Seizing Sarajevo Meant Suicide

A former officer told Ratko Mladic’s war crimes trial that Bosnian Serb forces were not strong enough to seize Sarajevo during the 1992-95 siege of the city.

“The attacker must have three times more power. That, in this case, was not an option… The Sarajevo-Romania Corps would have committed suicide,” Ratomir Maksimovic, a former officer with the Bosnian Serb Army’s Sarajevo-Romanija Corps, told Mladic’s trial at the Hague Tribunal on Wednesday.

Defence witness Maksimovic told the UN-backed court that the Sarajevo-Romanija Corps had 22,000 armed men, and only 12,000 of them were “fighters one could count on”, who were defending the Serb lines around the besieged city.

Mladic is on trial for terrorising the population of Sarajevo with artillery and sniper attacks against civilians, as well as genocide in Srebrenica and seven other municipalities, the persecution of Bosniaks and Croats, and taking UN peacekeepers hostage.

The trial continues on Thursday.