"All this evil is unimaginable." "Sarajevo safari" tells the story of rich people who paid money to hunt people in the Bosnian war

Among the many dramatic tragedies of the siege of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, which began in 1992 and lasted 3 years, the story of “Safari” has remained far from the public eye;

Only a select few were aware that the siege of Sarajevo on the Serbian side involved not only the BSA, volunteers, and mercenaries but also another small, secret group, made up of wealthy foreigners who paid high fees for the opportunity to shoot the besieged Sarajevo population.

The Sarajevo Safari documentary highlights how wealthy wartime people in the 1990s paid Serb soldiers to "hunt people" in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The film was shown for the first time, last Saturday, in the capital, Sarajevo, as part of Al Jazeera Documentary Days, and was produced by Arsmedia with Al Jazeera Balkans and others as co-producers, and with partial funding from the Slovenian Film Center.

The film, directed by Slovenian Miran Zubanic, was admired by the participants in the international festival, which lasted until September 13, and the director said that at first he did not believe the existence of "all this evil", noting that the victims were civilians who found themselves in the crossfire of these snipers. Cruel foreigners, as he put it.

The documentary recounts events that took place during the longest siege in the history of modern wars, when some wealthy people visited the sites of the Serbian army and offered money to its elements in order to live the experience of "hunting people" from the Bosnians.

brutal story

The 75-minute documentary opens with seemingly poetic footage of a site on the beautiful hills overlooking the city, but soon comes heartbreaking archival footage of life in the city under siege between 1992-1995, and then the narrator begins telling his story of travels. The safari” and his relationship with it as a witness.

The anonymous narrator (unnamed) received a military education in the former Yugoslavia in the 1980s and made a living working in intelligence before the country collapsed. The collapsed state is “to listen to the pulse of its people and societies,” according to his testimony presented by the film.

Through his contacts in Belgrade, he got acquainted with the "Safari" program, where the "hunters" involved in this activity were shooting people in the besieged city of Sarajevo from sniper positions for the Serbian forces, in return for a financial reward. "Safari" trips were organized and facilitated by the armies of each From Serbia and Republika Srpska (a legal entity that is currently part of Bosnia and Herzegovina), the participants came from abroad to fulfill their frantic desires.

The former intelligence man spoke about his vision of strangers who came to a neighborhood of Sarajevo to hunt the besieged in it, and the testimony sparked widespread controversy in Bosnia, as Bosnian jurists considered the film new evidence of war crimes that had not been fully documented previously, while activists from Republika Srpska said that the film is based on An untrue lie.

The film supports the story by listening to the victims, including a couple who lost their one-year-old daughter to a sniper, and a captured soldier recounting the story of the fishermen.

In the film, Edin Subasic, a military analyst who previously worked in the army of Bosnia and Herzegovina, also spoke about intelligence information received by the army from the Military Security Service, which captured a volunteer fighter, and during interrogation confirmed the presence of foreigners on the battlefield, according to Subasic.

In the film, Subasic describes the interrogation of a prisoner who told them about Italians who were taken with volunteer fighters from Belgrade to the town of Bali near Sarajevo, where he admitted that they were not paid to go to war, but were paid to go to the front lines during the siege.

The director of the Slovenian film Zupanic said that he did not know the identity of the killers, noting that this was the task of the investigative bodies, stressing that they had worked for more than 3 years in the investigation and search for witnesses, adding that the goal was to explore this phenomenon that exists on a global scale and to think about the ethics of human society.

It is noteworthy that the siege of Sarajevo by the Serbian forces began on the fifth of April 1992 and continued until the signing of the Dayton Peace Treaty on December 14, 1995, which ended the Bosnian War.

During the siege, about 500,000 bombs were dropped on Sarajevo, 11,541 people were killed, and about 80% of the city's buildings collapsed, as well as significant damage to infrastructure.