The pain Sarajevo endured during its four year siege between 1992 and 1996 did not end with the Srebrenica massacre of 1995, when more than eight thousand Bosnian Muslim boys, men and women were slaughtered in what Europe itself later conceded was the worst genocide on the continent since the Holocaust.
What is emerging today suggests that even that atrocity, monstrous as it was, is only one chapter in a longer and darker record. The list of crimes is not closed, and the memory is still bleeding. Among those open wounds there looms the spectre of a crime that is almost beyond belief, later known as “sniper tourism”.
The phrase itself only began to circulate a few years ago, but it now echoes like a slap in the face of human conscience, three decades after fear swallowed Sarajevo’s streets.
In November this year, the public prosecutor’s office in Milan opened a criminal investigation based on a complaint accusing wealthy Europeans – addicted to hunting as a favourite pastime – of travelling to Serbia during the war to take part in live fire sessions against Muslim civilians in besieged Sarajevo, under the protection of Serbian soldiers and in return for large sums of money.
According to the accusations, these trips were a form of paid entertainment, a kind of deadly tourism. Blood soaked excursions where the bodies of innocents became the shooting range. Nearly eleven thousand Bosnians are believed to have been killed in this cold and calculated way.
The charges reveal how Bosnians – children, women and men – were turned into targets for amusement, reduced to mere movement inside a rifle’s scope held by some wealthy visitor eager to test his marksmanship and indulge impulses that had nothing to do with humanity. In the darkest hours of their city, Bosnians were treated like wild birds to be shot on a weekend hunt, when in truth they were simply human beings running for their lives.
“Sarajevo Safari”: Where The Story Broke Open
In September 2022, the first line of light pierced the darkness surrounding this “human safari”, a story that had long circulated in whispers. It happened when new faces were exposed among those who abused and murdered Bosnian civilians. They appeared at first glance as polished, wealthy men with the look of successful businessmen, but behind the facade lay something far more sinister: killers who had come from abroad to join Serbian forces and mercenaries in one of the most degrading crimes of the war.
That moment came with the Sarajevo premiere of the documentary “Sarajevo Safari”, screened during Al Jazeera Documentary Days. The film, produced by Arsmedia in cooperation with Al Jazeera Balkans and other partners, and supported by the Slovenian Film Center, was a moral shock for the audience. It lit up a pitch-black chapter of the 1990s conflict, showing how wealthy foreigners paid large sums to Serbian soldiers for the “right” to hunt human beings in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The Slovenian director, Miran Zupanič, said that when he first heard the stories he could not believe that such an amount of evil could be real. The victims were ordinary civilians trying to survive, who suddenly found themselves turned into targets for foreign snipers who had come not to fight, but to be entertained.
The film presented live testimonies from the longest siege in modern warfare. It documented how some rich Italians travelled to positions held by the Serbian army and handed over cash to soldiers in exchange for the thrill of pulling the trigger, as if war were a stage play and the Bosnian person merely a prop on which to rehearse death.
The documentary provoked an intense wave of anger and pushed the authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina to open a formal investigation in 2022. Yet for almost three years, that move produced no tangible results, lost in political complications and the scars of the old war.
The story did not end there. While delay, hesitation and perhaps deliberate neglect impeded progress in Sarajevo, the case was reopened in Milan. The investigation began to move in a new direction, attracting more attention and throwing fresh light on a crime that had remained in the shadows for far too long.
Summons After Thirty Years
In November this year, Italian journalist and novelist Ezio Gavazzeni filed an official complaint with the Milan prosecutor accusing several of his compatriots of “murder with cruelty and vile motives” during the siege of Sarajevo.
The complaint was not born overnight. Gavazzeni built his case on documents handed to him by former Sarajevo mayor Benjamina Karić, who contacted him in August after she was shaken by the story of “Sarajevo Safari”, which she heard about for the first time at the film’s premiere in 2022.
Karić said she could not ignore the idea of “hunting human beings” as if they were part of a safari in the wild. In her view, this was an organised and carefully funded crime, not a random outburst of violence. Driven by her ethical and professional responsibility – as lawyer, citizen and then mayor – she submitted a complaint to the prosecutor in Bosnia and Herzegovina and later attached the testimony of American firefighter John Jordan.
Jordan had served with United Nations forces and personally witnessed the arrival of “foreign hunters” to the besieged city. His testimony was accepted in The Hague and is part of court records.
This year, Karić forwarded the file to the Italian authorities through their embassy in Sarajevo, shifting the investigation to Milan. There, prosecutors gained access to documents and potential witnesses from Italian security services. The former mayor publicly confirmed her full readiness to testify, writing on X that “paying money to shoot civilians, especially children, is an evil no respectable state can remain silent about”. She stressed that cooperation between Bosnian and Italian authorities is ongoing to identify any suspects, whether Italian or from other nationalities.
Yet the road to justice has been rough. According to Gavazzeni, Bosnian prosecutors previously closed an inquiry three years ago because of deep internal divisions and the difficulty of reopening such crimes. In Serbia, merely raising the subject was nearly impossible amid official scepticism about the entire narrative.
Gavazzeni therefore saw Italian courts as the only realistic venue. “We are dealing with businessmen and wealthy people who used to travel from Trieste to hunt human beings, then come back to their respectable lives as if nothing had happened,” he said, estimating that the number of Italian participants in the crimes was at least one hundred, possibly double that, alongside other foreign nationals. Among them was Russian writer Eduard Limonov, shown in video footage firing at civilians from the hills around Sarajevo.
The Rich In Fascist Colours
According to testimony from Gavazzeni and the former Sarajevo mayor, most suspects were rich men who loved firearms and backed far right ideologies. They reportedly travelled from Trieste in northern Italy to the hills overlooking Sarajevo, where the lives of Bosnian civilians became a deadly game in their hands.
