Lorenzo Maria Pacini
Remembering is not only an act of pity towards the victims, but an exercise of responsibility towards the present.
Snipers and Safari
Thirty years after the end of the war in Bosnia, a new judicial investigation brings to light one of the darkest and most morally intolerable episodes of the Balkan conflict: that of the so-called "sniper tourists," foreigners-including some Italians-who allegedly paid large sums of money to participate in the manhunt against the civilian population from the hills around Sarajevo.
The Milan Public Prosecutor's Office is now investigating, following a complaint filed by journalist and writer Ezio Gavazzeni, who has been involved in investigations into terrorism and organized crime for years. According to his research, condensed into a 17-page dossier, during the siege of Sarajevo-one of the longest and bloodiest episodes of the Yugoslav dissolution-wealthy citizens from various countries were able to "purchase" the experience of shooting at men, women, and children. A macabre game of death, paid for with money and justified by an ideology of force and impunity.
The first testimonies, collected at the time by war reporters and confirmed today by a former Bosnian intelligence officer, speak of trips organized through Trieste, with direct connections to the hills surrounding Sarajevo. According to the revelations, the Italian military secret service, SISMI, had been informed of the existence of these "human safaris" as early as the beginning of 1994, after Bosnian intelligence had discovered the horror months earlier. The response, according to the Ansa news agency, was: "We have put an end to it all, there will be no more safaris." And indeed, two or three months later, the incidents ceased. But the shame remained, buried in silence.
Anyone who covered the Bosnian war knows that the siege of Sarajevo-from 1992 to 1996-was more than a military battle: it was systematic cruelty against a city that symbolized multi-ethnic coexistence. Over 11,000 civilians were killed, including 1,600 children. Daily life was punctuated by the sound of mortar fire and the terror of snipers. Just crossing the street was enough to risk death.
Yet the presence of foreign "volunteers" and "guests" among the shooters was no secret. As early as 1995, reports by Ezio Mauro, Bernardo Valli, Ettore Mo, and other Italian correspondents mentioned the presence of groups of "adventurers" alongside the Bosnian Serb militias. The then correspondent from Sarajevo wrote: "In Grbavica, where the sniping of the Chetniks and the international participation in the hunt are not hidden but flaunted by Karadžić's television, there is also a team of publicly decorated Greeks among the snipers, and the case of a Japanese volunteer."
Among the best-known names is that of Russian writer and politician Eduard Limonov, filmed firing a heavy machine gun alongside Radovan Karadžić, who was later convicted of genocide in The Hague. Limonov, who did not pay to participate, declared his admiration for "Serbian courage" and said, "We Russians should follow your example." A eulogy to cynicism elevated to aesthetics, as if cruelty could become a political gesture.
Between pacifism and indifference
But what is most striking, then as now, is not only the brutality of the facts, but the reaction-or rather, the lack of reaction-of the world watching them. While Sarajevo endured four years of hunger, bombing, and snipers, much of the West was paralyzed by a sterile pacifism, unable to distinguish between humanitarian intervention and military aggression.
"A consistent left," wrote a correspondent at the time, "should have chained itself to the streets, not to protest against all use of force, but to demand intervention by the United Nations and NATO in defense of Bosnian citizens. Instead, inertia was preferred, in the name of neutrality." The same neutrality that allowed, shortly thereafter, the massacre of Srebrenica.
The case of the "massacre tourists" is therefore not just an episode of private barbarism. It also reflects a political and moral climate in which horror could coexist with indifference. It is no coincidence that Gavazzeni observes that "everyone knew," but few really wanted to see. It was as if the Balkan war, despite its geographical proximity, remained distant in the European consciousness.
What makes the story even more disturbing is the way it resurfaced. Not from an institutional investigation, but from the initiative of a journalist who, after seeing the documentary Sarajevo Safari by Slovenian director Miran Zupanič in 2022, decided to dig deeper. In the film, several Bosnian witnesses describe the presence of 'foreign guests' who, for a fee, were taken to firing positions to shoot at civilians. The nationalities mentioned include Americans, Russians and Italians.
Gavazzeni, struck by the coincidences with the reports from thirty years earlier, gathered new evidence and handed it over to the Milanese judiciary. Today, prosecutor Alessandro Gobbis, an expert in international terrorism, is considering the possibility of proceeding with murder charges. This is a very difficult undertaking, decades later, but morally necessary.
Yet, even in the face of a formal investigation, doubts and denials resurface. Former British soldiers who served in Sarajevo in the 1990s, interviewed by the BBC, called the story "an urban legend," arguing that it would have been logistically impossible to bring foreigners to shoot between Serbian lines due to the numerous checkpoints. But this Anglo-Saxon caution-typical of those who prefer not to disturb their conscience-clashes with the amount of testimony gathered on the ground and with the very words of the reporters who lived through the siege.
The moral legacy of the conflict
The Milanese investigation will not change the course of history. But it reopens a wound in European memory: that of the moral hypocrisy that accompanies war when it happens "too close to ignore, but too uncomfortable to face." Bosnia was the first major test for post-Cold War Europe, and it failed miserably. Today, recalling the 'massacre tourists' means asking not only who fired the shots, but who looked the other way.
Behind the monstrosity of "human safaris" lies a deeper problem: the fascination with violence, the normalization of cruelty, the spectacularization of war. That dark desire to see-or even participate in-the power of life and death is the same h, in media form, that today animates war as entertainment: drone counts, live coverage from the front lines, viral videos of bombings. Technology has changed, but the imagery has not.
Thirty years after Sarajevo, the West finds itself immersed in another European war, this time between Russia and Ukraine. Here too, the line between information, propaganda, and censorship is blurred. And as in the 1990s, the risk is to reduce the conflict to a moral clash between good and evil, simplifying its complexity and removing its ambiguities.
Today, hills are no longer needed to shoot from. We shoot with words, with the media, with disinformation campaigns and mutual censorship. The same Russophobia that pervades the West-and leads to the cancellation of concerts, exhibitions, and books-stems from an identical mechanism of moral exclusion: the need to purify the public space of anything that disturbs the official narrative.
The horror of the 'sniper tourists' in Sarajevo therefore also tells us something else: how fragile the line is that separates condemnation from complicity, freedom from censorship, truth from propaganda.
The Milan investigation will probably not result in any convictions. Too much time has passed, too many documents have disappeared, too many responsibilities have dissolved. But it has already achieved one essential result: it has forced us to look again, without filters, at the moral abyss of war.
"It is the same indifference that yesterday let Sarajevo die and today is only intermittently indignant," says Gavazzeni. Because remembering is not only an act of pity towards the victims, but an exercise of responsibility towards the present.
Tourists of the massacre do not belong only to the past. They are the symbol of a civilization that, while declaring itself free and democratic, continues to live with its dark side-the one that turns the pain of others into spectacle, cruelty into curiosity, war into tourism. And until this view changes, the story of Sarajevo will continue to concern us.