Sarajevo Siege: How Perpetrators of Deadly Attacks Remain Unprosecuted

A total of 1,601 boys and girls lost their lives during the siege of Sarajevo. One of them was Mirza Imamovic.

His mother Zlatka Imamovic recalled how one day she heard an explosion and ran out of the house with her husband, calling for Mirza, who was playing outside.

"There was smoke… We could not see through it, we did not know what was happening, we ran down the stairs, not knowing what was happening and shouting for Mirza," Imamovic said.

"At some stage I saw my Mirza lying on the stairs, dead … With that moment in my head I go to sleep and with that moment in my head I wake up, every morning for the whole of my life."

Stanislav Galic and his successor as the commander of the Sarajevo-Romanija Corps, Dragomir Milosevic, were jailed by the Hague Tribunal for terrorising the population of Sarajevo during the siege.

But so far the Bosnian state prosecution has not filed a single indictment for the murders and wounding of thousands of people in the city from 1992 to 1995.

No one has been convicted in Bosnia and Herzegovina for the death of Mirza Imamovic and other children like him.

The state prosecution said it has several investigations ongoing over crimes committed as part of the siege, but refused to explain why it has failed to file a single indictment for these crimes it started operating in 2003.

Legal experts argue however that because of the hierarchical structure of the Bosnian Serb Army and the evidence presented at the UN court in The Hague, it would be possible to identify a large number of direct criminal perpetrators.

'It was like Russian roulette'

Bosnian Serb general Stanislav Galic at the Hague Tribunal in December 2003, just before his verdict for committing war...