25 years since the siege of Sarajevo ended
On February 29, 1996, the Bosnian government declared the siege of Sarajevo officially over after nearly four years of death and privation in the capital.
The following text is from an AP story released on April 6, 1996, written by AP reporter Samir Krilic.
Four Years After Sarajevo’s War Began its People Remember
SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) _ On Vrbanja Bridge, flowers and a new plaque mark the spring day four years ago when a sniper fire on a peace rally against the nascent Bosnian war and claimed a 21-year-old woman as the first of the war’s 200,000 victims.
Although the bridge in central Sarajevo became better known for the young Muslim-Serb couple who died together there a few months later, the city renamed it in honor of the first victim, medical student Suada Dilberovic.
A sniper’s bullet killed Dilberovic on April 5, 1992, singling her out among the thousands who’d gathered there to support Bosnia’s new independence from Serb-dominated Yugoslavia.
A new plaque was in place Friday for the fourth anniversary, the first one observed in peace. So was 27-year-old Mirela Hadzic, standing on the once-again crowded bridge with a bundle of flowers for her friend.
“It is very sad for me to stand here and still not know why Suada was killed,” Hadzic said. “This whole war is a misery nobody should go through.”
The anniversary brought many in Sarajevo to the bridge for the first time since the beginning of the war. The bridge separated government from Bosnian Serb troops throughout the fighting, and had to be cleared of hundreds of mines before being opened to normal traffic.
Scores died there during the war, most felled by snipers as they tried to cross to one side or the other.
The most famous victims were a young couple, killed in the fall of 1993, who became known as Sarajevo’s Romeo and Juliet. Bosko Brkic an ethnic Serb, and Admira Ismic, a Muslim, tried to run away from the horrors of the war by crossing the bridge.
They were hoping to reach Belgrade and relatives there through Bosnian Serb territory. Snipers’ bullets stopped them both on Vrbanja, where they died together.
In the bloodiest war in Europe since World War II, more than 200,000 were killed or disappeared, tens of thousands were wounded and more than 2.5 million Bosnians fled or were driven from their homes.
According to the Bosnian Health Ministry, 8,017 people were killed in Sarajevo alone, 769 of them children. Another 46,982 people, 11,442 of them children, were wounded.
The years of dodging snipers’ bullets and running for cover from shelling are still fresh in people’s memories.
“The fear we lived with for so long cannot be forgotten that easily,” said Salih Custic. “Even today the noise a tram makes as it passes by makes me always jump.”
For most of the war, Sarajevo was under Bosnian Serb siege, and an international airlift was the only lifeline into the city.
Desperate Sarajevans dug a tunnel underneath the U.N.-controlled airport linking it with the rest of government-held territories. It was used for supplying the city with food, military supplies and for troop movements.
“Nowadays nobody even thinks of the tunnel,” said Neven Cica, 34, a doctor and ex-soldier. “But I will never forget how we crawled through the mud like rats.”
Under the U.S.-brokered peace agreement, Sarajevo has been reunified under the control of the Muslim-Croat Federation, but most of the Serbs are gone.
WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS GRAPHIC CONTENT
Smoke rises from the Jajce barracks Tuesday after it was hit by artillery fired by the Yugoslav Army from the hills surrounding Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital. Army artillery pounded Sarajevo on Tuesday, May 5, 1992 leaving the city cloaked in flames and smoke and its streets strewn with corpses. (AP Photo/David Brauchli)
Bosnian fighters run towards one of their positions after a battle erupted near the city center for control of a strategic hill, Friday, June 12, 1992 in Sarajevo. Serbian forces continue to besiege this city. Serbs on Friday announced a cease fire in Bosnia-Herzegovina beginning next week offering their fullest cooperation yet to U.N. monitors in the republic. (AP Photo/Santiago Lyon)
New signs are appearing over the besieged city of Sarajevo to alert the people of the whereabouts of sniper fire in Sarajevo, Monday, July 13, 1992. The sign reads “Watch Out, Sniper!” and represents the frequent dangers for people going to and from work. (AP Photo/Martin Nangle)
A Bosnian man cradles his child as they and others run past one of the worst spots for sniper attacks in Sarajevo in this April, 1993 file photo. (AP Photo/Michael Stravato)
Waving their money and bags, citizens of Sarajevo push and shove to get to the front of a queue to buy bread, after a ceasefire was declared, May 6, 1992. A fragile truce shattered in Bosnia-Herzegovina as a federal army barracks in the strategic town of Doboj was reported ablaze and shelling and sniper fire echoed across Sarajevo. (AP Photo/David Brauchli)
A Muslim militiaman covers the body of a person killed yesterday during fierce fighting between the Muslim militia and the Yugoslav federal army in central Sarajevo on Sunday, May 3, 1992. Bosnian officials and the Yugoslav army bargained Sunday over the release of President Alija Izetbegovic from military custody. (AP Photo/David Brauchli)
A wounded Serbian fighter is loaded into the back of a car in the Sarajevo suburb of Ilidza during fighting with the Muslim forces on May 14, 1992. At least three people were killed in the incident and three wounded when a mortar round exploded near a Yugoslav federal army armored personnel carrier. (AP Photo/Santiago Lyon)
A Bosnian man runs through a Sarajevo intersection Tuesday that is exposed to Serb snipers. Heavy fighting was raging between Croatian and Muslim forces in Central Bosnia on Tuesday, April 20, 1993, with U.N. officials estimating at least 200 people have been killed in four days of battle. (AP Photo/Michael Stravato)
