Can there be any aspect of the Bosnian War, which ended 27 years ago, that has not yet come to light, that remains hidden? Slovenian filmmaker Miran Zupanic tries to answer that question with a shocking documentary from the title. ‘Sarajevo safari’ addresses the rumor that continues to circulate in parts of what was the former Yugoslavia that foreign millionaires paid a lot of money during the siege of the bosnian capital to become snipers for a day and shoot civilians from a building window.
Did this macabre tourism exist? The documentary is not enough to confirm it with evidence, but it does provide clues in that regard. Especially two testimonies: one of a shady character, whose features are hidden throughout the footage, who is the main narrator of ‘Sarajevo safari’. He explains that, after having received some military training during his youth – when Yugoslavia was still a single country – a US secret agency contacted him once the war had already started. This kind of achiever claims that he was taken by helicopter from Belgrade to Pale, in the Republika Srpska – the pro-Serb split from Bosnia -, from where he left for Sarajevo with a group of men. They were not all Serbian soldiers; there was also “foreigners who, for certain sums of money, shot the besieged inhabitants” of the city. Between 1992 and 1994, he entered and left Sarajevo some 35 times.
Protected by anonymity, the revelations of this interviewee are the most shocking in the film. He explains, for example, that the “safari” operated from the beginning of the war; that paying foreigners spent little time in Sarajevo (“they were already shooting home”); and that in total he saw seven people fall hit by the bullets of these amateur snipers: “I even saw children die with their mother holding hands. They were like hunters shooting animals. I was horrified to see it.”
Westerners and Russians
The second direct witness of the events does have names and surnames. This is Edin Subasic, who during the war years worked for the intelligence of the Bosnian army. In the documentary he assures that, when they received information to the effect that Western and Russian millionaires were paying fortunes to be able to shoot as snipers in a “human safari”, they began to investigate it. They discovered, he affirms, that some of those who came to carry out this infamous activity did so from Italy, so they contacted the intelligence services of that country to gather more information. “Three or four months later I checked with Mustafa [Hajrulahović, un alto mando militar bosnio durante la guerra] what was the situation. Italian intelligence told us that they had located the point of origin, that it had been neutralized and that it would not happen any more.”narrates Subasic.
The documentary addresses the facts from the need to provide evidence to prove them, but also from the human side. The terrible testimony of the parents of a girl who was barely one year old and who, in October 1993, was shot dead by a sniper constitutes a part of the tape. In fact, one of the participants in ‘Sarajevo safari’ claims that foreigners were charged more if the victim was a child. Another of the interviewees remained in a wheelchair after receiving a bullet in the back.
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Sarajevo safari was screened to great acclaim in September at the Al Jazeera Balkans documentary festival in Sarajevo. Zupanic then explained that his objective, as it becomes clear during the film, was also to study from a moral point of view. what kind of person could participate without remorse in that hunt for the human being. “Life is very complex. History is very complex. This may be a drop in the ocean of history. This little story is significant precisely because it opens up a whole new level of human evil,” he told the AA news agency on documentary director. The producer, the Slovenian Arsmedia, is looking for a distributor so that the film can be commercially screened in 2023.
The siege of Sarajevo, the longest in recent history, dragged on for nearly four years, during which some 6,000 civilians were killed. Zupanic’s documentary, the revelations of which call Serbian media into question, explains how some of them could have fallen so that wealthy citizens of other countries get a dose of macabre adrenaline.