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Last updated:
Dec.19.2003.
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Dec. 05. 2003.
THE HAGUE - A Bosnian Serb general was convicted Friday of running a two-year terror campaign against civilians in Sarajevo, unleashing sniper fire and shells that killed and wounded thousands in the
Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) sector of the city.
Stanislav Galic was sentenced to 20 years in prison by the UN war crimes tribunal.
The tribunal found that Galic ordered his troops to fire on civilians while they were going about their daily lives: shopping, tending gardens or fetching water from the river.
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Galic, 60, was the first suspect to be tried by the UN war crimes tribunal exclusively in connection with the 44-month siege of the Bosnian capital in the 1992-95 war.
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It also was the first time the court dealt with the charge of terror, as defined in the 1949 Geneva Convention.
The judges ruled that "the international tribunal does indeed have jurisdiction over the crime of attack on civilians" and the crime of terror, which has an "additional mental element."
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Serb forces dug into surrounding hills and rained sniper and shell fire down on buses, trams, gardens and funerals, killing men, women and children.
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The siege of Sarajevo claimed at least 10,500 lives, mostly of Bosniaks, including almost 1,800 children. Some 50,000 people were wounded during the siege, punctuated by atrocities such as mortar bomb attacks on a market and a soccer game.
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Judges found General Stanislav Galic guilty of terrorizing the city's residents through a two-year campaign of shelling and sniping.
The court convicted Galic on five counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes. He was convicted of murder, inhumane acts and violence intended to spread terror among civilians.
In reading out the court's findings, Judge Alphons Orie said it was clear to the majority that the attacks against civilians could not have occurred without the will of corps commander General Stanislav Galic.
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"No civilian of Sarajevo was safe anywhere." - the presiding judge, Alphons Orie,
said.
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"The evidence as understood by the majority reveals that the campaign against civilians was intended primarily to terrorize the civilian population," the judge said. "He actually controlled the pace and scale of those crimes."
"It is clear that General Galic, through his orders and by other means acts of facilitation and encouragement, conducted the campaign of attacks," said judge Orie. "He did so with the primary aim to spread terror among the civilian population of Sarajevo."
The judge said that prosecutors proved beyond a reasonable doubt 18 of the 26 sniping incidents they charged and all five of the shellings. That includes the 1994 Sarajevo marketplace shelling (markale market massacre) in which 68 people were killed and more than 100 injured. It has been a controversial incident, with many Bosnian Serbs saying Bosniaks shelled themselves to gain world sympathy and get the Bosnian-Serb army in trouble.
But judges, who said they examined new evidence about the marketplace bombing, concluded that the mortar shell that caused the explosion was fired by the Bosnian Serbs.
Even if there were incidents where Bosniaks sometimes fired on themselves - as Bosnian Serb-General defense lawyers argued - judges found that that does not excuse the crimes committed against the city's Bosniaks.
Gen. Stanislav Galic commanded the 18,000-member Bosnian Serb army from September 1992 to August 1994 -- a period when close to 3,800 civilians were killed.
Instead of protecting the population of Sarajevo, the court found, Galic's forces brought terror and destruction on the city.
In the summary of their verdict on Friday, the judges said civilians of the mostly
Bosniak city had been deliberately fired on "while attending funerals, while in ambulances, trams and buses and while cycling." They were attacked while tending gardens or shopping in markets, the judges said, most of the time in daylight.
The encircled city, with more than 400,000 residents, was often short of food and other essentials.
As Bosnian Serb troops, aided by Yugoslav forces, shelled and sniped at the city from their mountaintop positions, with U.N. peacekeepers standing by powerless, the violence was broadcast on television and shocked the world. Finally, in August 1995, Western forces launched air strikes against Serb troops.
Human rights groups have said more than 11,000 people, including more than 1,700 children, were killed in Sarajevo.
The siege tore up and depleted a city that long had a reputation as a civilized place where Muslims, Jews
and Orthodox and Catholic Christians lived together for centuries.
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HELSINKI COMMITTE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS IN SERBIA
(Excerpt from Dragoljub Todorovic's Burden of Crime: National Courts and
Justice, dated 04/09/2002; Helsinki Chapter - No 51)
The Serb public opinion cherishes a stereotype that Bosniaks have stage-managed the Markale market massacre in Sarajevo. But at the trial of [Serb] General Stanislav Galic, the man in charge of the Sarajevo siege, the material evidence presented by the top international experts clearly showed that shelling of Markale and massacre of innocent Sarajevo denizens was committed by the Serb army in the surrounding hills. That fact was disclosed by all the international media, but the domestic ones failed to mention it.
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