During the siege of Sarajevo (1992-1995) Western and Russian millionaires allegedly paid Bosnian Serb soldiers to shoot civilians from their positions in the hills of the city, a “safari” in which the game was human.
This is what the documentary supports Sarajevo safariby Slovenian director Miran Zupancic, premiered last night at the Al Jazeera Balkans Documentary Film Festival in the Bosnian capital.
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The filmmaker has worked to try to shed light on the rumor of the “sniper tourism” that has persisted for decades, but has never been corroborated, which is why the documentary offers as many questions as answers about this alleged practice.
‘Sarajevo Safari’ maintains that the “hunters” were millionaires -unidentified- from the United States, Canada, Russia and Italy, who traveled first to Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, to be later transferred to Bosnia in Yugoslav Army helicopters or by roads controlled by Bosnian Serb forces.
Zupancic’s film does not identify military commanders Serbs and Serbs who would have allowed such activities.
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The best paid: killing children
As in any safari, there were more expensive pieces. In this “the price was higher if the target was a child,” according to one of the witnesses. The documentary does not mention fees but says they were huge sums.
That witness, whose face is not shown and whose identity is not revealed, assures that he worked in the past as a secret agent for Yugoslavia and the United States. He claims to have witnessed at least seven murders by these snipers.
During the siege, some 6,000 civilians, including more than 700 children, were killed in attacks on the city.
“I saw how, for certain sums of money, strangers arrived to shoot at the citizens of besieged Sarajevo,” he reveals.
The Bosnian capital is in a valley surrounded by hills, from which Bosnian Serb artillery shelled and snipers harassed its inhabitants during the 1,425-day siege.
Zupancic, a documentary filmmaker and screenwriter with a long career behind him, explains to Efe that he decided investigate this rumor because it represented “an exceptional professional and ethical challenge“, which disrupts their “perception of the world and raises issues to a new level, disturbing and unpleasant”.
Some Serbian and Bosnian Serb media have presented the documentary as mere anti-Serb propaganda, although Zupancic defends the validity of his testimonies and denies that he wants to “demonize” the Serbs.
“We have recorded testimonials from people we believe. Each person who sees the documentary will decide if they can believe it or not”underlines.
At first he thought it would be easy for him to debunk the “safari” rumors, but he found the testimony of the witnesses convincing and withstood all his verifications.
Another witness is Edin Subasic, a former Bosnia-Herzegovina Army analyst, who says he heard about human safaris during the interrogation of a prisoner of war, who told him that some Italians had paid to shoot civilians in the city. .
The Sarajevo authorities then informed the Italian intelligence services, which after several months confirmed the presence of Italians and promised “that it would not happen again.”
According to Zupancic there are more witnesses, but all of them backed down when speaking in front of a camera.
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suspicions without proof
Natasa Kandic, head of the Serbian NGO “Fund for Humanitarian Law” in Belgrade, assures Efe that she never had information about this type of activity.
The director of the Sarajevo Documentation Center (IDC), Mirsad Tokaca, says for his part that he only knows of rumors about this type of “safari”, although he mentions the case of the Russian writer Eduard Limonov.
In the 1992 documentary ‘Serbian epic’, by the Polish Pawel Pawlikowski, Limonov (1943-2020) is seen firing a heavy machine gun at Sarajevo. Nearby was then-Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, now in prison for war crimes.
Despite having no evidence, Fikret Grabovica, president of theto “Association of parents of children murdered in besieged Sarajevo”, assures that he does not doubt that something so “horrifying could have happened” during the siege.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) sentenced to life imprisonment – in addition to Karadzic – also the Bosnian Serb military commander, Ratko Mladic, for crimes against humanity during the siege of Sarajevo.
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