Siege of Sarajevo (1992–1996): Longest Siege of a Modern Capital

The Siege of Sarajevo was the encirclement of the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Bosnian Serb forces during the Bosnian War. It lasted from 5 April 1992 to 29 February 1996, almost four years, making it the longest siege of a capital city in modern warfare. Constant shelling and sniper fire killed an estimated 11,000–14,000 people, and the image of a European city under siege at the end of the twentieth century shocked the world.

Background

Sarajevo was the most mixed city in Yugoslavia. Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), Serbs, Croats, Jews and people who called themselves simply Yugoslavs lived side by side, and the city had hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics. Before the war, the wider city had a population of roughly half a million.

As Yugoslavia broke apart, Bosnia and Herzegovina held an independence referendum in February and March 1992, which most Bosnian Serbs boycotted. Bosnian Serb leaders under Radovan Karadžić, backed by Slobodan Milošević in Belgrade, rejected independence and set up their own state, Republika Srpska. The causes and course of the wider conflict are covered in the article on the Bosnian War.

The siege begins

On 5 April 1992 a large peace demonstration gathered in Sarajevo. Shots were fired at the crowd, and two women, Suada Dilberović and Olga Sučić, were killed on the Vrbanja bridge; they are often remembered as the first victims of the siege. The next day the European Community recognised Bosnia and Herzegovina, and fighting spread through the city.

Bosnian Serb forces, first with the Yugoslav People’s Army and then as the Army of Republika Srpska, took the hills and mountains around the city. From there they positioned artillery, tanks, mortars and snipers. Sarajevo, lying in a narrow valley along the Miljacka river, was almost completely surrounded. Inside, the Bosnian government’s forces, poorly armed because of an international arms embargo, held the line but could not break the encirclement.

Life under siege

For nearly four years Sarajevans lived without regular electricity, running water, heating or adequate food. People queued at public taps and breweries to fill canisters with water, often under fire. In winter they burned furniture, books and the city’s trees to keep warm, and many parks were turned into vegetable plots and cemeteries.

Shelling hit homes, markets, hospitals and schools. On a typical day hundreds of shells fell on the city; on 22 July 1993 a record of more than 3,700 was reported. Snipers targeted people crossing open streets, especially along the main boulevard that became known as Sniper Alley. Residents learned to run across junctions or wait behind shipping containers and United Nations armoured vehicles.

The city’s population was not only Bosniak. Thousands of Serbs and Croats stayed in government-held Sarajevo and shared the hardships of the siege, while many Serbs lived in suburbs such as Grbavica and Ilidža held by the besieging forces. Inside the city, some early defence units were led by criminals who also preyed on residents. Members of one such unit, commanded by Mušan Topalović, known as Caco, murdered Serb civilians at the Kazani pit above the city before the government moved against him in October 1993. These crimes were long little discussed but have been publicly commemorated in recent years.

Foreign journalists, many of them based at the Holiday Inn hotel on Sniper Alley, reported daily from the city, and several were killed. Their reports made Sarajevo the best-known face of the war for audiences in Europe and North America.

Despite this, cultural and civic life continued. The daily newspaper Oslobođenje kept publishing from a ruined building. Theatres staged plays, musicians held concerts, and a beauty contest was organised in a cellar. The cellist Vedran Smailović played in the ruins of the city in memory of the dead, and in 1993 the American writer Susan Sontag directed a production of Waiting for Godot by candlelight. In October 1995, while the city was still encircled, the first Sarajevo Film Festival was held; it has since become one of the largest film festivals in south-eastern Europe.

Schools continued in apartments and cellars, and doctors at the Koševo hospital and the State Hospital worked through power cuts and shelling, treating tens of thousands of wounded. Survival depended on improvisation: people built stoves from metal scraps, grew vegetables on balconies, and shared news and food with neighbours across ethnic lines.

