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BBC War correspondent Jeremy Bowen testified at the trial of Ratko Mladic that the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) considered civilians “not only a legitimate target, but also the principal enemy”.
Bowen said that due to shelling and sniper campaigns, between 1992 and 1995 there was “no safe place” in Sarajevo for the civilian population. During Bowen’s testimony, Prosecutors showed the courtroom his television report from the funeral of two children, killed by sniper shots in July 1992, during an attempt to evacuate them in a bus convoy out of the city.
Bowen’s footage shows the moment when the cemetery, during the funeral, was hit by shells, while the family and many children were laying flowers on the graves of the killed. Also screened was the scene of medical aid being provided to the grandmother of the killed girl who was wounded in the hand by shrapnel.
“I was absolutely embittered and considered this contemptuous. The murder of civilians was bad enough in itself, but shelling the funeral was grotesque,” said the British journalist in the courtroom. Bowen added that he was told by eyewitnesses that the cemetery was an everyday target, not only just when television cameras were there.
“There is no dilemma that Serb forces deliberately targeted the cemetery to kill civilians,” he said in his report on the attack on the cemetery. Pointing out he was aware of “conspiracy theories” that the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina attacked its own population, Bowen said “he never saw any proof of that”.
Ratko Mladic, former commander of the main headquarters of the Army of Republika Srpska, is charged with terrorising Sarajevo civilians by lengthy shelling and sniping campaigns. He is also charged with genocide in Srebrenica and other seven municipalities, expulsion of Bosniak and Croats all over Bosnia, and taking international peacekeepers hostages.
During the war, said Bowen, in Sarajevo there was no safe place for civilians. “There was not a single place where you could not be hit by a shell, and there were a lot of places where you could be shot by a sniper. There was no safe place in the city until the end of war,” said Bowen.
Bowen called it “the Bosnian Serb army’s organised shelling and sniping campaign” against the Sarajevo population, adding he personally witnessed the murder of civilians with sniper shots to the head along streets in the city centre. As a proof of deliberate targeting of civilians, the Prosecutors also showed Bowen’s report on the shelling of the Hotel Europa, which, in June 1992, housed 800 Bosniak refugees from other parts of the city. In his report, Bowen said that the hotel was “hit hundreds of times from Serb positions”.
“It seems that Serbs see civilians not only as a legitimate target, but as their principal enemy,” emphasised Bowen at the time.
Bowen said that, outside Sarajevo, he witnessed “ethnic cleansing” carried out by the Bosnian Serb army “in order to create ethnically clean territories across Bosnia”.
Bowen will resume his testimony on Friday, October 18.
