Mladic’s Forces’ Firepower in Sarajevo ‘Exaggerated’

Defence witness Milosav Gagovic, who was a representative of the commander of the Yugoslav People’s Army’s Fourth Corps in Sarajevo from May to June 1992, said that there was “a distorted image of what was happening in Sarajevo at the beginning of the war”.

“When we speak about the Serb side’s artillery pieces, the numbers are exaggerated several dozen times,” Gagovic told the trial of former Bosnian Serb military chief Mladic at the Hague Tribunal on Monday.

Gagovic said that numerous crimes against Serb civilians living in Sarajevo were committed.

“A witch hunt against Serbs in Sarajevo was conducted at the time. The key perpetrators of those murders and crimes were paramilitary and para-police forces under the control of Muslim forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” he said.

When he was presented during cross-examination with an intercepted conversation during which Mladic said that he would “destroy half of the city” unless captives who were being held at the Yugoslav People’s Army’s barracks in Sarajevo were released, Gagovic said that these were “empty threats”.

He said that at the time, Mladic did not even have enough weapons to destroy “one single building”.

“Mladic advocated a peaceful solution of problems. I once heard him telling Fikret Abdic, a member of the Presidency of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, who he called by his nickname ‘Babo’: ‘Let us solve the problems on our own. Let’s not allow men speaking foreign languages to solve them for us,’” Gagovic recalled.

Mladic is on trial for terrorising the people of Sarajevo with an artillery and sniper campaign from 1992 to 1995. He is also accused of genocide in Srebrenica and seven other municipalities, the persecution of Bosniaks and Croats and taking UN peacekeepers hostage.

Abdic was sentenced in Croatia to 15 years in prison for wartime crimes in the Western Bosnia Autonomous Region, a self-proclaimed Bosniak statelet which existed between 1993 and 1995. After having served two-thirds of his sentence, he was released two years ago.

The trial continues.