A Sarajevo couple runs on an empty street in an industrial area of Sarajevo, Sept. 1, 1992. The black smoke in the sky billows from a fire in a rubber factory which broke out after an mortar attack on Tuesday. (AP Photo/Rikard Larma)
A father and his son pass the dead body of a Bosnian policeman killed when a shell landed next to his guard house in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Dec. 30, 1992. Three people were killed and five wounded in the incident. (AP Photo/Santiago Lyon)
A Red Cross flag flies on the facade of the former military hospital, now called "French hospital," on Thursday, Sept. 17, 1992 in Sarajevo. The building, often target of mortar and rocket attacks, still houses many victims of the civil war raging in and around the besieged Bosnian capital. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay)
A father's hands press against the window of a bus carrying his tearful son and wife to safety from the besieged city of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War on Nov. 10, 1992. (AP Photo/Laurent Rebours)
A Bosnian mother, center, says goodbye to her two daughters, May 10, 1992 in Sarajevo as they prepare to board a bus taking children out of Sarajevo. Women and children are being evacuated from the besieged Bosnian capital as fierce ethnic fighting continues to tear the city apart. Bosnia's President Alija Izetbegovic appealed to the United Nations for intervention as heavy shelling shook the city Sunday. (AP Photo/David Brauchli)
In this May 1993 file photo, the bodies of Bosko Brkic, a Serb, and his Muslim girlfriend Admira Ismic, lie together in "no-man's land" between Bosnian Serb and government front lines in Sarajevo, after they were killed by a Serb sniper about six days earlier while trying to slip out of Sarajevo. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay)
A Bosnian Muslim woman weeps over one of the many graves in a Sarajevo cemetery, April 18, 1993. Bosnian Serbs and Muslims signed a cease-fire for the embattled eastern town of Srebrenica early Sunday and guaranteed safe evacuation of civilians. (AP Photo/Michael Stravato)
In this Sunday, March 27, 1994, file photo, a Ukrainian U.N. soldier holds a weapon while protecting a tram driving through the so called Snipers Alley, in Sarajevo, Bosnia, backdropped by the Holiday Inn hotel. The Holiday Hotel, which opened as Holiday Inn, a luxurious accommodation for world's royalty, film stars and other dignitaries who came to watch the 1984 Winter Olympics, and less than a decade later, became ground zero of the bloody siege of Sarajevo in the 1990's. (AP Photo/Enric Marti, File)
A woman, injured in the market massacre, is transferred from an armored vehicle by U.N. troops to an awaiting U.S. aircraft at the airport in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Feb. 6, 1994. Victims of the mortar attack on Sarajevo's central market were scheduled to be flown to hospitals in Germany. At least 68 people were killed and dozens injured during the Serbian shelling. (AP Photo/Laurent Rebours)
Bosnian President, Alija Izetbegovic, visits the emergency department of the Kosevo Hospital on Saturday, Feb. 5, 1994 in Sarajevo. His personal visit attempted to console the survivors of the central market mortar attack and the relations of the deceased. (AP Photo/Rikard Larma)
A Bosnian woman walks next to a barricade made of mortar and bullet damaged busses and cars as she makes her way through the frontline neighborhood of Dobrinja in Sarajevo Sunday Nov. 13, 1994. Sniper activity has increased in Dobrinja as the war in other areas of Bosnia-Herzegovina has escalated. (AP Photo/Jacqueline Arzt)
Doctors of Sarajevo's Kosevo hospital rush to help wounded men arriving by car at the hospital Monday, June 26, 1995. Heavy shelling left one person dead and nine wounded in the Bosnian capital Monday. (AP Photo/Santiago Lyon)
Sarajevans take cover behind a French armoured personnel carrier as a Bosnian Serb sniper fires upon them on a main street in the Centre of Sarajevo, Tuesday, June 6, 1995. Sniping and shelling activity is rising in the besieged Bosnian capital as Bosnian government and Serb forces battle in the surrounding hills. (AP Photo/David Brauchli)
A Bosnian soldier stands guard on a bridge off Sniper Alley in Sarajevo, Thursday, Nov. 9, 1995. Behind the soldier is a portrait of the head of the Bosnian Army, Gen. Atis Dudakovic. Life in this beseiged city has remained calm since the ceasefire. Peace talks on the conflict in the former Yugoslvia are continuing in Dayton, Ohio. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky)
Muslim-Croat federation police officers look at the local map before going on patrol in the Sarajevo suburb of Ilijas Thursday Feb. 29, 1996, after they took control from the Bosnian Serbs. The Bosnian Federation government declared Thurday that the siege of Sarajevo is over. Ilijas is the second of the five Sarajevo districts to be transferred to the Muslim-Croat Federation. (AP Photo/Laurent Rebours)
Razlja Jankovic, 64, a Bosnian Muslim, hugs her husband Radovan, 70, a Bosnian Serb, after being separated from each other for almost four years of the war, on the Bosnian Serb side of the Brotherhood and Unity Bridge in the Sarajevo neighborhood of Grbavica Thursday Feb. 1, 1996. Thursday marks the first day since the beginning of the war that Bosnians with identity cards from both sides can cross freely to the other side without need for prior official permission. People in background are waiting to be processed for crossing into Bosnian government-held Sarajevo. (AP Photo/Jacqueline Arzt)
A Bosnian, who returned home after almost 4 years of war, hugs a policeman of the Muslim-Croat federation after Hadzici, a suburb of Sarajevo, was transfered from the Bosnian Serbs to the Bosnian government, Wednesday, March 6, 1996. (AP Photo/Michel Euler)
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