Most were under the impression that the war in Bosnia was behind us. The conflict in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s was characterised by the use of the crudest kind of propaganda, but it was undoubtedly in the Bosnian theatre that the crassness was the most pronounced.
It turns out however that for those who had politically benefitted from that war, or who think that they might still benefit a little more with an improvised replay of the propaganda techniques that were successful thirty years ago, the war in Bosnia remains the gift that keeps on giving.
Evidence of that is the intense media barrage, reminiscent of the 1990s, about alleged “Safari tourism” in the hills overlooking besieged Sarajevo. The story goes that wealthy psychopaths from Italy and other Western countries were paying enormous fees, running up to 100,000 euros in today’s money, eagerly collected by the Bosnian Serbs who held the hillside positions, for permission to shoot and kill defenceless civilians in the besieged city below.
The macabre “spirit cooking” dinners organised for the perverse pleasure and entertainment of the crème de la crème of Western elite circles, not to mention numerous other similar examples of depravity, make the Sarajevo allegation seems plausible, in principle at least. There are no moral factors on the side of this scenario’s Western perpetrators that would have prevented it from happening, assuming that the conditions were propitious.
That having been said, agreement that something could have happened is not an automatic confirmation that it actually did. Evidence is still needed to bridge the gap between a theoretical possibility and a demonstrated fact. For purveyors of propaganda, however, bridging that gap is not a major concern because their craft operates on emotional manipulation, not empirical proof. Their task is accomplished once they have successfully embedded in the public’s mind the subconscious impression they desired to implant there.
How does the Sarajevo “safari tourism” allegation stack up when examined with a reasonable degree of scepticism and the application of rigorous standards of proof? Like most propaganda constructions, it falls apart.
The first thing one notices that calls for extreme caution is that the alleged events occurred in the mid-1990s but are being brought to light and, it is claimed, investigated by the Milan Public Prosecutor’s Office only now, in 2025, more than thirty years later. The Bosnian war ended after the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement in December of 1995 and soon thereafter conditions were sufficiently normalised in Bosnia and Herzegovina. There were no serious impediments to conducting war crimes investigations and numerous agencies and institutions did precisely that. Shooting safaris where the targets were human beings would be a crime against humanity of extraordinary gravity. A reasonable explanation is required why no police or judicial organs investigated these heinous allegations soon after those events are said to have happened, whilst witnesses could still be found with relative ease and, just as importantly, forensic evidence might still have been intact. That first and most obvious question is not even asked, let alone answered by anyone.
The other key unasked (and therefore also unanswered) question is about the source for these belated allegations. It is a documentary film “Sarajevo Safari,” released in 2022. We now come to the interesting part. The film was financed by Hasan Čengić, one of the founders of the Democratic Action Party of Bosnia’s war-time President Alija Izetbegović. Mr. Čengić therefore is by no means an impartial source. During the war he was one of the principal funds and arms procurers for Izetbegović. The film’s producer is the Slovenian film director Franci Zajc who during the conflict created numerous documentaries which uniformly presented only the Serbian side in an unfavourable light. Zajc also happens to be one of the only two supposedly percipient witnesses of this safari tale. The other alleged witness is Mr. Čengić himself who, however, is unavailable for cross examination because he passed away in 2021.
Some would argue that Zajc is a shady witness because of his extravagant claims that during the conflict in Bosnia he was an agent of Western intelligence agencies but that nevertheless the Serbs allowed, and in some versions even invited, him to observe these morbid proceedings. Why the Serbs would allow a hostile witness like Zajc to observe them in such a compromising situation is unexplained. Be that as it may, these are the only two ocular witnesses of the Sarajevo “tourist safari” events known so far. One of them claims and the other, Čengić, almost certainly did have intelligence connections. These are the exclusive sources for a sensational story that is making headlines in the collective West media and has even attracted the attention of one of the frequent contributors to this portal.
Yet even these scant sources for an event of major significance, if it is authentic, are not in complete harmony about an important detail of their story. Zajc has claimed that wealthy foreigners paid huge amounts of money to the besieging Serbs to shoot civilians and that they were provided with sniper weapons for that purpose by their Serbian hosts. Čengić on the other hand claimed before his death that foreigners were paying trifling fees for the morbid privilege and brought their own weapons.
But there are more problems with this affair. It is said that the Milan Public Prosecutor’s Office is conducting an investigation. That may well be the case. But the important question that anyone with legal training will immediately ask is what is the statute of limitations for murder in Italy? It happens to be 21 years. That means that if the imputed crime was committed more than twenty-one years before apprehension, even if the perpetrator were to be identified and linked to the crime he could not be prosecuted. The alleged offences date back to the mid-1990s, which means that the Italian statute of limitations has expired and nobody any longer can be brought to court to answer charges of sniping at civilian from the hills that surround Sarajevo. If the Prosecutor in Milan is indeed investigating, would he not be wasting his time?
If the motive were purely judicial, he certainly would be. But if the motive is predominantly political, not necessarily so.
Furthermore, even if statutory obstacles could be overcome, for instance by reclassifying the offence as a crime against humanity for which there is no statute of limitations instead of treating it as a simple murder under Italian law, there would still be a problem. For a conviction to be achieved under either indictment, beyond the necessity of personally identifying the shooters, which is the sine qua non, to actually convict them they would have to be directly linked to a lethal outcome on the ground. For an indictment to be viable, victims would have to be identified as well, almost thirty years after the fact. Shooting with a sniper weapon is not a crime unless it results in someone’s death. For culpability to be established, a forensic investigation would have to be conducted to determine for each imputed victim the cause and manner of death, and bullets which struck the victims would have to be provably traced to the weapons that were in the hands of the perpetrators at the time of shooting, almost thirty years ago. Does that seem like a feasible undertaking for the Milan Prosecutor, no matter how competent he may be? That is doubtful.
The media frenzy that has erupted around allegations of war-time tourist safaris on civilians in Sarajevo recalls the worst propaganda excesses of that conflict. Their most notable feature was that critical questions were not being asked and that few and largely unverified facts were force-fitted into a Procrustean propaganda matrix. When subjected to close scrutiny most of these claims almost always are found to be uncorroborated and spurious.
That certainly seems to be the case with the Sarajevo Safari story, regardless of the fact that the collective West media are having a field day expanding on it in endless and strikingly imaginary detail.
The Safari story will soon die a natural death once it is concluded that its political purpose has been achieved. The purpose is not to convict anyone because given the complete unavailability of any evidence, even under the most rigged trial conditions that would be nearly impossible. It is, rather, to create a sinister impression that would further discredit the Serbian entity in Bosnia, the Republika Srpska, for colluding with depraved individuals and facilitating their heinous behaviour in return for money. The successful dissemination of such an impression will serve as an additional argument for the liquidation of Republika Srpska and will indirectly validate other heinous allegations made at the expense of the Serbian side during the Bosnian conflict. That explains the timing.
As for the Milan Prosecutor’s Office, it will quietly drop its investigation for some specious bureaucratic reason that no one will ever question. And there on the legal level the matter will end. There will be no facts, only emotionally charged impressions.
