The Siege of Sarajevo 1992–1996

The instruments of the siege were shelling and sniping. Thoroughfares such as the boulevard that became known as "Sniper Alley" were lethal to cross; markets, water-collection points, funerals, and bread queues were targeted. The dead included around 1,601 children. Two attacks on the Markale market in the city centre came to symbolize the siege:

• Markale I (5 February 1994) — a single mortar shell killed 68 people and wounded more than 140.
• Markale II (28 August 1995) — mortar shells killed 43 and wounded scores more. This second massacre was a precipitating factor in NATO's Operation Deliberate Force, the air campaign that helped bring the siege and the war toward an end.

The exact toll of the siege is the subject of careful demographic work. The figure commemorated by the city — embodied in the "Sarajevo Red Line" of 11,541 empty chairs laid out along the main street in 2012 — is 11,541 killed, including 1,601 children. A separate demographic study placed total deaths connected to the siege at 13,952, of whom 5,434 were civilians, the remainder soldiers of the defending and besieging forces.

The crime of terror

Sarajevo gave international criminal law one of its most important modern articulations of the war crime of "terror" — the deliberate infliction of fear on a civilian population as an end in itself. The Galić judgment established that targeting civilians not to achieve a military objective but to terrorize them is a distinct and prosecutable crime. The siege thus matters not only for its scale but for what it added to the legal vocabulary of atrocity: it named and condemned the strategy of making ordinary life — crossing a street, drawing water, burying the dead — an act of mortal danger.

The siege and the question of genocide

The siege of Sarajevo is generally classified as crimes against humanity and war crimes rather than genocide, and this is analytically apt: its aim was to subjugate and terrorize a city, not to destroy a group as such. Yet Sarajevo cannot be separated from the genocidal campaign that surrounded it. It was the capital whose multi-ethnic survival the architects of the "ethnically pure" project sought to break, and the suffering of its people was the centrepiece of the war's assault on the very idea of a shared Bosnian society. To study Sarajevo is to study what the genocide was against: coexistence itself.

The world as witness

Uniquely among the sites in this catalogue, Sarajevo was besieged in full view of the international press, which remained in the city throughout. The siege was televised nightly to a watching world. That this did not produce decisive intervention until 1995 makes Sarajevo, like Srebrenica, a central case in the study of bystander response — the gap between witnessing atrocity and acting to stop it.