Sarajevo wedding attack
Around 2:30 p.m. on Sunday, 1 March 1992, a Serb wedding procession in Sarajevo's old Muslim quarter of Baščaršija was attacked, resulting in the death of the father of the groom, Nikola Gardović, and the wounding of a Serbian Orthodox priest.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.Ramiz Delalić, a career criminal allegedly under the protection of the SDA, was quickly identified as a suspect, but the Bosnian Muslim authorities made little effort to locate him in the immediate aftermath of the shooting.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.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.[9] On 9 January 1992, the SDS announced the establishment of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a self-proclaimed autonomous entity which was to include all the municipalities in which more than 50 percent of voters had voted to remain part of Yugoslavia.[11] 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.[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.[19] 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.[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.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."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.[31] On 1 March 1997, the fifth anniversary of the wedding attack, Delalić publicly threatened a father and son inside a Sarajevo restaurant, and brandished a pistol in front of patrons, an offence for which he was later convicted.This latter incident prompted Carlos Westendorp, the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, to urge the country's authorities to investigate Delalić's wartime activities.On the first day of court proceedings, prosecutors played the jury a videotape of the wedding attack, which appeared to show Delalić firing at the procession.[17] The political scientist Keith Crawford describes the attack and the Sijekovac massacre of Bosnian Serb civilians in Bosanski Brod on 27 March as the two incidents that effectively precipitated the conflict.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.