Siege of Sarajevo

The Siege of Sarajevo was the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare. After being initially besieged by the forces of the Yugoslav People's Army, Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, was besieged by the Army of Republika Srpska from 5 April 1992 to 29 February 1996 during the Bosnian War. The siege lasted three times longer than the Siege of Stalingrad and a year longer than the Siege of Leningrad.

After Bosnia and Herzegovina had declared independence from Yugoslavia, the Serbs—whose strategic goal was to create a new Bosnian Serb state of Republika Srpska (RS) that would include parts of Bosnian territory—encircled Sarajevo with a siege force of 18,000 stationed in the surrounding hills. From there they assaulted the city with weapons that included artillery, mortars, tanks, anti-aircraft guns, heavy machine-guns, multiple rocket launchers, rocket-launched aircraft bombs and sniper rifles. From 2 May 1992, the Serbs blockaded the city. The Bosnian government defence forces inside the besieged city were poorly equipped and unable to break the siege.

It is estimated that nearly 12,000 civilians were killed or went missing in the city, including over 1,500 children. An additional 56,000 people were wounded, including nearly 15,000 children. The 1991 census indicates that before the siege the city and its surrounding areas had a population of 525,980. There are estimates that prior to the siege the population in the city proper was 435,000. The current estimates of the number of persons living in Sarajevo range from between 300,000 to 380,000.

After the war, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) convicted three Serb officials for numerous crimes against humanity for the siege. Stanislav Galić and Dragomir Milošević were sentenced to life imprisonment and 29 years imprisonment respectively, while Momčilo Perišić was sentenced to 27 years. One of the 11 indictments against Radovan Karadžić, the former president of the Republika Srpska, is for the siege. In the case against Stanislav Galić, the prosecution alleged in an opening statement that:

The siege of Sarajevo, as it came to be popularly known, was an episode of such notoriety in the conflict in the former Yugoslavia that one must go back to World War II to find a parallel in European history. Not since then had a professional army conducted a campaign of unrelenting violence against the inhabitants of a European city so as to reduce them to a state of medieval deprivation in which they were in constant fear of death. In the period covered in this Indictment, there was nowhere safe for a Sarajevan, not at home, at school, in a hospital, from deliberate attack.

Prosecution Opening Statement, ICTY vs Stanislav Galić, 2003

Read more about Siege Of Sarajevo:  Background, Start of The War, Early Fighting For The City, The Siege of Sarajevo, NATO Intervention, ICTY Convictions

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