Sarajevo wedding attack
Sarajevo wedding attack | |
---|---|
Location | Sarajevo, SR Bosnia and Herzegovina, Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia |
Date | 1 March 1992 2:30 p.m. (Central European Time) |
Attack type | Shooting |
Deaths | 1 (Nikola Gardović) |
Injured | 1 (Radenko Mirović) |
Accused | Ramiz Delalić |
Around 2:30 p.m. on Sunday, 1 March 1992, a
In response to the shooting, Serb Democratic Party (SDS) irregulars set up barricades and roadblocks across Sarajevo, accusing the Bosnian Muslim Party of Democratic Action (SDA) of orchestrating the attack. The SDS demanded that Serb-inhabited areas of Bosnia and Herzegovina be patrolled by Serbs, and not by police officers of other ethnicities, and further called for United Nations peacekeepers to be deployed to the country. On 3 March, the SDS agreed to dismantle the barricades it had erected. The Muslim-dominated People's Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina declared the country's independence the same day.
Gardović is often regarded as the first casualty of the
Background
Following the death of its longtime leader Josip Broz Tito in 1980, the multi-ethnic socialist state of Yugoslavia entered a period of protracted economic stagnation and decline. The anemic state of the country's economy resulted in a substantial increase in ethnic tensions which were only exacerbated by the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989.[1] The following year, the League of Communists of Yugoslavia permitted democratic elections to be held nationwide. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, political parties were established largely along ethnic lines. The Bosnian Muslims founded the Party of Democratic Action (SDA) to represent their interests, the Bosnian Serbs founded the Serb Democratic Party (SDS) and the Bosnian Croats founded the Croatian Democratic Union of Bosnia and Herzegovina (HDZ BiH). The three parties were led by Alija Izetbegović, Radovan Karadžić and Stjepan Kljuić, respectively. Bosnia and Herzegovina held its first democratic election on 18 November 1990. The voting was dominated by nationalist parties such as the SDA, SDS and HDZ BiH. Socialist parties with no ethnic affiliation, most notably the League of Communists of Bosnia and Herzegovina, failed to win a significant percentage of the vote.[2]
The SDA and HDZ BiH, representing the aspirations of most Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats, advocated for Bosnia and Herzegovina's independence from Yugoslavia, a move opposed by the SDS and the vast majority of Bosnian Serbs.
Like much of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the capital Sarajevo was ethnically and religiously diverse. According to the 1991 Yugoslav population census, the city had 525,980 inhabitants, 49.3 percent of whom identified as Bosnian Muslims, 29.9 percent of whom identified as Serbs, 10.7 percent of whom identified as Yugoslavs and 6.6 percent of whom identified as Croats.[11]
Attack
On Sunday, 1 March 1992, the final day of voting, the wedding of a Bosnian Serb couple, Milan Gardović and Dijana Tambur, was held at the Church of the Holy Transfiguration in Novo Sarajevo. The groom was a seminarian in his final year of study. His father, Nikola, was a sacristan at the Church of the Holy Transfiguration.[12] The historian Kenneth Morrison describes the atmosphere in Sarajevo that day as "tense".[9] Following the ceremony, the newlyweds, their respective families and the wedding guests drove to the Church of the Holy Archangels Michael and Gabriel, colloquially known as the Old Orthodox Church, in the city's old Muslim quarter of Baščaršija, where a wedding meal was supposed to be held.[12] The Church of the Holy Archangels Michael and Gabriel was Sarajevo's oldest Serbian Orthodox religious building.[13]
Because there was no parking space in the immediate vicinity of the Church of the Holy Archangels Michael and Gabriel, the wedding party decided to head towards the church on foot, forming a procession that stretched from the nearest parking lot to the church itself.[12] During the procession, members of the wedding party brandished Serbian flags, which many Bosnian Muslim passersby interpreted as a deliberate provocation. Such processions were typical of Serb weddings across Yugoslavia. They were usually accompanied by the honking of car horns and the singing of songs.[14] Around 2:30 p.m., four young men emerged from a white Volkswagen Golf and attempted to seize a flag from one of the wedding guests. A scuffle ensued, and according to eyewitnesses, one of the men opened fire at the procession.[12]
Viktor Meier, a correspondent writing for the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, was a chance eyewitness to the attack, and wrote of it in his 1995 book Yugoslavia: A History of its Demise.[15] "At first, it seemed to be a detonator," Meier wrote of the gunshots, "but then I saw people in a frenzy; I heard cries and saw someone run to the nearest telephone and saw the terrified faces of passers-by."[16] Gardović's father was killed in the attack, and a Serbian Orthodox priest, Radenko Mirović, was wounded.[9]
Aftermath
Response
"The emotional charge of the incident was strong on both sides," the historian Mladen Ančić writes, "because a Serb wedding procession, displaying Serb symbols, on its way to the oldest Serb church in Sarajevo was stopped by a Muslim bullet."
