Former Firefighter Recalls Sarajevo Siege
Mladic trial witness describes battling flames under sniper fire.
Former Firefighter Recalls Sarajevo Siege
Mladic trial witness describes battling flames under sniper fire.
A former American firefighter who volunteered in the besieged city of Sarajevo testified this week in the trial of wartime Bosnian Serb army commander Ratko Mladic that he and other volunteers were routinely shot at by Bosnian Serb snipers.
Prosecution witness John Jordan told the court that in November 1994, he was shot in the chest while responding to a fire at the city’s frontline, just north of the Bosnian Serb-held area of Grbavica.
“I was exposed to open ground and there was nothing between me and from where the shot came. The way [the bullet] hit me, it drove me straight into the ground,” Jordan told the court.
He said he was certain the shot came from the Bosnian Serb side, as he was close to the front line and there was nothing between himself and the snipers. He added that all the nearby Bosnian government troops had taken cover.
“Were you carrying a weapon?” prosecuting lawyer Adam Weber asked.
“No,” the witness replied.
At the beginning of Jordan’s testimony, the prosecution showed clips from news reports that the witness said inspired him to come to Sarajevo in November 1992.
In one clip, buildings burn while CNN’s Christiane Amanpour describes the scene.
“These are not accidents, but arson on a mass scale,” Amanpour says in the news report. “Serbian shells set buildings ablaze and then wait for the firemen to arrive before another barrage.”
Another clip, narrated by ABC News’s Tony Birtley, described local firemen as poorly equipped, with thin uniforms and hoses that were not long enough.
After hearing about the situation in Sarajevo, the witness formed a non-profit organisation called Global Operation Fire Rescue Services, GOFRS.
Jordan, who originally hails from New York and today works in construction, said he and other volunteers from around the world assisted local firefighters on both sides of the front line.
He responded to between 250 and 300 fires from his arrival in Sarajevo until the end of the war.
The witness features in video footage from October 1993 that was shown to the court, and can be seen crouching to avoid gunfire while trying to extinguish a fire at an industrial building near the Miljacka river.
“There was gunfire behind us and fire in front of us,” the witness recalled.
He added that this was one of the rare occasions when he and his team responded to a fire in a building that did not contain civilians.
“There were maybe half dozen [instances] where we responded and found burning structures to be strictly military, at which point we would leave,” Jordan added.
Prosecutors allege that Mladic, the highest authority in the Bosnian Serb army from 1992 to 1996, planned and oversaw the 44-month siege of Sarajevo that ravaged the city and left nearly 12,000 people dead. Mladic’s army is accused of deliberately sniping and shelling the city’s civilian population in order to “spread terror” among them.
The indictment against Mladic–which lists 11 counts in total–accuses him of crimes of genocide, persecution, extermination, murder and forcible transfer which “contributed to achieving the objective of the permanent removal of Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats from Bosnian Serb-claimed territory.”
During much of his work in Sarajevo, Jordan said, he found women and children inside burning buildings. The firefighters would sometimes have to suspend operations when the shooting became too heavy, he said.
Jordan and his volunteers also assisted people hit by sniper bullets. Members of his team were present during an incident on November 18, 1994 when a bullet passed through a woman’s stomach and hit her seven-year-old son in the head, killing him. The incident is included in Mladic’s indictment.
Prosecutors showed the court graphic footage of the boy laying face down on the concrete as blood poured from his head.
Jordan said his team was stationed nearby because it was a “very active snipering day”. While the witness was not at the scene himself, his deputy was, and he received a phone call about it soon afterwards.
During cross-examination, Mladic’s lawyer Danny Ivetic asked the witness whether he was ever armed when responding to fires.
Jordan, who spent five years in the United States Marine Corps prior to becoming a fireman, said that he and his volunteers brought military-grade weapons into Bosnia so as to defend themselves and local firemen against sniper attacks.