Sources indicate that these wealthy “hunters” paid enormous sums, estimated between 80,000 and 100,000 euros, to join this lethal “safari”. Prices allegedly varied according to the target. Men and women were priced differently from children, whose lives apparently fetched the highest amount. Human souls were turned into a commodity, valued in money as if the life of a child or woman were just a line item on a list, not a sacred trust that must be protected.
The “Sarajevo Safari” documentary relies on documents and testimonies that show the participants were not driven by political or religious motives, but by thrill seeking and perverse pleasure. Sniping and random killing of civilians during the siege were already war crimes. Adding a commercial “tourism” layer turned it into a grotesque trade, where innocents were targeted in cold blood for entertainment, far from any legitimate military objective.
Wealthy snipers reportedly took up positions along the main roads that Bosnian civilians had to use daily to fetch water or food, routes with no alternative paths. As people crossed, bullets struck them, sometimes maiming them for life, sometimes killing them instantly.
Research cited in the documentary suggests that between 5 and 15 people a day were killed or wounded by snipers, and that around 10 percent of all child fatalities in Sarajevo were caused by sniper fire. These numbers are almost without precedent in modern armed conflict.
With children, women and men all being targeted, these crimes represent one of the ugliest forms of violation of basic human rights. Suffering itself became a product with a price tag, measured against age and gender, and heavily marked by sectarian hatred, as Muslim civilians were the primary victims. It was a blend of revenge, dehumanisation and the systematic crushing of human dignity.
Global Betrayal And A Silent Media
Almost thirty years have passed since these atrocities, yet neither the United Nations system nor the wider international community moved decisively. It is as if the moral conscience of the world has been asleep, ignoring the ordeal of a people subjected to extreme forms of killing and humiliation, turned into playthings for rich snipers while the world looked away in its usual silence.
This failure was not merely about neglect. It was accompanied by a kind of deliberate media blackout, as though the lives of Sarajevo’s civilians did not even deserve to be documented or told. The silence allowed the horrors to drift into the forgotten corners of history, hidden behind walls of politics and interests. The world tends to see only what fits its calculations and carefully engineered hierarchies.
This selective blindness cannot be separated from what we see today in Gaza, El Fasher, Sana’a, Damascus, Baghdad, Libya and Beirut, where similar suffering repeats itself. It is the same global pattern that looks with one eye and closes the other, shaped by Western standards that categorise human beings by faith or ethnicity and impose selective limits on rights and justice.
Against this backdrop, the Sarajevo sniper case tears away the thin mask of Western moral rhetoric. It exposes how hollow the slogans of freedom, values and human rights become when weighed against political expediency and financial power. Those noble words dissolve into illusion when confronted by such open double standards and failures.
Where Is Justice?
The burden of this failure does not rest solely on the shoulders of the international community. The wounds left by these crimes on the Bosnian body were not only neglected by outsiders, but also mishandled at home. Bosnia’s own political system, courts and institutions share responsibility for the long silence, whether through incapacity, fear or quiet complicity. For years, it was as if the voices of the victims could not echo even inside their own country.
Three full decades passed. Evidence accumulated, testimonies multiplied, and the threads of the crime became painfully clear, yet the file remained shut in the hands of those unwilling or unable to open it. Thousands of Bosnians killed or crippled for the whims of a handful of wealthy tourists were not even granted the status of a recognised case, or a single line written with a fully awake conscience.
If not for that documentary breaking the silence three years ago, the world might never have heard about this tragedy. Without it, memory would have stayed asleep, and the story would have been buried. The film allowed a faint beam of hope to reach exhausted hearts. Perhaps it could become a document that forces closed doors to open. Perhaps it might move prosecutors. Perhaps it could generate justice, even if late. Yet the steps that followed were slower than the pain of the victims, heavier than the cries of the mothers, as though there were those who wished the truth to be buried with its owners.
Had Milan not reopened the investigation, the file might have been buried forever. That in itself reflects the impotence, or perhaps the quiet collusion, of Bosnian authorities. It is as if they were prepared to let the blood of their own people hang in the air without any answer, without accountability, without even one clear word of justice to ease the bitterness of thirty years.
A Last Chance
Today, with the case back in the spotlight through Milan, justice seems to be knocking on the door of history again. It gives the Bosnian government another – and perhaps final – chance to repair part of what was broken, and to tell the victims that their blood was not shed in vain.
What is unfolding now is more than a passing lawsuit. It is like a hand stretching from the past into the present, demanding the recognition of rights and reminding the world that those who were hunted on the streets of Sarajevo are still waiting for their killers to be named and their stories to be told honestly, not in whispers or by chance through a single documentary.
With this renewed legal momentum and the media and human rights focus likely to build around it, a deeper question stands: will Bosnian authorities have the courage to engage in this battle as they should? Will they seize what remains of this opportunity to reclaim some political dignity and to repay part of the moral debt owed to their people, who were left alone for three decades without a voice, without counsel and without refuge?
If Bosnian institutions choose to join the case with full strength, their action will be more than a technical legal step. It will be a late but symbolically powerful apology. Every document submitted, every testimony recorded, every door knocked on in European courts will write a new line in a long register of betrayal. This time, however, that line will be one of resistance, tilting the scales slightly back toward balance after thirty years of injustice.
If they hesitate or retreat, the painful scene will simply repeat itself. Time will circle back into the same loop of silence and pain. History has offered Bosnia a second chance – rare and harsh at once – to restore honour to its wounded capital and to allow its mothers, who have waited so long, to raise their heads again. The question is whether Bosnia will hold on to that chance this time.
