Mladic: Civilians Struggled to Survive

Bell, who was a BBC correspondent from Sarajevo during the Bosnian war, said that civilians in the city were deprived of gas, water and electricity.

The indictment charges General Mladic, the then Commander of VRS, with terrorising civilians in Sarajevo by attacking them with artillery and snipers.

After the prosecutors played Bell’s footage on VRS artillery positions in January 1993, the witness said that soldiers had “a direct view” of the Sarajevo downtown area from those positions, and that the buildings of the Parliament of Bosnia and Herzegovina were “severely damaged” at the time.

The prosecutors used Bell’s footage, depicting civilians in the streets of Sarajevo running away from sniper fire from the Serb side. In his report the BBC correspondent said that Serbs did not comply with their “promise that they would only open fire at military targets”.

The witness confirmed that, in January 1993 he personally saw the wounding of a man, who was queuing for water near the Sarajevo maternity hospital.

“I would call this intentional targeting… The victims were on the Bosnian Government’s territory. Common sense says that they were attacked from the Bosnian Serb side,” Bell said, adding that civilians in the city “struggled to survive”.

He confirmed that, in January 1993 he reported for the BBC, about the death of eight civilians, including a father, mother and daughter, in an explosion of a mine-thrower grenade in front of the brewery in Sarajevo.

Responding to a question by the Prosecutor, he said that the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina did not undertake any activities in that area, but he said that it “was not easy to identify ABiH targets in the city”.

Besides that, the witness said that he was wounded by mine-thrower grenade shrapnel near the “Marshall Tito” military barracks in August 1992, although no combat was taking place in the vicinity of that location.

The BBC correspondent said that he made reports about explosions of modified air-bombs, specifying that they were the most destructive of all the bombs he saw during the war, adding that the VRS fired those bombs on several buildings in Sarajevo.

“It was a war in an industrial city… Most of the time there was no electricity, gas and water. People lived in primitive conditions. I heard that some old people froze in a tower block, because they could not come down,” Bell said.

While being cross-examined by Mladic’s Defence attorney Dragan Ivetic, the witness confirmed that civilians, who lived on the Serb-controlled territories, were “targeted by sniper and mine-thrower fire, but this did not happen in front of cameras”, as he wrote in his book “In Harm’s Way” about the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

According to Bell, Serb soldiers deployed in the Sarajevo surroundings were local residents of the nearby villages and they believed that they were defending their houses and families.

The British journalist said that the Sarajevo Government forces did not allow journalists to shoot activities of their mine-throwers from the city, adding that ABiH forces were “scattered among the local population”.

Responding to Defence’s questions, Bell stuck to what he wrote in his book, saying that Muslim forces “initiated offensives they could not win” and that, following “a furious response by Serbs”, “cameras and government representatives would appear, requesting an intensive action” by the international community against the VRS.

Bell said that General Mladic was against paramilitary formations and that he tried to suppress them.

The trial of Mladic, who is also charged with genocide in Srebrenica and seven other municipalities, persecution of Muslims and Croats throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina and taking UNPROFOR members hostage, is due to continue on Monday, February 4.