More than 11,000 empty red chairs were set up along the main street in Sarajevo on Friday in memory of over 11,000 residents killed during the siege of the city which began on 6 April 1992 and lasted until the end of 1995 when a peace agreement was signed in Dayton, Ohio, formally ending the war.
Thousands of people gathered by the chairs to pay tribute to the 11,541 of their fellow citizens who had been killed during the siege laid by Bosnian Serb forces.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) sentenced Bosnian Serb General Stanislav Galic to life imprisonment and General Dragomir Milosevic to 29 years in prison for genocide and other war crimes committed by their troops during the siege.
Galic and Milosevic were the commanders of the Serb forces that shelled the city for years and cut off delivery of food and medicines and transport routes.
Sarajevo Mayor Alija Behman said that the 11,541 empty chairs symbolised all victims who had been identified and whose places of death had been located so far, adding that the death toll was even higher.
"According to some estimates, over 18,000 Sarajevans were killed, including more than 600 children," said Behman, who together with delegations of many European cities, including Zagreb, Vukovar and Dubrovnik, laid wreaths at the city monuments commemorating the defenders of Sarajevo and victims of the siege.
Bosnian Presidency Chairman Bakir Izetbegovic said that the city had proved to be invincible.
"Sarajevo is an undefeatable city, it defeated all barbarians that attacked it. The capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina is a forerunner of what we see in Europe today," said Izetbegovic.
The Archbishop of Sarajevo, Cardinal Vinko Puljic, said that he had remained in the city during the siege in order to advocate the truth and help ordinary people as much as possible.
He recalled that he was on his way to Austria when the siege began and that he immediately returned to Sarajevo. "All four years I was in Sarajevo as the voice of the little man," the Catholic dignitary said.
The head of the Islamic Community in Bosnia, Grand Mufti Mustafa Ceric, said in a statement that the victims of the 44-month siege were a symbol of aspirations for freedom, of the resistance to hatred and of the struggle against crime.
Recalling that Sarajevo was "the biggest concentration camp in Europe after World War Two," the grand mufti criticised the international community for its "shameful role", accusing it of standing idly by while crimes were being committed in the Bosnian capital.
Some of the foreign correspondents who reported from Sarajevo in wartime arrived in the city for today's commemoration, including Roy Gutman, an American journalist and author who has won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting and his book "Witness to Genocide".
