Human safaris in Sarajevo

The news that the Milan prosecutor's office is investigating the involvement of Italian citizens in a form of [unspecified activity] has caused consternation. macabre tourism in the besieged city of Sarajevo —during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, between 1992 and 1996—exposed by an investigation by the writer and journalist Ezio Gavazzeni. Wealthy, far-right individuals They paid fortunes To go and act as snipers in Sarajevo and have fun shooting with impunity, from a window or rooftop, at civilians passing through the streets. Like shooting clay pigeons or rubber ducks, but with precision weapons and with human targets, paid a certain price per kill. Women and children were more expensive. Obviously, the Public Prosecutor's Office is investigating the Italian citizens involved in this atrocity, but there were people of many nationalities involved. There were hundreds. Sarajevo was, in those years, a city besieged by the troops of Serbian General Radovan Karadzic, convicted years later for crimes against humanity.

The confirmation that these human safaris actually took place in Sarajevo has, as we mentioned, stirred international public opinion, and rightly so. But we would be mistaken to think this is an isolated incident: on the contrary, these kinds of atrocities are common in countries at war or in colonized territories, and in situations where human rights are abolished. To cite just one example, in the Belgian Congo, during the reign of King Leopold II, white settlers played a game that consisted of forcing Black slaves to swim in a raft or a pond. When they surfaced for air, they were shot from the sidewalk. They played as a family, and the young men and women from wealthy families who owned the slaves participated. No one saw anything wrong with it: they considered it like shooting birds or frogs.

But we don't need to go back to colonial Africa at the end of the 19th century or to Sarajevo at the end of the 20th. In the 21st century, we can find different forms of shooting at humans in war zones about which we receive information more or less regularly (Ukraine, Palestine) and in those about which we receive much less (Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, the Congo itself). In the case of Sarajevo, there is the added element of touristification, the commercialization of murder. Indeed, this is the eschatology of capitalism, the ultimate consequences of capitalist logic. Donald Trump's bravado, boasting that he could walk down Fifth Avenue and shoot someone without anything happening to him, ceases to be a mere flatus vocis like those usually issued by the US president to become a warning: if you have the necessary money you can buy the ticket to kill helpless human beings.

Justice must work to clarify the facts, and if possible, to punish the murderers, but nothing can be done now for the people who died under the gunfire of someone who shot them purely for sport, and who had been paid for it. And no one can do anything to prevent this from being part of the human condition.