The attack prompted a "competition for urban space that would develop into the outright besieging and division of the city," the historian Catherine Baker writes.[21] Roadblocks and barricades quickly appeared across Sarajevo, first Bosnian Serb ones and then Bosnian Muslim ones.[22] The SDS demanded that Serb-inhabited areas of Bosnia and Herzegovina be patrolled by Serbs, and not by police officers of other ethnicities, and further called for United Nations peacekeepers to be deployed to the country.[23] Two days after the attack, the SDS agreed to remove the barricades it had erected.[24] This breakthrough was achieved by the JNA general Milutin Kukanjac, who successfully convinced the leaders of the SDA and SDS to allow joint patrols by the JNA and Bosnian Police.[25] The same day, Izetbegović declared the independence of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Muslim-dominated People's Assembly quickly ratified the decision.[26][b] Gardović was buried in Sarajevo on 4 March. His funeral was officiated by the bishop Vasilije Kačavenda. "I will not say, as some unintelligent politicians have, that the shot that killed this man was a shot at Bosnia," Kačavenda remarked during his eulogy. "But it was a warning to our three nations. Let Nikola's sacrifice be the last of these crazy times."[28]
Coverage of the attack largely eclipsed that of the concurrent referendum. Serbian newspapers largely portrayed the attack as one for which all Bosnian Muslims bore collective responsibility. The following passage from the Belgrade daily Politika was typical: "The killers of the Serb wedding guest are not the three attackers, but those who created the atmosphere which abolished Bosnia-Herzegovina once and for all." The Sarajevo daily Oslobođenje veered in the opposite direction, attempting to obfuscate the attackers' ethnic identities. A column published a day after the attack read: "The killers of the wedding guest at Baščaršija, hate-mongers and barricade-builders, were not only not Sarajevans, they were not even true Bosnians, but strangers."[29][c] The column went on to insinuate that the wedding procession had been a deliberate provocation. Many Serb readers considered Oslobođenje's reaction to the attack insensitive and sent angry letters to the editor in response.[20] Miroslav Janković, a Serb member of the newspaper's editorial board, vented his fury at the following day's board meeting, describing the column as "the most shameless thing this newspaper has published in fifty years."[30]
Responsibility
Eyewitnesses identified the individual who fired at the wedding procession as Ramiz Delalić, a career criminal.[15] The SDS leadership immediately blamed the SDA for the attack and alleged that Delalić was under the SDA's protection.[9] Prior to the attack, Delalić had been implicated in another shooting, as well as a rape, and had received treatment at a psychiatric hospital. On 3 March 1992, the local authorities had issued a warrant for Delalić's arrest, but made little effort to find him. SDS officials alleged that the authorities' failure to arrest Delalić was evidence of the SDA's complicity in the attack.[15]
During the
On 19 September 2012, prosecutors in Sarajevo charged the Kosovo Albanian
Legacy
Nikola Gardović is often considered the first casualty of the
