what does the alter boy say ?

"But what you need to understand is that not everyone watching this will understand whats going on as well as you. To the average person, that scene would just demonstrate Serbian Terrorism.

The Filmakers should have made it clear that it was Muslims shooting at the wedding. The average person would think it was Serbs shooting their own people, or maybe even Serbs shooting Croats. This cant be accepted because this attack, set in motion one of the bloodiest seiges in Modern History. The truth needs to be adressed."

There's a certain amount of misinformation in the post above, and I think it's necessary to address it. The poster seems determined to believe that the wedding sequence in WELCOME TO SARAJEVO is a dramatization of an event that took place in Bosnia's capital on March 1, 1992 (in which the father of a Serbian groom was killed by a Muslim gunman); the fact is, the scene in WELCOME is a dramatic invention which takes place a day before the Breadline Massacre, which happened on May 27, 1992 - more than a month after fighting broke out in Sarajevo.

The poster's words - "this attack set in motion one of the bloodiest sieges in Modern History" - may lead some to believe the Bosnian War began as the result of a murder that took place at a wedding. The truth is, the war in Bosnia (like the wars in Slovenia and Croatia before it) was set in motion by a desire to secede from Yugoslavia. Four-and-a-half months earlier, in October 1991, Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic spoke in Parliament and warned independence-minded Bosnian politicians that secession would bring about war - a war in which, he darkly predicted, Muslims would "disappear." However, Bosnian Croats were just as determined as Bosnian Muslims to secede from what they saw as Slobodan Milosevic's "Serb Yugoslavia" (or "Serboslavia"), and a referendum held the weekend of March 1 1992 resulted in 63 percent of Bosnia's electorate calling for independence. This satisfied conditions set by the European Community for sovereign statehood, but radical Serb elements (led by Karadzic and backed by Milosevic) refused to accept the outcome and actively prepared for war.

Two weeks earlier, a 16th century mosque in Banja Luka was damaged by a bomb. Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic (himself a Muslim) blamed the act on extremists, urged calm, and asked Muslims not to hold Serbs responsible. But on March 1, not long before the referendum polls closed, a Serb wedding party paraded down a street in Sarajevo's mainly Muslim area of Bascarsija waving a Serbian flag and shouting "This is Serbia!"; an enraged Muslim gunman shot & killed the father of the groom and wounded an Orthodox priest. President Izetbeogovic condemned the act, offered his apologies and promised the guilty party would be prosecuted, but Karadzic felt the attack could be used to further his (and Milosevic's) agenda: "This murder," he remarked, "shows what would happen to us in an independent Bosnia." By midnight, heavily armed Serbs in ski masks had erected barricades throughout Sarajevo. Talks between Karadzic and Izetbegovic defused the crisis, but it was only temporary. On March 22, fighting broke out in the norther Bosnian city of Bosanski Brod. During the first 10 days of April, the northeastern Bosnian cities of Bijeljina and Zvornik were attacked by Serbian militias led by Zeljko "Arkan" Raznjatovic and Vojilsav Seselj (in Zvornik, the attack was aided by artillery fire from across the river in Serbia). "We had prepared this operation carefully for a long time," Seselj said when interviewed for the documentary YUGOSLAVIA: DEATH OF A NATION. "Everything went exactly as planned." And on April 5, a mixed crowd consisting of Muslims, Serbs and Croats marched through Sarajevo denouncing the violence and all politicians who wanted to divide the country along ethnic lines; Karadzic ordered his paramilitaries atop the Holiday Inn to fire on the crowd (he patronizingly referred to them as "peace activists"). Six were killed. When General Ratko Mladic assumed command of Bosnian Serb forces in May, he made civilians a primary target. His orders to Colonel Vukasinovic of the Bosnian Serb Army were simple: "Shoot at slow intervals til I order you to stop. Target Muslim neighborhoods; not many Serbs live there. Shell them til they're on the edge of madness" - an order carried out with grim determination by units stationed around (and on the high ground above) Sarajevo.

This was indeed Serb terror, and it sometimes resulted in innocent Serbs being targeted in revenge attacks by Muslims and Croats (when fighting broke out between the latter two groups, Bosnia had truly descended into Hell). It's irresponsible to demonize Serbs in general - prominent members of Izetbegovic's Bosnian Army and staff members of the Sarajevo newspaper 'Oslobodjenje' were Serbs; in fact, the woman who ran the Ljubica Ivezic orphanage (referred to in the film as "Mrs. Savic") was herself a Serb. But make no mistake - the hurricane of violence that was unleashed on Bosnia was formed in the halls of Serbian power in Belgrade.

The buck (or dinar) stops at Slobodan Milosevic.

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