Various reports including in The Guardian and European outlets have detailed one of the most shocking ‘war tourism’ stories in a long time. The reports claim people in the 1990s paid large sums of money to travel to the Balkans, where they didn’t just observe the long-running Yugoslav wars, but picked up rifles and shot people for ‘sport’.
Italian prosecutors are investigating the shocking allegations that wealthy foreigners paid many tens of thousands of dollars to act as “weekend snipers” and shoot civilians during the siege of Sarajevo in the early to mid-1990s.
Travelers from Italy, the United States, Russia, and other countries allegedly went to Bosnia during the war to fire on residents of the besieged city “for entertainment”.
They are said to have paid money to soldiers belonging to the army of Bosnian Serb warlord Radovan Karadžić, who was decades later convicted of crimes against humanity at the Hague.
Serbian authorities have vehemently denied the sensationalist allegations related specifically to the years-running siege of Sarajevo from 1992 to 1996 which took over 11,000 lives.
Prosecutors in Milan are now working to identify the Italian citizens allegedly involved. Statements indicated they will include potential charges of “premeditated murder aggravated by cruelty and vile motives.”
There’s reason for skepticism, however, given some of the specifics seem hard to believe and over-the-top, and given Balkan conflicts have notoriously been clouded in wartime propaganda and enduring historical falsehoods:
The Milan complaint was filed by journalist and novelist Ezio Gavazzeni, who describes a “manhunt” by “very wealthy people” with a passion for weapons who “paid to be able to kill defenseless civilians” from Serb positions in the hills around Sarajevo.
Different rates were charged to kill men, women or children, according to some reports.
While there have long been rumors of such things taking place, the current investigation into this in northern Italy is due largely to a prominent journalist who has has sought to revive a formal probe by submitting his own 17-page report to prosecutors:
Ezio Gavazzeni, who usually writes about terrorism and the mafia, first read about the sniper tours to Sarajevo three decades ago when Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported the story, but without firm evidence.
He returned to the topic after seeing “Sarajevo Safari”, a documentary film from 2022 by Slovenian director Miran Zupanic which alleges that those involved in the killings came from several countries, including the US and Russia as well as Italy.
The reality is that for the bulk of the historic siege few people could move in or out of the city’s environs or outskirts, and various layers of snaking checkpoints and barriers were erected and staffed also by foreign troops at times.
For example, the BBC concludes with a lengthy case for skepticism:
However, members of the British forces who served in Sarajevo in the 1990s have told the BBC that they never heard of any so-called “sniper tourism” during the Bosnian conflict.
They indicated that any attempts to bring in people from third countries who had paid to shoot at civilians in Sarajevo would have been “logistically difficult to accomplish”, due to the proliferation of checkpoints.
British forces served both inside Sarajevo and in the areas surrounding the city, where Serb forces were stationed and they saw nothing at the time to suggest that “sniper tourism” was taking place.
One soldier described the allegations that foreigners had paid to shoot at civilians as an “urban myth”.
The war was tragic and brutal enough to need no exaggeration, and this could in the end be an attempt of some prosecutors, journalists, and documentary film-makers to make a name for themselves by re-presenting rumors which makes for loud and curiosity-evoking headlines.
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