Fleeing the war, Milan and Dijana Gardović immigrated to Sweden, where Milan now serves as a Serbian Orthodox priest.[12] In the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1 March is celebrated as Independence Day, a non-working holiday. Independence Day is not observed in Republika Srpska and most Bosnian Serbs associate the date with the wedding attack rather than with the independence referendum.[48][49] The attack was dramatized in the 1997 British war film Welcome to Sarajevo, with Bosnian Serb paramilitaries as the perpetrators and Bosnian Croat civilians as the victims.[50][51] "These changes were introduced obviously for political reasons," the film scholar Goran Gocić opines.[50] The anthropologist Stephen Harper concurs. He writes, "the switching of ethnic identities in the staging of the wedding party massacre in Welcome to Sarajevo ... offers a further example of how cinematic images can be used for the ideological rewriting of history."[52]
Footnotes
- ^ The Bosnian government declared the referendum unconstitutional.[7]
- ^ The independence referendum was reported as having a voter turnout of 63.4 percent, of whom 99.8 percent voted for independence.[3] Since only 63.4 percent of eligible voters had taken part, the referendum failed to attain the two-thirds majority mandated by Bosnia and Herzegovina's constitution.[27]
- ^ Under Tito, the media either reported on instances of inter-ethnic violence using euphemisms, or avoided reporting on them altogether, so as not to inflame inter-ethnic tensions. "In its coverage of the wedding march killing and its aftermath," the journalist Tom Gjelten remarked, "Oslobođenje looked again like the Party organ of old."[20]
- ^ The name Bosniak was adopted by a congress of leading Bosnian Muslim intellectuals in September 1993. Prior to this, Bosniaks were referred to as Bosnian Muslims.[37]
- ^ At the time of Radončić's testimony, his party, the Alliance for a Better Future, was the SDA's coalition partner at the national and sub-national level. Radončić's testimony resulted in an increase in tensions between the two parties, but the SDA decided to remain within the coalition so as not to trigger a new election.[39]
Citations
- ^ Calic 2019, p. 286.
- ^ Burg & Shoup 1999, pp. 46–48.
- ^ a b c d Pavković 2000, p. 161.
- ^ Ramet 2006, pp. 392–393.
- ^ Ramet 2006, p. 414.
- ^ Calic 2019, p. 301.
- ^ Nettelfield 2010, p. 67.
- ^ Donia 2014, p. 151.
- ^ a b c d Morrison 2016, p. 87.
- ^ Calic 2019, p. 304.
- ^ Nizich 1992, p. 18, note 27.
- ^ a b c d e Lopušina 26 January 2009.
- ^ Ančić 2004, p. 355.
- ^ a b Ančić 2004, p. 356.
- ^ a b c d Donia 2014, p. 162.
- ^ Meier 1995, p. 204.
- ^ a b Schindler 2007, pp. 78–79.
- ^ Silber & Little 1997, p. 205.
- ^ a b Morrison 2016, p. 88.
- ^ a b c Gjelten 1995, p. 83.
- ^ Baker 2015, p. 62.
- ^ Udovički & Štitkovac 2000, p. 183.
- ^ Bachmann & Fatić 2015, p. 23.
- ^ Maksić 2017, p. 106.
- ^ Donia 2006, p. 280.
- ^ Burg & Shoup 1999, p. 118.
- ^ Halpern 2000, p. 107.
- ^ McGeough 6 March 1992.
- ^ Kolstø 2012, pp. 157–161, 239.
- ^ Gjelten 1995, p. 84.
- ^ a b Ingrao 2010, p. 209.
- ^ a b Donia 2014, p. 163.
- ^ Donia 2006, p. 392.
- ^ Office of the High Representative 8 December 2004.
- ^ a b Jukic & Peci 6 May 2013.
- ^ a b The Economist 14 May 2013.
- ^ Velikonja 2003, p. 254.
- ^ Spaic 31 October 2016.
- ^ a b Latal 1 November 2016.
- ^ Leposhtica & Morina 1 February 2018.
- ^ Carmichael 2015, p. 139.
- ^ Crawford 1996, p. 150.
- ^ Kumar 1999, p. 38.
- ^ Nettelfield 2010, pp. 67–68.
- ^ Calic 2019, p. 314.
- ^ Burg & Shoup 1999, pp. 413–415.
- ^ BBC News 20 March 2019.
- ^ Latal 2 March 2015.
- ^ Kovacevic 1 March 2017.
- ^ a b Gocić 2001, pp. 42–43.
- ^ Harper 2016, pp. 59–60.
- ^ Harper 2016, p. 144.
