Front Burner - The ‘sniper tourists’ of Sarajevo

Episode Date: November 20, 2025

For decades there have been allegations that wealthy foreigners traveled into the Bosnian war, during the siege of Sarajevo, to shoot at besieged civilians for sport. That accusation is now the subject of an investigation by the public prosecutor's office in Milan, Italy.Today, we’re joined by Janine di Giovanni who covered the Bosnian war as a reporter for the Times of London, and lived through the siege of Sarajevo. She’s the author of two books on the war, and has covered 18 wars across her 35 years in journalism. She joins us to talk about ‘sniper tourism’, and the legacy of a defining European conflict. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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Donate at lovescarbro.cairbo. This is a CBC podcast. Hey, everybody, I'm Jamie Plesson. Four decades now, there's been this story almost too perverse to believe about the war in Bosnia. The claim was first reported by the Italian press, but also Bosnian media, and was brought up in the tribunal, followed the war. The allegation that wealthy foreigners had traveled to the besieged city of Sarajevo to shoot at Bosnian civilians for sport. It was referred to as tourism shooting or human safaris or sniper safaris. That accusation is now the subject of an investigation by the public prosecutor's

office in Milan, Italy. The war in Bosnia is one of the darkest chapters of the end of the 20th century and it involved mass violence among people that had long lived together in relative peace. It included bombardments, the longest wartime siege in modern history, the use of concentration camps, and a genocide in the small mountain town of Shrebanica. But it was defined in many ways by sniper fire. Sarajevo was terrorized by snipers positioned high above, who intentionally targeted civilians positioned below. Janine Di Giovanni covered the Bosnian War as a reporter for the Times of London, and she lived through the siege of Sarajevo.

She is the author of several acclaimed books on the war and has gone on to cover 18 wars across her 35 years in journalism. She now works as a senior fellow at Yale University's Jackson School of Global Affairs and is the co-founder and executive director of the Reckoning Project. Janine, thank you so much for coming on to the show. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. It's really a pleasure to have you. So before we get into some details of the Bosnian War, some of the central characters and its relevance today,

let's start with the news. This story of wealthy foreigners paying the Serbian army to snipe besieged Bosnian civilians is one that has been in the ether, however unconfirmed for decades now, as I understand it. They flew from Trieste to Belgrade, transported by Yugoslav army helicopters to Pala, the wartime headquarters of Bosnian sub-forces, before being driven into the hills above Sarajevo. Different fees were reportedly charged depending on whether the victim was a man, a woman or a child. Can you tell me when you first remember hearing about this story? Well, there's always been rumors of this kind of thing.

But you have to remember that Sarajevo was besieged, which meant that there was no electricity, there was no water, there was no food getting in unless the humanitarian bridge was clear, and often it was not. But more importantly, and this is hard to think of now when we live in a time of cell phones and internet, there was no communication with the outside world. So basically, when the wars started, the television station was hit, and there was was no TV. There was one functioning newspaper called Oslo Bajania, which was really remarkable that they put out news. But there was no cell phones and there was no internet. So journalists had to

report their stories by basically dictating them back to their offices. TV was entirely a whole different and very arduous situation. This is what all the talking is about, getting medicine in another aid to the victims of the war. The Serbs are doing what they said they would do, which is to continue their attack. I'm giving you this picture to show you how isolated we were. So there were many urban myths

about who was fighting, about mercenaries that had come, about jihadi groups, and this was one of them. I saw one of my colleagues from Sarajevo last week, and we were talking about it and he said, you know, that story was around for ages. No one ever believed it. But given that Italian prosecutors have opened up an investigation,