“Casualties in the fire department were one man in five before we started addressing the issue.... With no end to the war in sight, I thought the risk of not protecting the fire department would increase the risk of [the department] not existing,” Jordan said.
He said Bosnian Serb Army firemen were “armed to the teeth” and that while firemen traditionally do not carry weapons, fire marshals, who investigate arson, are armed in many countries.
However, he said that most of the time his colleagues’ weapons were kept inside vehicles, so there was “very little walking around with a rifle”.
Ivetic put it to the witness that the shooting of the mother and son could have been the result of a “marksman who missed the armed GOFRS and struck the victims” instead.
Jordan rejected this suggestion.
“I can say with 100 per cent certainty that whoever shot the child could not see us at all. We would only break cover to assist casualties. No one took a shot at us and [hit] the kid.” he replied.
“Were the [GOFRS members] armed?” Ivetic asked.
“One may have had 900-mm handgun on his hip,” Jordan replied. “It was not a situation where gunfire by us would have been necessary.” He explained that this was because the United Nations Protection Force, or UNPROFOR, was nearby.
Ivetic asked whether in previous instances, GOFRS staff had drawn their weapons and fired. Jordan conceded that they had, but stressed that they had only done so to protect the fire crews.
“[We] only fired to protect firemen…. It was not necessarily ‘shoot to kill’ but to drive people off. That was all it took in the vast majority of cases,” he said.
Jordan said that on one occasion he believed he was shot at by Bosnian government forces.
“It was only once, but not with heavy weapons. There were a lot less guns in the city than around it,” he said.
Ivetic then told presiding Judge Alphons Orie that Mladic himself wanted to put two questions to the witness, but the judge would not allow this.
In addition to three protected witnesses who testified almost entirely in closed session, a survivor of a mass execution also took the stand this week.
Prosecution witness Fejzija Hadzic, 65, is from Mladic’s hometown of Kalinovik in Bosnia and Herzegovina, BiH. Hadzic has testified before, so prosecutors read out a short summary of his previous testimony before asking additional questions.
According to the summary, Hadzic was arrested around June 25, 1992. He was subsequently held at several different locations, and on August 5 that year he was taken from an ammunition warehouse in the Kalinovik area to a nearby field, together with about 23 other men.
The men’s hands were tied behind their backs with wire, their valuables taken, and then they were lined up and shot.
Hadzic pretended to be dead when the bodies were moved to a stable, where they were covered in gasoline and set on fire.
“I tried to seek shelter so I wouldn’t be covered by dead bodies,” Hadzic told the court. “This is a day that was very difficult and that I do not like to remember.”
He said he managed to escape from the stable when he heard vehicles arriving with more prisoners, and then hid in a brook.
Before his capture, Hadzic was the director of a public utilities company in Kalinovik.
He recalled how Bosniaks complained directly to Mladic about weapons aimed at their village in May 1992. Mladic subsequently met Bosniak representatives. The witness was not present at the meeting, but was informed that Mladic told the representatives that BiH “would be a Serb state and the laws of the Serb state had to be observed in it”.
During cross examination, Mladic’s lawyer Miodrag Stojanovic asked the witness whether he had ever met Mladic when they were both younger.
“I remember him vaguely as a child when he played football, [but] after elementary school he went for further education and I stayed. We saw each other from time to time in passing,” Hadzic said.
“Do you agree that before the war you never heard anything bad about him?” Stojanovic asked. Hadzic replied that this was correct.
Towards the end of the cross-examination, Stojanovic told the witness that Mladic was prepared to shake hands with him, but Judge Orie interjected before the witness could respond.
“Restoring relationships are not part of the cross-examination. That’s best dealt with outside of court,” the judge said, as Mladic smiled.
The defendant was arrested in Serbia on May 26, 2011, after spending 16 years as a fugitive. The trial continues next week.
Rachel Irwin is IWPR Senior Reporter in The Hague.
