New Business: Tourist snipers in Sarajevo
After four years of conflict in the X-Yugoslavia, the eyes of the world are focused on Bosnia and the international community is perhaps waking up from its lethargic indifference. However, only a few months ago when articles addressing the subject were only sporadic in most American newspapers, these kinds of dreadful collateral acts were being reported.
It sounded like something that could only have been either far-fetched or fictional: organized hunting tours, not to the African Savanna in search of wild game, but a somewhat less exotic destination, the ex-Yugoslavia, and for a somewhat less conventional prey: humans.
This was not material for some horror plot, but rather the denouncements made by volunteers at the first meeting in 1995 of the "People's Court", which took place at the end of March in Trento, Italy. According to this group of volunteers, "war weekend trips" to Bosnia-Herzegovina were being reserved from several European (English and German) airports. You were taken to the hillsides, provided with a rifle and surrounded by sacks of sand as protection, you’d shoot at the human silhouettes in your sights. Then it was a glass of slivovitza, or whisky for those who didn't mind paying the extra price, and you’d fly back to your dreary every day world.
During their testimony the volunteers maintained they were only a fraction of the many people to have witnessed such shocking atrocities. Trento is not the only place where depositions have been made concerning the deplorable collateral effects of this war. At the Hague, the seat of the United Nation's Court which hears cases against war crimes in the ex-Yugoslavia, innumerous journalists have attested to the horrors to which they have been witness.
Although he was not present at the meeting in Trento, a well-known Italian journalist, Giuseppe Zaccaria, chose to expose his first hand experience of two years ago in Pale in a front page editorial of "La Stampa," one of Italy's most prominent newspapers. He reported of being conducted by a country gentleman dressed in a Serbian army uniform to the far end of the gentleman's garden where there was a small wooden house. No bigger than a dog house, there was an inflatable mattress on the floor and a tiny hole in the wall. A precision rifle was fixed to a tripod with heavy screws and the top of the barrel just fit into the tiny window. The man told the journalist to have a look through his binoculars which were pointed toward Sarajevo. He saw people running hurriedly across Snipers Alley from the canary yellow Holiday Inn toward the skeleton skyscraper which, before it had burned, had once been the Boston Hotel. "Like to have a shot?" he was asked, as he looked and saw an elderly woman framed in his sights.
However incomprehensible the horrible acts of war may be, even further from understanding is the need of these weekend hunters to escape into a reality that was somewhat less than virtual. No war is without its horror stories that we refuse to believe for as long as we possibly can, either to avoid the pain or because acknowledgment bounds us to the responsibility of action. World War II had its gas chambers, Vietnam, its napalmed civilians and the ex-Yugoslavia, its sporting snipers and multiple rapes. Although we don't know with certainty that the reports of Trento are actually true, what is most disquieting is that something so unthinkable is, regrettably, believable.
August 1995
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