I believe that this means they would have substantial evidence enough to feel that they're going to use taxpayers' money to launch an investigation. One thing I hadn't realized until I started looking into this was that this actually came up during one of the war crimes trials. the trial of Bosnia in general, I see, too, that there were some local stories on it in 1995. And I believe the newspaper that you just mentioned, but a lot of what is driving this renewed attention comes from this Slovenian documentary, right, released a few years ago called Sarajevo Safari and later picked up by Al Jazeera. And the film alleges that foreign tourists, including some Canadians, actually, were brought into the hills above Sarajevo and were allowed to fire on civilians. for sport, and it relies quite heavily on the testimony of witnesses. For example, this former Bosnian military intelligence officer

who talks about seeing interrogation transcripts of a former soldier talking about Italians who paid to hunt Serbs with snipers. Of course, there are documents about this. I remember at least three of them. One is the record of his interrogation. Another is the record of the follow-up interrogation, and the third is an analysis I prepared, which explained the phenomenon of the war safari,

a term mentioned for the first time on the Sarajevo battlefield. The film also included the war crime tribunal testimony. I was talking about before of this US Marine who talked about snipers who didn't act like locals. And it alleges that there were these priceless for different targets, including children who were more. It was between 2,000 euros and 3,000 euros. It was depending on who are they shooting.

The most expensive were kids. The people I saw were certainly not ordinary people. They were people in high positions, and from that side, they were also protected. I mean, these are incredible accusations, and I wonder why you think it has taken 30 years for an investigation like the one launched by Italian prosecutors to come to fruition here. Well, I mean, war crime tribunals and searching, you know, hunting for perpetrators is really based on political will. And, you know, I run the Reckoning Project now.

We are a war crimes unit of about 40 people. We started four years ago during the early days of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. And now we are working in Sudan and a small project in Gaza, as well as continuing in Ukraine. It's really difficult work to track war criminals. Having said that, what exists now, which did not exist in 1992 to 1995, which is when the siege of Sarajevo and the war took place, is the use of osint, which is open source intelligence, plus more sophisticated tracking tools such as radio interception, data scraping of the dark web, satellite imagery that is not open to public sources. So what I mean is that in 1992, or even in 1995, when Srebrenica, the genocide of Srebrenica happened, there was satellite imagery, but it was the State Department, U.S. State Department, not open to the public. It was mainly used for diplomats and later for the ICTY, which was the Yugoslavian War crimes tribunal. So, I mean, why did it take so long? Lack of political will. It costs money to launch.

investigations in, you know, foreign jurisdictions. There apparently was a Bosnian investigation, but it stalled. Also, I'd like to talk briefly about justice in Bosnia after the war. So one of the main things, the main issues of the Bosnian War, which haunts the country today, 30 years after the Dayton Peace Accords were signed, is that there was very little justice. for what happened there. 16,000 women were raped in the so-called rape camps in eastern Bosnia. It's very hard to talk about it,

even after 26 years. Three times I was taken to three different locations and raped. Sometimes I ignore what happened to me, especially when I think of my child being tortured and not being able to help her. What happened in Srebrenica, a genocide at the end of the 20th century, along with Rwanda, you know, justice was never done for the 8,000 men and boys who were

slaughtered. What this has led to in Bosnia is a sense that what happened there, the horror that people endured, was never accounted for because there was never true accountability. So I'm not really surprised that it took so long for this terrible human safari story to come to light, if it is indeed true. At the moment, it's still alleged the investigation is ongoing. But as I said, I think for the prosecutors to pick this up, and if they bring it to a judge, it will have to have substantial evidence. Because, you know, these investigations cost money. So it's weighed out, again, with the political scenario if their Justice Department wants to go through with it.

Like you said, we don't know exactly what kind of evidence they're working with, but I did see an interview with this Italian writer and journalist, Eziio Gavazzini, who brought forward the complaint. And, you know, he is saying that he has names of people who were involved in this. I cannot give numbers here, but we're talking. about quite a number of individuals. So we'll see and we'll have to keep following that. You know, there is a really sadistic element to this.

The idea of sourcing personal pleasure from inflicting pain and torture and another person doing it as a kind of sport, people that were not just cogs in a wartime machine, right? Carrying out orders, but people who came in from the outside to relish in this pain. and you have covered, I think, what, 18 wars, you've seen almost every conceivable form of cruelty. If it is true, how do you begin to make sense of something like this? Well, let's, like, back up a bit and look at what the sniping was during the war in Sarajevo, because it was absolutely terrifying.

