Urban legend or shocking revelation? A controversial unnamed source provides the spine for Miran Zupanič’s chilling and often shocking documentary which tells the story of how rich foreigners allegedly paid top dollar to join Bosnian Serb Army snipers to shoot at residents of a Sarajevo under siege during the 1992-96 war.
It is a film that is bound to divide opinion, especially given how the disturbing narrative is based on testimony from one unnamed former intelligence officer who spoke on the condition that he could remain anonymous. War crimes have long been reported out of the Balkans conflict, but this ‘revelation’ heads more towards territory normally reserved for lurid genre action-films than for balanced and fact-driven documentaries.
That non-Bosnian mercenaries and outside militia were involved in the conflict is a matter of fact – some fought for religious and ethnic loyalties and others simply for money – but this story suggests that clandestine operations facilitated the arrival of wealthy foreigners into the region to pay high fees to shoot at residents of the besieged city.
The unnamed agent offers no specific details in terms of dates, names or even how much these “high fees” actually were, and his interview is intercut with bloody archive footage of bodies recently shot by snipers being recovered from the Sarajevo streets and taken by car to local morgues.
In the film the agent recounts how he was recruited to watch proceedings in the city and build up contacts, before adding: “I was in Grbavica (a part of the city) where I saw how, for certain sums of money, strangers would come in to shoot at the surrounded citizens of Sarajevo.”
Frustratingly, it is his testimony alone that drives the key theme of the film. Issues are raised about the brutality of war, politics of the region and how some people take to brutality, but there is little more information about the specifics. There are mentions about foreigners being in the war zone, but no more details about the notion of sniper tourists.
Edin Subasic, a former analyst for the army of Bosnia and Herzegovina, talks how the army received intelligence from a military security service, and how a prisoner told them that Italians were part of a group of volunteer fighters and were paying to go to the frontline, possibly implying (but never overtly stating) that they may have been involved in the ‘safari’ activities. The analyst says he came to the conclusion that “this was a new phenomenon on the Sarajevo battlefield, that this was a specific type of enemy, about foreigners who are not real enemies in the war…but they are a real danger.”
The notion of sniper tourism is a disturbing and controversial one. The fact that the story is based on one anonymous source dilutes the impact of the film, but at the same time Sarajevo Safari also serves to illustrate what a dark and brutal period it was for Bosnia and the city. The archival footage alone gives the film a real sense of visceral power… and if true, the prospect of outsiders paying to kill besieged locals is truly chilling and terrifying.
Slovenia, 2022, 75mins
Dir/scr:
Production: Arsmedia
Producers: Franci Zajc, Bostjan Ikovic
Cinematography: Bozo Zadravec, Maksimiljan Susnik,
Editors: Jaka Kovacic,
Music: Tilen Salian
