richest collections of Oriental manuscripts in the world, was deliberately destroyed by Serb nationalist forces. The siege of Sarajevo was undoubtedly the worst and most catastrophic period in the city's history since World War I. Prior to the siege, the city was experiencing tremendous growth and development. The 1984 Winter Olympics had brought back some of the glory Sarajevo hadn't seen since the late 17th century. The warfare put a stop to all of this, taking the city back to a desolated state of destruction.

The city used to be a model for inter-ethnic relations, but the siege of Sarajevo inspired dramatic population shifts. Aside from the thousands of refugees who left the city, an immense number of Sarajevo Serbs left for the Republika Srpska as well. The percentage of Serbs in Sarajevo decreased from more than 30% in 1991 to slightly over 10% in 2002. Regions of Novo Sarajevo that are now part of the Republika Srpska have formed East Sarajevo (Istocno Sarajevo), where a good deal of the pre-war Serbian population lives today. Some Serbs that remained in Sarajevo were treated harshly by refugees returning to their homes, significantly so in Ilidža.

Since the gloomy desolate years of the early 1990s, Sarajevo has made tremendous progress, and is well on its way to recovery as a modern European capital^{[citation needed]}. By 2004 most of the damage done to buildings during the siege was fixed. New construction projects have made Sarajevo perhaps the fastest growing city in former Yugoslavia. Sarajevo's metro-area population in 2002 was around 401,000, which was 20,000 less than the population of the city itself in 1991. With its current growth and reconstruction, Sarajevo may one day in the not so distant future return to its late 1980s form and is clearly on the fast track to recovery, but the scars of the siege of Sarajevo on its history may never fully disappear.

Ethnic cleansing

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Mixed couple Admira Ismić and Boško Brkić shot dead while trying to escape Sarajevo

The Serb forces carried out a vicious campaign of ethnic cleansing in the parts of the city occupied by them during the siege. Non-nationalist Serbs were also targets of violence. In The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia, Michael A. Sells wrote:

Serbs who refused to participate in the persecution of Muslims were killed. In a Serb-army occupied area of Sarajevo, Serb militants killed a Serb officer who objected to atrocities against civilians; they left his body on the street for over a week as an object lesson. During one of the 'selections' carried out by Serb militants in Sarajevo, an old Serb named Ljubo objected to being separated out from his Muslim friends and neighbors; they beat him to death on the spot.

After several years in the 1990s characterised by denial of the widely held view of the Serb role in the Yugoslav wars, a trend has developed in the 2000s where Serb nationalists have attempted to draw Bosniak and Croat parallels to such infamous examples of atrocities as Srebrenica. Regarding Sarajevo, the typical claim is that between 1992 and 1995, 150,000 Serbs were ethnically cleansed from Sarajevo, with several thousand killed. The allegations were brought to the media forefront in early 2005 when the Prime Minister of RS, Pero Bukejlović, claimed that genocide was committed against Serbs during the siege of Sarajevo that exceeded that of the Srebrenica massacre.

Today, Sarajevo citizens of all nationalities generally take accusations of ethnic cleansing by the government forces in Sarajevo during the war as a highly offensive insult. In response to premier Bukejlović's statement, many have demanded a public apology to all Sarajevo citizens. The president of the Serb Citizens Council, Dr. Mirko Pejanović (a wartime member of the Bosnia-Herzegovina Presidency, and the 2007-2011 Dean of the Faculty of Political Sciences at the University of Sarajevo), stated:

Nobody, not even Bukejlović, can change or cover up the truth for the sake of current political needs. In Sarajevo, during the four year siege carried out by Karadžić's military forces and the SDS, there were deaths of Sarayevians of all ethnicities. The people were both suffering and dying from hunger, cold, they were being killed by mortar shells... among the 12,000 killed Sarayevians recorded in the war, at least one fourth were members of the Serb nation or had Serb ethnic ancestry. Thus, we can not talk of an extermination or genocide of Serbs, but of a responsibility of the SDS and Karadžić's military forces for the overall extermination of Sarajevo and Sarayevians, and within that of the Serb people.

During the war, Serb forces systematically raped and sexually abused Muslim Bosnian women in rape camps after being separated from men. There are claims the rapes occurred with the knowledge and approval of Serbian officials. In 2001, International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia's (ICTY) officially indicted Dragoljub Kunarac, Radomir Kovac, and Zoran Vukovic for the crimes of rape.

