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The YUGOSLAV WARS will not die. In the fall of last year, news broke that the Bosnian Serb leadership arranged “sniper safaris” during the 1990s for wealthy Western war tourists, bringing them to the hills above Sarajevo and letting them shoot Bosnian civilians in the besieged city below. According to new allegations, these Western sadists would meet in the Italian city of Trieste, where they would catch a flight to Belgrade on the Yugoslav charter carrier Aviogenex. They would then be taken to the Serb-held hills around Sarajevo where they were permitted to fire at civilians. The price was steep, reportedly between $92,000 and $116,000 per target. Shooting children cost the most, while shooting a man cost more than shooting a woman. The elderly could be shot for free.
The allegations of “sniper safaris” have been polarizing in the Balkans; opinions diverge as to their extent. Few doubt the presence of isolated sadists: there is even a notorious clip from 1992 of Russian writer and provocateur Eduard Limonov in the Sarajevo hills with Republika Srpska’s then–President Radovan Karadžić. (Limonov, who in 1993 cofounded the National Bolshevik Party alongside far-right philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, developed an increasing fascination with violence during the decade for reasons that were as much aesthetic as political; of Serbian warlord paramilitary leader “Arkan” Željko Ražnatović he reportedly said, “I’ve always loved bright and handsome gangsters.”) In the video, Karadžić tells Limonov that Sarajevo is a Serbian city, that sometimes the smoke that rises over it after an attack looks “like tamjan” (frankincense, used in Orthodox Christian worship), and that the weapons market in Yugoslavia was “very dirty business”—so much so, he claimed, that the Serbs had even purchased arms from NATO, something they surely found distasteful.
