Sarajevo wedding attack

"The emotional charge of the incident was strong on both sides," the historian Mladen Ančić writes, "because a Serb wedding procession, displaying Serb symbols, on its way to the oldest Serb church in Sarajevo was stopped by a Muslim bullet."[14] For most Serbs, the attack represented "a point of no return", the historian John R. Schindler writes.[17] The shooting was immediately denounced by SDS officials. Karadžić said the attack proved that the independence movement posed an existential threat to the Bosnian Serbs.[15] "This shot was a great injustice aimed at the Serb people," the President of the People's Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Momčilo Krajišnik, remarked.[18] SDS spokesman Rajko Dukić stated that the wedding attack was evidence that Sarajevo's Serbs were "in mortal danger" and argued that an independent Bosnia and Herzegovina would threaten the Bosnian Serbs' security even further.[19] Izetbegović condemned the murder, calling it "a shot at all Bosnia". The mayor of Sarajevo's Stari Grad municipality, Selim Hadžibajrić, expressed his condolences to Gardović's family.[20] The Bosnian Muslim paramilitary leader Sefer Halilović, who had founded the militia known as the Patriotic League in March 1991, struck a different tone. Halilović claimed that the procession "wasn't really a wedding, but a provocation", and that the members of the wedding party were SDS activists. "They wanted to go through Baščaršija with the cars, with the flags, with the banners, to provoke us and see how we would react," Halilović remarked.[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.[21] Roadblocks and barricades quickly appeared across Sarajevo, first Bosnian Serb ones and then Bosnian Muslim ones.[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.[23] Two days after the attack, the SDS agreed to remove the barricades it had erected.[24] This breakthrough was achieved by the JNA general Milutin Kukanjac, who successfully convinced the leaders of the SDA and SDS to allow joint patrols by the JNA and Bosnian Police.[25] The same day, Izetbegović declared the independence of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Muslim-dominated People's Assembly quickly ratified the decision.[26][lower-alpha 2] Gardović was buried in Sarajevo on 4 March. His funeral was officiated by the bishop Vasilije Kačavenda. "I will not say, as some unintelligent politicians have, that the shot that killed this man was a shot at Bosnia," Kačavenda remarked during his eulogy. "But it was a warning to our three nations. Let Nikola's sacrifice be the last of these crazy times."[28]

Coverage of the attack largely eclipsed that of the concurrent referendum. Serbian newspapers largely portrayed the attack as one for which all Bosnian Muslims bore collective responsibility. 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." The Sarajevo daily Oslobođenje veered in the opposite direction, attempting to obfuscate the attackers' ethnic identities. 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."[29][lower-alpha 3] The column went on to insinuate that the wedding procession had been a deliberate provocation. Many Serb readers considered Oslobođenje's reaction to the attack insensitive and sent angry letters to the editor in response.[20] Miroslav Janković, a Serb member of the newspaper's editorial board, vented his fury at the following day's board meeting, describing the column as "the most shameless thing this newspaper has published in fifty years."[30]

Eyewitnesses identified the individual who fired at the wedding procession as Ramiz Delalić, a career criminal.[15] The SDS leadership immediately blamed the SDA for the attack and alleged that Delalić was under the SDA's protection.[9] Prior to the attack, Delalić had been implicated in another shooting, as well as a rape, and had received treatment at a psychiatric hospital. On 3 March 1992, the local authorities had issued a warrant for Delalić's arrest, but made little effort to find him. SDS officials alleged that the authorities' failure to arrest Delalić was evidence of the SDA's complicity in the attack.[15]

During the siege of Sarajevo, Delalić led a Bosnian Muslim paramilitary unit that attacked and murdered Bosnian Serb and Bosnian Muslim civilians.[31] The impunity entrusted Delalić by the Bosnian Muslim authorities was such that he openly admitted to opening fire on the wedding guests in a televised interview.[32] The authorities only cracked down on Delalić's militia in late 1993 after it began targeting non-Serbs.[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. In June 1999, he ran over and injured a police officer with his car, and was again imprisoned. 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.[33] On 8 December 2004, Delalić was charged with one count of first degree murder in relation to the wedding attack.[34] His trial commenced on 14 February 2005. 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. The same day, Delalić posted bail and was released on his own recognizance. On 27 June 2007, before his trial could be completed, Delalić was shot and killed by unidentified gunmen in Sarajevo.[32]

On 19 September 2012, prosecutors in Sarajevo charged the Kosovo Albanian drug lord Naser Kelmendi with ordering Delalić's murder.[35] Kelmendi had fled Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2012 after being sanctioned under the United States' Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act. He was also indicted on several counts of drug trafficking.[36] He was arrested by the Kosovo Police in Pristina on 6 May 2013.[35] Since Bosnia and Herzegovina does not recognize Kosovo, and thus has no extradition agreement with it, Kelmendi was tried in Pristina for crimes that he was alleged to have committed in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In October 2016, the senior Bosniak[lower-alpha 4] politician Fahrudin Radončić, who had been acquainted with Delalić, testified in Kelmendi's defense. In 2012, Radončić had been named in Kelmendi's indictment as one of the plotters in the conspiracy to kill Delalić, but was never personally charged and denied the allegations. Radončić testified that Delalić had told him that the wedding attack had been ordered by Izetbegović and the SDA. Radončić further testified that Delalić's assassination had been ordered by "the Bosniak state mafia", and not by Kelmendi, because Delalić had wished to discuss the Izetbegović family's alleged involvement in organized crime with prosecutors.[38][39][lower-alpha 5] On 1 February 2018, Kelmendi was convicted on one count of drug trafficking and sentenced to six years' imprisonment; he was acquitted on all counts relating to Delalić's murder.[40]