Sarajevo siege general on trial

Gen Milosevic surrendered to the court in December 2004

A wartime commander of the Bosnian Serb forces that besieged Sarajevo in the early 1990s has gone on trial at the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

Gen Dragomir Milosevic has pleaded not guilty to charges of leading attacks on civilians in the city.

He is accused of seven counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

More than 11,000 people were killed in the 44-month siege of Sarajevo. Gen Milosevic is not related to the late Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic.

Gen Milosevic's predecessor in command of the Bosnian Serb forces that besieged Sarajevo, Gen Stanislav Galic, is the only defendant so far to have received the maximum penalty - life imprisonment - from the appeals chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

The appeals verdict, which came in November, ruled that the original sentence of 20 years' imprisonment was "unreasonable and plainly unjust in that it underestimated the gravity of Galic's criminal conduct".

Brutal siege

After serving as Gen Galic's deputy, Gen Milosevic took over command of the Bosnian Serb army's Sarajevo Romanija corps in August 1994 - a little over a year before the siege ended.

Despite the overwhelming superiority of the besieging forces and the huge scale of destruction, much of Sarajevo remained in the hands of the mainly-Muslim Bosnian government.

According to the prosecution, Gen Milosevic continued to implement his predecessor's strategy of using shelling and sniping to kill, injure and spread terror among Sarajevo's civilian population.

The prosecution argues that many of the attacks were entirely unrelated to military objectives.

Gen Milosevic's defence will probably seek to persuade the judges that most of the attacks were aimed at legitimate targets, the BBC's South-East Europe analyst Gabriel Partos says.

Another line of defence might suggest that the defendant was not fully aware of the war crimes that were being committed by forces under his command.

The Bosnian Serbs' overall military commander, Gen Ratko Mladic, remains in hiding nearly 12 years after he was first indicted for war crimes. So does the Bosnian Serbs' wartime leader, Radovan Karadzic.