COURTSIDE: General Galic Trial
By Vjera Bogati in The Hague (TU 295, 6-10 January 2003)
COURTSIDE: General Galic Trial
By Vjera Bogati in The Hague (TU 295, 6-10 January 2003)
They denied the claims of the prosecution that UNPROFOR sent protests to the defendant over sniper fire coming from the positions of Galic's Sarajevo-Romanija Corps of the Army of Republika Srpska.
Mykhaylo Tsynchenko, a retired Ukrainian army colonel, spent around eight months as deputy commander of the UN forces in sector Sarajevo – from November 1993 until July 1994.
In this period, he claimed that fire came from both sides – Serbian and Bosniak – and that both sides received official protests on an almost daily basis.
Although he met the defendant on several occasions, Tsynchenko claims that he never saw an official written UN complaint addressed to Galic.
In these meetings, the witness said, they negotiated “cease-fires, withdrawal of arms and distribution of humanitarian help”, adding that there was no talk of sniper fire and the shelling was discussed only occasionally.
The second witness was Viktor Petrovic Pashchenko, a former Russian army officer who spent eight months in the Sarajevo UNPROFOR mission, from January to August 1993, as a staff officer in charge of contact with the warring parties.
The witness told the court that while his office had received protests from both sides in the conflict, these had contained no specific details of particular incidents.
Vjera Bogati is an IWPR correspondent in The Hague and a journalist with SENSE news agency.
