The scandal surrounding alleged ‘human safaris’ during the siege of Sarajevo has escalated, with the fresh allegation that Serbia’s current president participated in the hunting trips of unarmed civilians.
Aleksandar Vučić, who took office in 2017, has been accused of taking part in grotesque expeditions where wealthy foreign tourists would shoot at people with snipers during the four-year Bosnian Serb siege of the city in the 1990s.
Between 1992 and 1996, more than 10,000 people were killed in Sarajevo by shelling and sniper fire in the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare.
Prosecutors in Milan have opened an investigation into Italian tourists who allegedly paid between £70,000 and £88,000 to take part in the violence and shoot at innocent civilians for fun, paying more to target children.
Croatian investigative journalist Domagoj Margetic has written to the prosecutor’s office in Milan alleging that Mr Vučić participated in and facilitated sniper tourism in Sarajevo, claims the politician has previously denied.
The allegation against the Serbian President has been echoed by Serbian lawyer Čedomir Stojković, who is putting pressure on magistrates in Belgrade to launch an investigation.
In his letter to prosecutors in Milan, Mr Margetic cites a video from 1993 which he claims showed Mr Vučić carrying a sniper rifle alongside other armed men.
The group, Mr Margetic claims, was stationed at a Jewish cemetery located on a hillside overlooking Sarajevo that was utilised as a frontline position for Serbian snipers.
In his letter, Mr Margetic claims the Serbian President was a ‘war volunteer’ in the besieged city in 1992 and 1993, and a member of the New Sarajevo Chetnik Detachment of the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS), led by commander Slavko Aleksić.
As evidence of this claim, he cites a snippet from a purported interview Mr Vučić did with the Serbian magazine Duga in 1994, where he appears to have said:
‘When the war in Bosnia began, I went to Serbian Sarajevo and signed up as a volunteer. I was not a member of the party, I simply went. I knew some friends and that’s why I went to defend [the Serbians].’
Mr Vučić goes on to say he spent time at the Jewish cemetery – the same graveyard which supposedly features in the footage of him with armed men.
The journalist also cites evidence given by Vojislav Seselj, the founder of the hard-right Serbian Radical Party, testifying in The Hague during the defence of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic in 2013.
During his testimony, Mr Seselj said Mr Vučić was part of the military detachment in Sarajevo, according to court summaries published by the SENSE Transitional Justice Centre.
Hague prosecutors during the United Nations-led ad hoc international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia found that there was ‘ample evidence’ to show that Aleksić commanded a unit of Serbian Radical Party (SRS) volunteers based at the Sarajevo Jewish cemetery from April 1992 until at least September 1993.
In the letter to Milan magistrates, the journalist also cites the claims of Zukan Helez, Bosnia’s minister of defence, who has said that members of the VRS told him they witnessed Mr Vučić firing on Sarajevo residents from the Jewish cemetery.
Mr Vučić has previously denied that he ever shot at anyone in Sarajevo, and that he was working in the Pale, 11 miles east of the city, as a journalist in the early 1990s.
‘I can’t listen to nonsense and lies,’ he said to Bosnian news channel Face TV in 2021.
‘I didn’t shoot, but I was at Pale, doing my job.’
He also claims the object he carried in the video was an umbrella, not a rifle.
Mr Helez has dismissed the Serbian President’s denials. ‘His excuse that in the footage taken on the frontlines above besieged Sarajevo he was holding an umbrella and not a rifle is a blatant lie,’ he told The Sarajevo Times.
‘Recently, I spoke with three members of the VRS who admitted to me that they were at the Jewish cemetery at the same time as Vučić and that the current President of Serbia was firing on Sarajevo residents with a sniper rifle,’ he said in December last year.
In his letter, Mr Margetic alleges that not only did Mr Vučić participate in the ‘safaris’ personally, he also provided logistical support for the trips, including acting as a translator between the foreign hunters and the Serbian forces.
‘There is more and more evidence that Aleksandar Vucic was part of the “Sniper safari” during the siege of Sarajevo,’ Mr Stojković, a Serbian lawyer wrote on Facebook.
‘Vučić absolutely certainly knew what was going on, and he was a part of it, one way or another.’
‘Despite the increasingly intense evidence – the public prosecutor’s office in Belgrade does not launch an investigation,’ he wrote in another post, condemning Serbian authorities for not probing the allegations.
Hellbound and Down 
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