References
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- Ančić, Mladen (2004). "Society, Ethnicity, and Politics in Bosnia-Herzegovina". Journal of Contemporary History. 36 (1). Zagreb, Croatia: Croatian Institute of History: 331–359. ISSN 0590-9597.
- Bachmann, Klaus; Fatić, Aleksandar (2015). The UN International Criminal Tribunals: Transition Without Justice?. London, England: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-31763-136-1.
- Baker, Catherine (2015). The Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. London, England: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-1-13739-899-4.
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- Calic, Marie-Janine (2019). A History of Yugoslavia. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press. ISBN 978-1-5575-3838-3.
- Carmichael, Cathie (2015). A Concise History of Bosnia. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-10701-615-6.
- Crawford, Keith (1996). East Central European Politics Today: From Chaos to Stability?. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press. ISBN 978-0-71904-622-3.
- Donia, Robert J. (2006). Sarajevo: A Biography. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press. ISBN 978-0-472-11557-0.
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- ISBN 978-1-9033-6414-7.
- Halpern, Joel M. (2000). Neighbors at War: Anthropological Perspectives on Yugoslav Ethnicity, Culture, and History. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 978-0-27104-435-4.
- Harper, Stephen (2016). Screening Bosnia: Geopolitics, Gender and Nationalism in Film and Television Images of the 1992–95 War. London, England: Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-1-6235-6592-3.
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- Maksić, Adis (2017). Ethnic Mobilization, Violence, and the Politics of Affect: The Serb Democratic Party and the Bosnian War. Berlin, Germany: Springer. ISBN 978-3-31948-293-4.
- Meier, Viktor (1995). Yugoslavia: A History of Its Demise. London, England: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-13466-510-5.
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- Nettelfield, Lara J. (2010). Courting Democracy in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-76380-6.
- Nizich, Ivana (1992). War Crimes in Bosnia-Hercegovina. New York City: Human Rights Watch. ISBN 978-1-56432-097-1.
- Pavković, Aleksandar (2000). The Fragmentation of Yugoslavia: Nationalism and War in the Balkans. New York City: Springer. ISBN 978-0-23028-584-2.
- ISBN 978-0-253-34656-8.
- Schindler, John R. (2007). Unholy Terror: Bosnia, al-Qa'ida, and the Rise of Global Jihad. Saint Paul, Minnesota: Zenith Press. ISBN 978-0-76033-003-6.
- ISBN 978-0-14-026263-6.
- Udovički, Jasminka; Štitkovac, Ejub (2000). "Bosnia and Hercegovina: The Second War". In Udovički, Jasminka; Ridgeway, James (eds.). Burn This House: The Making and Unmaking of Yugoslavia. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. pp. 175–216. ISBN 978-0-82238-091-7.
- Velikonja, Mitja (2003). Religious Separation and Political Intolerance in Bosnia-Herzegovina. College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University Press. ISBN 978-1-58544-226-3.
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- Latal, Srecko (2 March 2015). "Disputes Simmer Over Bosnian Independence Day". Balkan Insight. Retrieved 12 November 2019.
- Latal, Srecko (1 November 2016). "Kosovo Drug Lord's Trial Rocks Bosnia Coalition". Balkan Insight. Retrieved 13 August 2017.
- Leposhtica, Labinot; Morina, Die (1 February 2018). "Kosovo Court Jails Kelmendi For Drugs Running". Balkan Insight. Retrieved 12 November 2019.
- Lopušina, Marko (26 January 2009). "Molio se za laku smrt". Večernje novosti (in Serbian). Retrieved 12 November 2019.
- McGeough, Paul (6 March 1992). "Threats to shaky peace in Sarajevo". The Sydney Morning Herald – via Newspapers.com.
- "Media Round-Up, 8/12/2004". Office of the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina. 8 December 2004. Retrieved 12 November 2019.
- "Radovan Karadzic sentence increased to life at UN tribunal". BBC News. 20 March 2019. Retrieved 21 November 2019.
- Spaic, Igor (31 October 2016). "Controversial Politician Accuses "Bosniak Mafia" of Murder at Kelmendi Trial". Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. Retrieved 12 November 2019.