Even when it's calm, this is a city of fear, where nervous people dashed through open areas, hoping to avoid stray mortars. where drivers race at breakneck speeds in areas known to have snipers. You know, 15,000 people died in Sarajevo during the war, which, you know, compared to the statistics we now have for Gaza or Sudan, doesn't sound like a lot. But remember that this was an urban city, that Sarajevo is in a basin of mountains.

Remember it was the Olympic city in 1984, so ringed around the city, were these mountains where the Bosnian Serbs sniper nests were? It was a really devastating sense of the claustrophobia because you felt closed in the cage and somebody shooting at you. And I actually traveled up to one of them early in the war and I was with the British officer from the U.N. Protection Forces, Unprefor, and the snipers were recovering from their hangovers. They were evil. I mean, I could only say they were truly evil. They wanted to show us how they sniped by sniping someone right then and there. We bed them to stop. We drove away in absolute horror because they could see everything.

So we, as reporters, we were living with the civilians in Sarajevo. And in order to cross streets, you had to gather at a corner with, if it was one of the streets that were in view of the snipers, you gathered at a corner and you waited until there was about 10 people. And then you ran across together so that the snipers had less chance of hitting someone. When we came out of our hotel, the holiday inn, we had to run in a zigzag pattern through a field. Again, you confused the sniper. People were shot while they were washing dishes at their kitchen sink. They were shot while they were playing with their children. So there was a constant terror that you were being watched by this unknown shooter.

And it was a psychological. It was a way of breaking the morale of the people, which, by the way, never did break after three and a half years of siege. If I remember correctly, the British soldier you were with who you talked about, he talked about the fact that maybe he should have killed those men in that sniper's nest. That's how struck you both were by what you had seen in that nest, hey? Yeah. Am I right about that? Yeah. I mean, we drove away and he said, you know, humanity would have been better off.

No one would have known. I, you know, I could have killed him. And we, humanity would have, you know, there would have been more chance for. civilians to live that these two drunken, toothless, evil men, they were not, you know, remember that a lot of the Bosnian Serb army were not regular forces. There were militias that were started up throughout the war based on nationalism. So a lot of them, they weren't following the laws of war. They weren't following the Geneva Conventions. That was not embedded into their code when fighting this war.

So you asked about how humans could do this to other human beings, and the answer is that this was all wars are evil. And, you know, Sudan right now, the attacks on civilians in Gaza, it is pure evil. And with the rise of AI-fueled wars, meaning drones, it will get even worse. warfare will become even more disconnected from humanity because drones, okay, they may be operated by a human being, but they don't think, even the most cruel sniper is going to have a thought cross his mind when he aims at the head of a child. And that won't happen with the drone. In Ukraine right now, in Harrison, it's also called Human Safari. When these drones hunt down

people, actually go into doorways, they're following them when they move. So we're entering a new era in terms of the cruelty and the lack of humanity in warfare. You need grit to climb this high this often. You've got to be an underdog that always overdelivers. You've got to be 6,500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors, all doing so much with so little. You've got to be Scarborough. Defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights. And you can help us keep climbing.

Donate at lovescarbro.cairbo.ca. Is your home ready for the next big snowstorm? You can take action to help protect your home from extreme weather. Discover prevention tips that can help you be climate ready at keep it intact.com. I wonder if you could tell me about the story of Romeo and Juliet in Sarajevo. I think it underscores a lot of what we're talking about it. Yeah, that was an incredible, incredible story. So as I said, you know, ordinary people were targeted.

It wasn't, you know, it wasn't hitting soldiers' positions. And this was basically a couple, Admirah Ismich, who was Bosnian, Bosnian Muslim, and Bosco Burkic, who was Bosnian Serb. A story tonight reminiscent of the tragic tale of Romeo and Julia. Childhood sweethearts from opposite sides of the ethnic religious divide. They were just 25. Crossing a bridge, a bridge that... we knew to stay off of. I think this was the spring of 1993, May 1993,

which was an incredibly vicious time in the war. And they were shot by snipers and killed. Bosco was killed instantly, witnesses said. Admirah did not die immediately. In her final act, she flung her arms around her boyfriend. They still lie where they fell in each other's arms. What was really terrible was that no one could get to the bodies for several days to pull them away. Eventually, Serb soldiers took them to a nearby barracks for burial.

