Sarajevo siege leader gets 20 years for war crimes

JUDGES at the Hague war crimes tribunal jailed a former Bosnian Serb general for 20 years yesterday for deliberately shelling and shooting civilians during the siege of Sarajevo in the 1992-’95 Bosnian war.

Stanislav Galic, 60, is the first suspect to be tried by the UN war crimes tribunal exclusively in connection with the 44-month siege of the Bosnian capital. Prosecutors said Bosnian Serb forces had plunged the city into a "medieval hell".

Sarajevo became synonymous with war during the siege. Serb forces dug into surrounding hills rained down sniper and shell fire on buses, trams, gardens and funerals, killing men, women and children. Television images of the city's shattered buildings and slain civilians shocked the world.

In a majority decision, the court convicted Galic on five counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes, including murder and inhumane acts.

It dismissed two other counts against the stout, balding former major general who commanded the Bosnian Serb army's 18,000-strong Sarajevo Romanija Corps around the city from 1992 to 1994.

"Hundreds of civilians were killed and thousands injured from sniping and shelling incidents in the period covered by the indictment," presiding judge Alphons Orie said. "No civilian of Sarajevo was safe anywhere. The evidence as understood by the majority reveals that the campaign against civilians was intended primarily to terrorise the civilian population," the judge said. "He [Galic] actually controlled the pace and scale of those crimes."

The siege of Sarajevo claimed 10,500 lives, mostly of Muslims, including almost 1,800 children.

Some 50,000 people were injured during the siege, punctuated by atrocities such as mortar bomb attacks on a market and a football game.

Judge Orie said the civilians of Sarajevo had been subjected to regular sniper and shell fire between September 1992 and August 1994.

One of the three judges dissented, saying he would have recommended a 10-year sentence. Judge Rafael Nieto-Navia said the evidence had not shown that Galic's forces had deliberately targeted civilians or that a campaign of terror against civilians came within the court's mandate.

But he said Galic had reason to know about the crimes and should have take action to prevent them and punish those responsible.

"The majority [of the trial chamber] is convinced that the Bosnian Serb army's widespread attacks against the civilian population of Sarajevo could not have occurred without this being the will of its corp commander [General Galic]," Judge Orie said.

But in a dissenting opinion Columbian judge Rafael Nieto-Navia recommended that Galic be sentenced to 10 years in prison saying that while the former general had done nothing to stop the killings or punish the perpetrators, there was "reasonable doubt as to whether he had issued orders to target civilians". He added that he believed the offences of inflicting terror on civilians did not fall within the court's jurisdiction.

The Bosnian conflict pitting Serbs, Croats and Muslims against each other was one of the 1990s Balkan wars sparked by the collapse of the Yugoslav federation.

The 1995 Dayton peace agreement divided post-war Bosnia into two highly autonomous regions a Muslim-Croat federation and a Serb republic under a loose umbrella government.