French officer Guillaume Ancel: We let the Serbs attack Sarajevo as much as they wanted in '95

PARIS/SARAJEVO, (Patria) - Officer Guillaume Ancel in his book “Icy Wind over Sarajevo” testifies publicly for the first time about the ambiguity and bias of French policy during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Speaking last night on a show on N1, he said that in 1995 he came to Sarajevo to prevent the shelling of the city, but that France prevented his unit from acting, even though a completely different picture was sent to the world.

Ancel said he arrived in Sarajevo in January 1995 as an officer in the French forces and was head of the team for countering air attacks.

He said the UN had earlier reached some kind of agreement that would mean no more heavy artillery around Sarajevo, and his team was tasked with finding that weaponry and destroying it if it was not under UN control. 

„When I arrived in Sarajevo, the city's residents had already been under siege and daily shelling by the Serbs for three years,“ Ancel recalls, as reported by the Patria agency. 

He adds that regardless of the UN agreement, Serbian forces continued to shell Sarajevo every day. He said his team was prevented from destroying that weaponry, even though they had the capability to do so. 

„More than a hundred times we found heavy weapons firing on Sarajevo, we were close to immediately stopping and destroying them, more than a hundred times the aircraft descended, the target was locked, and then we were stopped at the last minute.“ 

Asked who stopped those air strikes, Ancel said the orders came through the chain of command and originated from UN forces. 

„At first I thought it was a coordination problem. But then we realized it was a policy coming from France. At that time, France had the leading role in the UN command chain. The order came from French officials, because this was not a matter the military could decide on. We were absolutely not allowed to act against the Serbian attackers. The mission became absurd. We came to protect the city of Sarajevo. The aggressors were the Serbs. And then we were forbidden from doing so,“ Ancel said. 

„The mission was presented to the whole world as something it was not. We said we came for humanitarian reasons to protect the besieged city of Sarajevo, but in fact we prolonged the siege by not preventing the Serbian attacks. We let them attack without any problems,“ Ancel added, stressing that this was not only senseless but also criminal.

„We let the Serbs attack the city as much as they wanted, right in front of us,“ he said.

Ancel recalls that the Serbs then began attacking them as well, after which he lost 18 of his colleagues, but had no way to return fire and protect his men.