Key events

Some attacks became symbols of the siege. On 27 May 1992 a shell struck a queue for bread in Vase Miskina street, killing more than a dozen people. On the night of 25–26 August 1992 incendiary shells set fire to the National and University Library in the old City Hall, the Vijećnica, destroying most of its collection of around 1.5–2 million books and manuscripts.

The United Nations reopened Sarajevo airport in June 1992, and a humanitarian airlift began that ran, with interruptions, until January 1996. It lasted longer than the Berlin Airlift of 1948–1949. In mid-1993 Bosnian forces completed a tunnel of about 800 metres under the airport runway, linking the city to government-held territory at Butmir. The Sarajevo Tunnel became the city’s lifeline for supplies and people.

On 5 February 1994 a mortar shell hit the crowded Markale market, killing 68 people and wounding about 144. NATO responded with an ultimatum demanding that Bosnian Serb heavy weapons be withdrawn from a 20-kilometre exclusion zone around the city, which brought a period of relative calm. On 28 August 1995 a second attack near Markale killed 43 people. Two days later NATO launched Operation Deliberate Force, a bombing campaign against Bosnian Serb positions.

Key people

• Radovan Karadžić, president of Republika Srpska, was the political leader of the Bosnian Serbs.
• Ratko Mladić commanded the Army of Republika Srpska.
• Stanislav Galić (1992–1994) and Dragomir Milošević (1994–1996) commanded the Sarajevo-Romanija Corps that surrounded the city.
• Alija Izetbegović, President of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, led the government from within the besieged city.

The end of the siege and justice

NATO air strikes, a Croatian and Bosnian ground offensive in western Bosnia and diplomatic pressure from the United States pushed the parties to negotiate. The Dayton Agreement, reached in November 1995 and signed in Paris on 14 December 1995, ended the war.

Under Dayton, Serb-held suburbs of Sarajevo were transferred to the Bosniak–Croat Federation. Many Serb residents left, some after their own leaders urged them to go. On 29 February 1996 the Bosnian government formally declared the siege over.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague tried several commanders for the campaign of shelling and sniping against civilians. Stanislav Galić was convicted in 2003 of crimes including terror against the civilian population, and his sentence was raised to life imprisonment on appeal in 2006. Dragomir Milošević received a sentence that was fixed at 29 years on appeal in 2009. Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić were both convicted of crimes including the terror campaign in Sarajevo and sentenced to life imprisonment.

By the numbers

Legacy

The siege left deep physical and human scars. Buildings across the city still show shell and bullet marks, and some shell craters have been filled with red resin to form “Sarajevo Roses” as memorials. The Vijećnica was restored and reopened in 2014, and part of the tunnel is now a museum.

The siege also changed how Europe thought about war and intervention. Television brought daily images of a besieged European city into living rooms, and the slow international response became a lasting example of the limits of peacekeeping without a mandate to protect civilians. For many Sarajevans, the memory of resilience, humour and solidarity during the siege remains as important as the memory of loss. Nearly eighty years earlier, Sarajevo had already entered world history with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand; the siege gave the city a second, painful place in the story of twentieth-century Europe.

Timeline

• 1992, 5 April: Shots fired at a peace march; the siege of Sarajevo begins.
• 1992, 6 April: The European Community recognises Bosnia and Herzegovina.
• 1992, 27 May: A shell kills people queuing for bread in Vase Miskina street.
• 1992, 25–26 August: The National and University Library is burned.
• 1993, mid-year: The Sarajevo Tunnel under the airport is completed.
• 1994, 5 February: The first Markale market massacre kills 68 people.
• 1995, 28 August: A second Markale attack kills 43 people.
• 1995, 30 August: NATO begins Operation Deliberate Force.
• 1995, 14 December: The Dayton Agreement is signed in Paris.
• 1996, 29 February: The Bosnian government declares the siege over.

Why it matters

The Siege of Sarajevo was the defining image of the wars that ended Yugoslavia. It showed how a modern city could be held hostage for years, how ordinary people survived it, and how slowly the international community acted. Its trials helped establish that deliberately terrorising a civilian population is a war crime.