Ratko Mladic ‘Terrorised Sarajevo During Siege’: Prosecutors says

On the third and final day of the prosecution’s summing-up, prosecutor Adam Weber told the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia on Wednesday that over the course of the three-and-a-half years of the war, the Bosnian Serb Army commanded by Ratko Mladic hit Sarajevo with non-selective artillery fire and used snipers to shoot civilians.

The prosecutor played the UN court a recording of an intercepted conversation from May 1992, during which Mladic gave an order to open artillery fire on the Velesici and Pofalici neighbourhoods of the city “because not many Serbs live there”.

“Let’s blow their minds, so they cannot sleep,” Mladic said during the recording.

According to the prosecutor, this was proof that the shelling was aimed at “spreading terror” among the population of the Bosnian capital.

Weber said that Mladic’s troops subjected civilians in Sarajevo to “mass bombings that covered the entire city” or sporadic shelling, depending on his decisions, throughout the entire 1992-95 war.

He said that Mladic, together with Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic, used the attacks on the city as a tool for putting pressure on the Sarajevo authorities and the international community.

“No parts of the city were spared … Hospitals, people at funerals, people queuing for water and food were targeted… Not even mosques were spared,” Weber said.

The prosecutor cited data from the UN children’s agency UNICEF data from 1994, which said that “direct sniper fire was opened at 40 per cent of children in Sarajevo”.

Challenging defence claims that Mladic prohibited “offensive fire” and attacks against civilians, the prosecutor presented orders showing that the Bosnian Serb Army chief qualified this by saying “without my permission”.

“This is not the same as a prohibition,” Weber said.

In order to highlight Mladic’s attitude to civilians, Weber quoted his words from a recording played in the courtroom: “Whenever I come to Sarajevo, I kill someone in passing.”

Rejecting the defence’s claim that Mladic “did not issue orders to open sniper fire on civilians”, the prosecutor noted that in 1995, Mladic admitted to the commander of the UN peacekeeping force UNPROFOR that sniper attacks had been intensified.

The prosecutor also said the defence’s allegation that Serb forces “only reacted” to the Bosnian Army’s attacks from Sarajevo was false.

He further argued that the defence claim that the Bosnian Army was responsible for most of the attacks against civilians in Sarajevo “was groundless, or, in fact, based on non-existing evidence”.

The prosecutor rejected findings by the defence’s ballistics expert Zorica Subotic, who said that two deadly explosions at the Markale market that killed scores of people were caused by planted mines, calling it “a conspiracy theory”.

“She made it all up,” the prosecutor said.

Weber said the defence tried to present Mladic as a“heroic saviour” of civilians, by claiming he secured the welfare of the local population.

“Nothing can be farther away from the truth,” he said.

According to the prosecutor, Mladic actually deprived civilians in Sarajevo of humanitarian aid, electricity, water and gas, which he “used as the means” for achieving his goals.

“The defence’s allegation that Mladic did not give orders to deprive those people of aid is bizarre. Mladic controlled and limited the aid and the basic necessities,” Weber said.

The prosecutor tried to prove this by quoting one of Mladic’s orders: “Immediately stop the supply of water, electricity and gas to the Muslim part of Sarajevo.”

Contrary to the defence’s allegations that “freedom of movement was always allowed” to civilians in Sarajevo, Weber argued that Mladic was “proud of the blockade of Sarajevo”.

He said that Serb troops blocked all the roads from the city and shot at civilians who were trying to leave.

Mladic stands accused of the genocide of Bosniaks from Srebrenica in 1995, the persecution of Bosniaks and Croats throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina, which allegedly reached the scale of genocide in several other municipalities in 1992, terrorising the population of Sarajevo during the 44-month siege of the Bosnian capital, and taking UN peacekeepers hostage.

The 74-year-old has said he is innocent of the charges.

The defence will give its closing statements between December 9 and 13.

Both sides will then have the opportunity to comment on each other’s closing statements on December 15 at the UN court.

The trial began in May 2012, and a verdict is expected in 2017.