Did Rich Foreigners Pay to Shoot Civilians in Bosnia?

Did Rich Foreigners Pay to Shoot Civilians in Bosnia? Introduction. What’s the most depressing piece of global news you’ve heard this year? The film relied on testimony from an anonymous Slovenian intelligence officer, who had claimed that he personally witnessed seven sniper shootings by paying foreign tourists, and an intelligence officer from Bosnia who had interrogated a Serbian fighter who had, in turn, claimed that he had encountered several Italian foreigners who had paid to shoot civilians.

Key Developments

There’s been plenty to choose from, whether it’s the atrocities committed in the city of El-Fasher, in Sudan, to the revelations coming out about the extent, and brutality, of state repression in Assad-era Syria, to headlines from global battlefields in Ukraine, Gaza, the Congo, the Sahel, and elsewhere. But this November, an Italian journalist and a group of investigators in the city of Milan added yet another contender to that conversation, a series of horrific crimes that may have gone unpunished for over three decades. They were called the Sniper Safaris, and although they’ve been discussed as rumors, ever since the conclusion of the Bosnian War, they’ve never resulted in a known, formal investigation in any country, let alone a prosecution.

But if the information that Italy now possesses, is accurate, then wealthy citizens from Italy and all across the Western world might have descended on the besieged city of Sarajevo, and paid for a sort of holiday that should be unthinkable: Taking up positions in a sniper’s nest, staring down their sights at Bosnia’s infamous sniper alleys, and killing the civilians unlucky enough to end up in their crosshairs. The Siege of Sarajevo. What does it mean, to go on a sniper safari?

Strategic Implications

To answer that, we’ve got to start, not by discussing these people’s journeys, but their destination. The city of Sarajevo is the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, usually referred to simply as Bosnia. Today, the nation is divided into two autonomous entities: the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, made up predominantly of ethnic Bosniaks and Croats, and the Republika Srpska, mostly home to ethnic Serbs.

But back in the early 1990s, with a pre-war population of about half a million people, the city of Sarajevo was the capital of a nation that had only just declared its independence from the now-former state of Yugoslavia. Then, as now, Bosnia and the rest of the ex-Yugoslav states of the Balkan region are places where ethnic tensions can run very hot, and when Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence, the nation’s ethnic Serb population took issue with the idea that they would have to be minority members of a single, unified nation. In their view, the Republika Srpska that we know today, /shouldn’t/ have been an autonomous region within the country, but its own sovereign state—with Bosniak-majority areas firmly under its control.

Risk and Uncertainty

Their response was the Siege of Sarajevo, an encirclement of the city that began in early April of 1992, and would continue for nearly four years straight. To put it bluntly, the Siege of Sarajevo was misery in human form. Some three to four hundred thousand civilians were trapped inside the city, alongside around seventy thousand troops fighting with the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, who had mostly small arms at their disposal, and lacked the capability to break out.

Pointing their guns inward, was a far smaller force: no more than twenty-three thousand Bosnian Serbs at their strongest, and typically a good deal less than that. But they had the benefit of heavy artillery, tanks, and encirclement: They could see into the city from all angles, anticipate and respond to any massing of enemy forces, and rain down hell upon the people within. They also had the support of the neighboring, and much more powerful new nation of Serbia, led by a man whose name now lives alongside some of the most despised war criminals in modern history: Slobodan Milosevic, the final leader of Yugoslavia.

Outlook

Many of the besieging forces were, in effect, under Milosevic’s direct control, or were otherwise former members of the Yugoslav armed forces who very conveniently showed up around Sarajevo, wearing new uniforms but firing most of their own weapons. Even the tanks and artillery pieces had essentially come from Milosevic, split off to the Republika Srpska as part of the breakup of Yugoslavia, and Serbia was more than happy to provide all the ammunition, fuel, supplies, and intelligence and diplomatic support that the Bosnian Serbs needed. Now, it’s important to understand that although Sarajevo was under siege, and bore the brunt of this entire conflict, the ultimate goal of the Bosnian Serbs and Milosevic was not to capture the city.

Instead, their goal was to force the leadership of both Bosnia, and the international community, to accept the partition of the state and allow the creation of a sovereign Serb nation. That was particularly important to Serbs in Bosnia and Serbia, because at that time, Serbia was still part of a union with modern-day Montenegro, with ethnic Serbs making up a national majority, but not by all that much. Regardless of their motivations, the Bosnian Serbs’ objective was to use Sarajevo as leverage: accept what the Bosnian Serbs were proposing, and all this pain and suffering could be over tomorrow.

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Sources

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