By Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist
The Italian prosecutor’s office has launched an investigation into the ‘weekend snipers’ who killed civilians in Sarajevo during the war, reports La Repubblica, among other media outlets, as cited by Sarajevo media outlets. https://radiosarajevo.ba/metromahala/teme/sarajevo-safari-najmanje-200-italijana-pucalo-je-na-civile-tokom-opsade-glavnog-grada-bih/613386
According to them, prosecutor Alessandro Gobis opened up the case “on charges of premeditated murder committed with exceptional cruelty and evil intent.” https://www.slobodnaevropa.org/a/bih-opsada-sarajeva-vikend-snajperisti/33586395.html
The horrifying practice of wealthy people from around the world who traveled to Sarajevo on a grotesque “safari”, where, instead of hunting animals, they hunted human beings, was something both the CdM portal and I wrote about three years ago. See: https://www.cdm.me/kolumne/bogati-zapadnjaci-i-rusi-placali-su-da-ubijaju-sarajevsku-djecu-to-cak-nije-najmonstruoznije-sto-je-bosni-ucinjeno/
The Italian investigation has brought to light new details. Affluent Italians would travel to Trieste, from where they’d take a charter flight to Belgrade, and from there, through territory controlled by Karadzic’s forces, they were transported by helicopter to Serbian positions overlooking Sarajevo.
The Italian news agency ANSA reports Bosnian intelligence services believed the entire operation had been organized by Serbia’s State Security Service. The flights from Trieste to Belgrade were allegedly carried out by the state security-owned company Aviogenex, while the key figure mentioned was Jovica Stanisic, the alpha and omega of Serbia’s secret service, currently on a “study trip” to the Hague prison.
Everything we reported back in 2022 on CdM about the ‘Sarajevo Safari’ has now been confirmed as true. Yes, there was a price list for snipers. The “package” cost between €80.000 and €100.000 in today’s value. The highest price was paid for the killing of a child. They used various methods of execution. For example, one of the identified participants, a Milan-based cosmetic surgeon, or one of his refined, well-mannered colleagues from Lombardy, Piedmont, or perhaps Veneto, would first wound a child. Why’s that important? Because once the child was injured, the parents would rush out, breaking cover. Then the gentleman would shoot his parents, and, finally, turn his optical and ballistic attention back to the child lying in agony on the asphalt. For what noble reason, one wonders, would such a fine gentleman not put an end to the suffering he himself had caused?
What particularly draws attention today is a part of the prosecutor’s file describing the psychological profile of the monsters who took part in the Sarajevo safari. It’s about wealthy right-wingers, psychopaths possessing sadistic tendencies.
As I was already wondering:
Yes: in Bosnia wealthy men from the United States, Italy, Canada and Russia killed children and even paid other people to do it. Yes: in Bosnia an elitocide was committed in towns targeted for “ethnic cleansing”: the systematic extermination of the Bosniak elite and cold, methodical murders of Bosniak professors, engineers, clergy, politicians… Yes: as part of a political-military operation – mass, systematic rape offences of Bosnian women were done. Yes: in places such as Prijedor, Bosniaks were rounded up into concentration camps and forced, as Jews once were, to wear not yellow but white armbands if they dared to walk the streets and to mark their houses with white sheets. Yes: a genocide was committed in Bosnia. Not one, but several.
It wasn’t a war. But an attempt of extermination. So I’m asking what makes everything I’ve listed, the whole attempt to exterminate one nation, any less psychopathic than going on a ‘Sarajevo Safari’? Was it less monstrous because it was an organized, carefully planned and state-sponsored operation? Or does that fact make it even more monstrous? Yes, it does.
What is that I want to say? Okay, imagine a serial killer whose victims are young women in their early 30s with large breasts. Killing someone only because of their religion or nationality is no less psychopathic than killing someone only because they’ve brown hair or big breasts. In both cases the murderer destroys the victim’s entire humanity, all that complex infinity of traits making someone a human being. The killer focuses on a single trait. For the killer, the fact that someone is ‘a Turk’ or has large breasts makes it irrelevant whether that person is a mother, father, aunt, uncle or a decent human being other human beings need.
Or let’s put it this way: how come a cosmetic surgeon from Milan who shot at children in Sarajevo is labeled a sadistic psychopath, while Pavle Djurisic, who on February 13, 1943, sent Draza Mihailovic a report on his “operation against the Muslims in the districts of Pljevlja, Cajnice, and Foca” is not? The report clearly says: “During the operation, we wanted to completely destroy the Muslim population regardless of gender or age. Fatalities. Our total losses were 22 dead of whom 2 by accident and 32 injured. Among the Muslims, around 1.200 fighters and up to 8.000 other victims: women, the elderly and children.”
How that went: if you kill one child, you’re prosecuted by an Italian court. But if you kill several thousand, you get a monument and a place in a church?
So what do you say: there’s really nothing sadistic or psychopathic about unveiling monuments and glorifying sadistic, psychopathic mass murderers?
I know what you’re going to say.
A sadistic psychopath kills for the pleasure of killing, while men like Pavle Djurisic killed for something “higher,” almost nobler – they were killing in the name of faith, nation, or ideology.
No. First: the Italians had an ideology, too – as their psychological profile shows, they were extreme right-wingers, which means they hated Muslims and that hatred served as their moral excuse for murder. Second: killing in the name of ideology brings its own perverse pleasure, one heightened by the aura of righteousness that ideology itself provides. Anyone who has watched David Fincher’s masterpiece Se7en knows about the psychopath played by Kevin Spacey who kills because he believes he’s punishing the “sins” of his victims. And he takes pleasure in it, that pleasure being his own sin, which is why the seventh and final victim is himself.
P.S.
One of the most luxurious, most in-demand sites for the Sarajevo Safari, that is, for the killing of children in their mothers’ arms, was the Jewish Cemetery. I know that part of the city well, my grandmother’s sister used to live there – a wonderful, dignified and courageous woman who, during the siege, watched the scum firing from the cemetery torment her lifelong friends, women in their 50s and 60s, in ways that defy imagination. My aunt managed to escape that hell, but not the memories of what she witnessed, nightmares that haunted her day and night, waking and asleep, until her last breath.
Aleksandar Vučić was there during the war. There’s a photo of him at the Jewish Cemetery. Some say the object in his hand is a rifle. He claims it’s an umbrella.
You know what? It doesn’t matter. Even if no one else on earth remembers or cares that the president of Serbia, with a rifle or umbrella in hand, once calmly strolled the very ground from which sadistic psychopaths, whether from Milan and Udine or from Belgrade, Foca, or Nikšić, hunted their prey – I do. I care.
(The opinions or views of our columnists aren’t necessarily the opinions and views of the CdM news team)
I care