What is more monstrous - the 'Sarajevo safari' or the justice system of Bosnia and Herzegovina?

By: Amina Čorbo-Zećo

While Italy, three decades after the war, is opening an investigation into the "Sarajevo safari", a monstrous phenomenon of paid foreign "tourist snipers" who shot at Sarajevans for fun, silence still reigns in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

A silence that has lasted for 30 years like another bullet fired at the victims. Because, what is more monstrous – the fact that foreign citizens came to shoot civilians, or that the state of the victims, Bosnia and Herzegovina, has completely failed in prosecuting those who organized, led, and carried out the siege of the capital?

The BiH Prosecutor's Office has never filed an indictment for the siege of Sarajevo. Never, not a single one. At the same time, there are indictments against members of the Army of RBiH and the Ministry of Internal Affairs of RBiH, and when all is said and done, they are accused because they/we defended ourselves. I am not sure how any individual in the BiH Prosecutor's Office can be called 'honorable', if we know that, for example, for the Dobrovoljačka case, the highest civilian, military, and police leadership of RBiH 'rose up' to answer for a case that was dismissed in The Hague, while for sniping, siege, and abuse of Sarajevans, we have not a single indictment.

This hurts especially today, as global media, and the biggest ones at that, are buzzing about the monstrous phenomenon of 'Sarajevo safari'. Everyone is on their feet, demanding the prosecution of monsters!

And in a city where 11,541 people were killed, including almost 1,600 children, a prosecutorial silence still reigns.

In a city where every window was a target, every step a walk on the edge of death, every street a lottery of life. In a city that was the largest open-air concentration camp in Europe for 1,425 days after World War II.

And while foreign prosecutor's offices, as in the case of Italy, investigate the pages of monstrosity of this war, we here are surviving another one, a judicial one.

It is enough to look at the absurdity that surrounds us: snipers who deliberately shot at children now work as waiters, drive taxis, and encounter their victims at the counters of institutions.

It's not like they are hard to find. If colleague Avdo Avdić managed to do it, how can prosecutors with all their apparatus and power that they realistically possess not be able to!? However, it was easier for them to transfer the case of 'this sniper' to lower levels, in the style of it being too simple for them!? Numerous revised strategies for prosecuting war crimes have only benefited the executioners, and never the victims.

Free, rehabilitated, integrated. The society that survived the siege today lives side by side with the people who shot at it, without justice ever having tried to knock on their doors.

What's more, some are even witnesses, like Danilo Beribak, who is a witness for the Prosecutor's Office in the case of 'Ejup Ganić and others'. He publicly admitted in court that he shot at Sarajevo. He left the courtroom and Sarajevo without anyone questioning him about those circumstances. And, whoever follows the trial in the Dobrovoljačka case can easily conclude, even if not a lawyer, that a solid indictment for the siege of Sarajevo could have been written based solely on the testimony of the witnesses of the BiH Prosecutor's Office.

However, the BiH Prosecutor's Office, headed by Mlanko Kajganić, has long been an institution that is not a pillar of justice; for years, it has perfectly succeeded in two things: either 'doing nothing' or 'creating fabricated indictments in favor of shameful revisionism'.

They have not filed an indictment for the siege of Sarajevo, they have not prosecuted the network of snipers, they have not connected the documented evidence from international courts, they have not protected even the minimum dignity of the victims.

The result?

Here, monstrosity has become normalized.

Today, documentaries are made about monstrosity, foreign media report on it, investigations are launched in foreign countries, while in Bosnia and Herzegovina, monstrosity is institutionally protected.

Perhaps this is the greatest shame of our justice system. That while Italy investigates tourists who paid to shoot at Sarajevans, we live in a country where those who shot are still walking free. Where many are working, advancing, earning... Where impunity and forgetting have become policy.

And the question that hangs over all of this, a question that in any normal country would be a cry, is merely a whisper here: what is more monstrous, the Sarajevo safari or the Bosnian-Herzegovinian justice system?