Admira's Muslim parents couldn't cross the front line. Only Bosco's Serb mother could get there. They're today buried in the Lyons Cemetery, which if, Anyone ever goes to Sarajevo, I highly recommend, recommend going. It was a football pitch in the middle of the city, and now it's full of graves and makes me emotional thinking about it, but the graves of most of the people there are young people, because the soldiers were so young as well, 18 and 19, and there they're buried, and they're a symbol of this, well, a love story in the middle.

of this terrible, terrible war. Wow. You have reported from the fault lines of three genocides, I believe, the genocide of the Bosniaks, of course, the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda and the genocides of the Yazidi minority in Iraq and Syria. But your first time bearing personal witness to a campaign of extermination came in Srebrenica, right? The Bosnian city of Srebrenica. And can you tell me about what happened in the city for people who might not know very much about it and how that incident went on to shape you and your work? More about how it went on to shape you and your work. Well, Srebrenica was a town in northwest Bosnia that had formerly been a mining town. It was known for healing waters. And it was a place where pregnant women went to take the water.

and to heal from it. It became, it was, ironically, it was a safe zone. The UN designated safe haven, and yet it was besieged very early in the war. Horrible, because, you know, it was even smaller than Sarajevo, and there was relentless shelling. Aid trucks could not get in. It was a, it was a terrible time. Children were being sniped, there was no food, there was no water,

and in 1995 it resulted basically in the town being overrun. The men were separated from the women. Boys as young as 12 were put in that group of men, and they were marched into buildings of Sadish Rabinica and slaughtered. In a field of tears, their memories of terror and death come pouring out. My family, my family, she says. Why didn't they kill me? she is asking. Why didn't they kill me?

The UN, he says, they did absolutely nothing to protect us. In the aftermath, the Serbs thought they were clever by burying the remains in different mass graves, primary, secondary, and tertiary. And then they even knew then they wanted to cover their tracks. The agony of Srebrenica, and I urge everyone listening to this, to watch the movie Quovadis Aida, it's extraordinary, it's made by a Bosnian filmmaker, and it basically tells the story of a UN interpreter desperately trying to not only save her family, but save her people, and the aftermath, because Shrebaniza, which was a Bosnian Muslim town before, is now a Serb, a Bosnian, a Serb town. the hatred has never gone away, nor has there been justice, as I mentioned earlier, which

means that there will be renewed fighting at some point. All my Bosnian friends always said to me, we'll see you in 30 years, because Dayton was never meant to be a permanent agreement to end the war, and it has barely been revised. Many of the features, it ended the killing, it's true, it stopped the slaughter, but there weren't great provisions for justice. You know, I imagine some people listening who don't know the conflict in its aftermath as well as you do, they might be thinking to themselves, but there were trials, right? trials for crimes including genocide and crimes against humanity. The first such tribunal since Nuremberg and dozens of leaders were put on trial,

the commander of the Bosnian Serb army, Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of Serbia. And as someone who was reporting during that tribunal, how would you describe the proceedings and then why were those not enough? Like, what kind of justice do you think needs to still happen? Okay, so the ICTY, you know, it's broken into two camps, whether there were incredible achievements, and they did indict 161 individuals. But most of them were high ranking. Rundich was at the helm of Bosn-Serb forces

that carried out a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing. It included the killings of more than 8,000 men and boys in a UN safe zone in Srebrenica. Count two, genocide. Count three, persecution, a crime against humanity. Rado van Karajic was sentenced to 40 years in prison for atrocities committed during the Bosnian War. It also, you know, developed international criminal law

by clarifying definitions and rulings like genocide and crimes against humanity and sexual violence. So, yes, in a sense, it did end impunity. It did help develop international. law, and it did establish a historical record. But what it did not do, it did not get the people that actually did it. So, for instance, let's talk about Focha, one of the sites of the rape camps. Most of the men and women who were involved in that horror went back to their day jobs after the war ended, and I have interviewed women who told me that in their villages,

they see the men that raped them in the cafes, and it's the women who have to drop their eyes in shame, not the men. Another woman said that every year when she goes to pay her taxes, at the local courthouse or wherever she goes, she hands her check over to one of her rapists. So the actual, the ICTY did get Milosevic. I consider this tribunal, false tribunal, and indictments, false indictments. It is illegal, so I have no need to appoint counsel.

