What it was number two of the Italian diplomatic mission in Sarajevo during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s and the then first ambassador of this country to Kosovo, Michael Giffoni, confirmed in an interview on Thursday the existence of the so-called human safaris in the Bosnian capital. Italians and other foreigners who went there to act as weekend snipers during the siege of the city, paying to shoot civilians. This is a hitherto hidden phenomenon that came to light this month, when the Milan Prosecutor’s Office opened an investigation into the Italians who participated in these sinister trips, after receiving a complaint from the writer Ezio Gavazzeni, who has been collecting information on the case for years.
Giffoni, who later served as head of Javier Solana’s Balkan team when he was the EU’s high representative for foreign policy, confirmed a crucial detail: that Bosnian intelligence officials informed Italy of this practice and SISMI, the Italian secret service, opened an investigation and nipped it in the bud in March 1994. That is, there may be official files in Italy with more information on the matter.
Giffoni’s statements to the newspaper The Republic They represent the first confirmation of these facts by a member of the Italian institutions and validate one of the most solid clues of the investigation, the declarations of Edin Subasic, former agent of the Bosnian secret services. Subasic confirmed to EL PAÍS that he had the first reliable news of this macabre activity during the interrogation of a Bosnian Serb prisoner. Then they informed SISMI, which after a few months informed them that the matter was now closed. The Italian security forces had discovered the route through which these war tourists arrived – by plane from Trieste to Belgrade and then by land to Sarajevo – and had interrupted it. “Subasic doesn’t invent anything,” Giffoni said.
“I remember, with a certain emotion, when I arrived in Sarajevo at the end of 1994. They immediately told me: ‘They do safaris there’. Many rich people came from all over. Hunters and also businessmen. Military or paramilitaries, who were powerful in that conflict, took them to the hills and paid them. Then everything became clearer”, says Giffoni. It refers to the moment in which Bosnian intelligence alerted SISMI. Furthermore, he specifies, the information was also confirmed by Subasic’s superior, another name to be included in the investigation: Mustafa Hajrulahovic, known as Talijan, the Italianwith whom the Italian delegation had good relations.
This happened in 1994, and Giffoni adds that after a few months “from Rome” they informed the Bosnian agents “that the trail had been explored, that they had identified who was organizing it and the matter had been closed”. “They ensured that at least from Italy the flow had stopped,” he concludes. The former diplomat claims he never heard of them again and never knew the identities of these people. “If we had had a name we would have chased them, the news disturbed us a lot,” he claims.
The interview with Giffoni was not the only news of the day in this case. The other is the complaint that the Croatian investigative journalist Domagoj Margetic presented to the Milan Prosecutor’s Office, in which he accuses the current president of Serbia, Aleksandar Vucic, of having participated in the attack human safaris.
As the journalist explained on social networks, Vucic, then general secretary of the Serbian Radical Party (SRS), took part in the war as a volunteer between 1992 and 1993, and in the siege of Sarajevo he found himself in the positions of the Bosnian Serb militias in the Jewish cemetery. According to Margetic this point was precisely one of those where the so-called war tourists were taken to shoot in exchange for money.
Vucic, for his part, denied: “I have never killed or injured anyone, or done anything similar. They lied about my sniper in Sarajevo for 10, 20 years, and they continue to lie,” the EFE agency reported.
The current Serbian leader, the complainant claims, was a member of Slavko Aleksic’s paramilitary group, and his presence there was confirmed, he adds, by numerous testimonies in the war crimes proceedings of the International Criminal Tribunal (ICC) of the former Yugoslavia. Among these, he assures, is that of Vojislav Seselj, founder of Vucic’s party and his superior in those war years. Seselj, sentenced to ten years in prison by the Hague court, then appeared on Serbian television shooting as a sniper in Sarajevo, according to articles in the Italian press from 1995 recalled in recent days, and shot a passer-by in front of the cameras.
According to this journalist, Vucic himself once acknowledged his presence in Sarajevo in an interview in which, according to him, he uttered these words: “When the war broke out in Bosnia I went to Sarajevo and volunteered. I spent some time in the Jewish cemetery.”
This Croatian journalist claims that Vucic was one of the people who “provided logistics” to foreign snipers and sometimes even accompanied them from Belgrade to Sarajevo. He published a well-known video, recorded during the war in the Jewish cemetery, in which Sesejl and Vucic appear. According to him, the current Serbian president avoided the cameras because he had a rifle in his hand. Vucic has always maintained that it was an umbrella. “Who carries an umbrella? If that were the case, I wouldn’t run away from the cameras or try to hide the umbrella,” Margetic wrote on her Instagram account. In his response to the accusations, Vucic denied it, although this time he claimed that what he was holding was a photography tripod. “What a shame! There isn’t a word they didn’t say to present me as a monster, a cold killer,” he declared.