Siege of Sarajevo in documentaries and art

The former building of Sarajevo newspaper *Oslobođenje*. For years after the siege it remained as a memorial

Diários da Bósnia (Bosnian Diaries), a film by Joaquim Sapinho
Đavo u Sarajevu (Devil in Sarajevo), a book by Nenad Veličković
Sarajevo Blues, a book of poetry by Semezdin Mehmedinović
Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24, a song by Savatage and the Trans-Siberian Orchestra
Dead Winter Dead, a rock-opera by Savatage, 1995
Fax From Sarajevo, a comic-art by Joe Kubert [3]
Fools Rush In: A True Story of Love, War, and Redemption, by Bill Carter [4]
Miss Sarajevo, a song by U2 and Brian Eno under the pseudonym "Passengers"
My Childhood Under Fire: A Sarajevo Diary by Nadja Halilbegovich
Natasha's Story, a book by Michael Nicholson
Pretty Birds, by Scott Simon, 2005
Savršeni krug (The Perfect Circle), a film by Ademir Kenović
Sarajevo Tango, a comic-art by Hermann Huppen
Shot through the heart, a TV film by David Attwood
Regarding The Pain Of Others, by Susan Sontag
Remember Sarajevo, a book by Roger Richards [5]
Romeo and Juliet in Sarajevo, a PBS Frontline documentary
The Question of Bruno, stories by Aleksandar Hemon
Welcome To Sarajevo, a war movie by Michael Winterbottom
Witness from Sarajevo, by Boris Jug [6]
Zlata's Diary, a book by Zlata Filipovic
Sarajevo Roses, a book by South African UN Peacekeeper Anne-Marie Du Preez Bedroz

Notes

^ April 5, 1992 was the date of the first attack on Sarajevo by the JNA and Serb paramilitaries and is as such considered the beginning of the siege. However as early as March 1, 1992 barricades and and armed gunmen started appearing on the streets of Sarajevo.
^ February 29, 1996 was the official end to the siege as declared by the Bosnian government. The war ended with the signing of the Dayton Accords on November 21, 1995 and the Paris Protocol on December 14, 1995. The reason that the siege was not declared as over was because the Serbs had not yet implemented the Dayton deal which required them to withdraw from areas north and west of Sarajevo as well as other parts of the city. The Serbs also violated the Dayton peace by firing a rocket propelled grenade at a Sarajevo tram on January 9, 1996 killing 1 and wounding 19.

External links

Final report of the United Nations Commission of Experts on the Siege of Sarajevo
An incomplete list of persons killed during the siege.
Survival Map of Sarajevo
Photos of Siege of Sarajevo
Radovan Karadzicc $5 million Reward - The U.S. Government is offering $5 million reward for information leading to the arrest of Radovan Karadzic
Ratko Mladic $5 million Reward - The U.S. Government is offering $5 million reward for information leading to the arrest of Ratko Mladic
[7] - Bosnia's rape babies: abandoned by their families, forgotten by the state
[8] - Systematic Rape in Bosnia: a Tool of Genocide- Evidence Serb leaders in Bosnia OKd attacks
[9] - Mass Rape in Bosnia: 20,000 WOMEN, MOSTLY MUSLIMS, HAVE BEEN ABUSED BY SERB SOLDIERS
[10] - Rape: weapon of war
[11] - Bosnia: Landmark Verdicts for Rape, Torture, and Sexual Enslavement
[12] - Factbook on Global Sexual Exploitation Bosnia and Herzegovina

[1] April 5, 1992 was the date of the first attack on Sarajevo by the JNA and Serb paramilitaries and is as such considered the beginning of the siege. However as early as March 1, 1992 barricades and and armed gunmen started appearing on the streets of Sarajevo.

[2] February 29, 1996 was the official end to the siege as declared by the Bosnian government. The war ended with the signing of the Dayton Accords on November 21, 1995 and the Paris Protocol on December 14, 1995. The reason that the siege was not declared as over was because the Serbs had not yet implemented the Dayton deal which required them to withdraw from areas north and west of Sarajevo as well as other parts of the city. The Serbs also violated the Dayton peace by firing a rocket propelled grenade at a Sarajevo tram on January 9, 1996 killing 1 and wounding 19.

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