It did get Milottich. the butcher of Bosnia. It did get Karadich, but it did not get the people that actually did the crimes. And more importantly, it never really established anything for victims. And that wasn't their role. That was more the role of the Bosnian government. But what Dayton did is it set up federations. So Bosnia is probably one of the most dysfunctional governments in the world. It's divided into three. It is rotating presidencies. It still has a major issue with corruption. And it basically did not bring justice to many of the people who suffered terrible crimes. It was also the ICTY. There were a lot of issues about bias, about ethnic lines, how difficult it was to secure

arrests and also the limits of criminal justice in meeting, you know, broader needs, which are reparation and most importantly, reconciliation. I think it led to a lot of media disinformation. The proceedings were sometimes disconnected from the reality of victims' lives. You know, I have a lot of friends who were prosecutors at the ICTY, so they have very different views. They think it was groundbreaking and it was important. I think it failed, you know, I'm going to say thousands and thousands of thousands of people who were victims of that terrible war. You and others have said Bosnia was kind of like your generation's Vietnam and that in a way every generation has their signature violence, a moment at which the wool kind of falls from your

eyes in a way where I think maybe you start to see the world differently. And many millennials, I think I'm a millennial, would look perhaps through the war on terror. Gen Z, as you mentioned, several times during this conversation, may look to Gaza. And what is it about a conflict like Bosnia that you think imprinted itself so deeply on your generation? So I went to Bosnia straight from Gaza, which was really my first war. And I started working there during the first Intifada in 1987. And I'd say both those wars have had a massive, or Gaza wasn't that a war, it was an uprising and occupation. But it was the same thing.

It was injustice on a massive scale occupation. I think having started my career when I was so young, you know, in my early 20s, and having been guided and mentored by some extraordinary people, in my case, an Israeli Jewish human rights lawyer called Felicia Langer, who had been a victim of the Holocaust, but her goal in her life was justice for Palestinians because she felt that it was bad for her society, not just for Palestinians, but for Israelis. When I went to Bosnia, seeing civilians, and for me, war has never been about, I've never been the kind of military junkie that embeds with U.S. troops. It's just not my thing. I embed with civilians. And because I truly believe, you know, it is just a matter of fate. Matub, as the Arabs say, of it is written that I was born where I was born. And I was not born in a war zone, that I wasn't born in Sudan. or Rafa, or the Congo, or the Great Lakes, or I wasn't born a ZD woman. And for me, that's kind of been my guiding principle, my entire life, that, okay, I have a voice and I'm going to use it. I have an education.

I have access to, well, now we have access to courts and to international justice mechanisms. and there are people that do not. So why did Bosnia affect my generation? Because it was the end of the 20th century, a time when we were meant to have evolved into creatures who did not shoot each other, like people in a shooting range, you know? So that, and you didn't mass rape women,

you didn't destroy homes, you didn't ethnically cleanse people. You didn't besiege cities and starved people to death. I thought that that would be the worst thing I ever saw on my career and my life. But unfortunately, it's not. I now have to say Gaza is probably the worst thing I have seen. Starvation is a tool of war. The killing of so many civilians, the amputation of so many children,

leaving so many orphans, leaving an entire society. society, dismantled and destroyed. So, yeah, I mean, why did it have an impact on us? Because it was wrong. It was absolutely wrong. And we were journalists. And by the way, there were some great CBC journalists who covered it throughout the war and did a fantastic job, including Anna Maria Tremonti and Lee Doucette and many, many

great Canadian reporters who I have enormous respect for, and who always let me borrow there's satellite phones. So thank you, CBC. I am an enormous fan of Anna Maria at least. Oh, great women. Jeanne, thank you. Thank you so much for this. I really, really appreciate it. My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. All right. That is all for today. I'm Jamie Pless. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.