The Mayor of Sarajevo, Benjamina Karic, spoke after the statements of the Mayor of Belgrade, Aleksandar Sapic, about the youth's request to remove the mural dedicated to the convicted war criminal Ratko Mladic noting that Sarajevo will deliver the court verdicts to her Belgrade counterpart familiarising him with facts regarding Mladic.

“The Mayor of the city of Belgrade and a doctor of science, as Mayor Sapic presents himself, should be familiar with the basics of international criminal law and the verdicts of the International Tribunal for war crimes committed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia. He should know that the International Mechanism for Criminal Courts issued a second-instance verdict confirming the life sentence of Ratko Mladic, former general of the Republika Srpska Army, for genocide in Srebrenica, persecution of Bosniaks and Croats, terrorizing the citizens of Sarajevo and taking UN members hostage. Taking into account a large amount of ignorance and lack of information, the City Administration of the City of Sarajevo will officially deliver the court verdicts that should be read, because as he himself said, he was not in Bosnia during that time, so he does not know what happened. But there are institutions that have been and that know what happened. The Mayor can also get more information at the Information Center on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which is located in the Sarajevo City Hall,” Karic stated in her reaction.

Earlier the Belgrade Mayor said that he “does not know whether Mladic committed war crimes, but he knows that he defended the Serb people in Bosnia and Herzegovina.” He pointed out that “we can always talk about graffiti and public order in Belgrade”, but, as he said, he asked the public not to mix the Hague Tribunal and its verdicts with these matters.

“In that case, you are at the wrong address and you will have to wait for another Mayor to come to my place and fulfil those kinds of Hague wishes,” said Sapic.