The film ‘Sarajevo Safari’ by the Slovenian director and screenwriter Miran Zupanic is a story about rich foreigners who paid money for the opportunity to shoot civilians from the positions of the Republika Srpska (RS) Army in the besieged city and will be shown at the upcoming AJBDOC documentary film festival in Sarajevo.
“Sarajevo Safari” is a film that talks about the little-known phenomenon of “manhunting”, actually, more accurately and precisely, about rich foreigners who came to the positions of the Army of the RS in the vicinity of Sarajevo and from there shot around the city, killing civilians.
The starting point, the one from which the “adventurers” went on a safari hunting for people, was Belgrade, says Miran Zupanic in an interview for “Al Jazeera Balkans”:
“At that time, Belgrade had normal air connections with foreign countries, and then there was a special logistics arrangement. One source says that they were taken from Belgrade by helicopter of the Yugoslav Army to Pale, according to anothersource, they were transported by road. Higher in rank, more powerful and richer probably had more comfortable conditions for traveling to Sarajevo.”
Miran Zupanic explains exactly what a “Sarajevo safari” is.
The “Sarajevo Safari” was a specific, unimaginable type of hunting, hunting people. During the siege of Sarajevo, rich foreigners who paid a certain compensation were allowed to shoot people in the free part of the city from Serbian positions. The victims were civilians, who at that moment found themselves under the sniper fire of those cruel foreigners,” Zupanic adds, recalling the first time he encountered this phenomenon:
“My producer Franci Zajc first told me about “safari” in February 2019, and that story was absolutely shocking to me. We filmed in BiH with Franci and cameraman Bozo Zadravac already at the beginning of 1993. Eyes of Bosnia was the first and, I think, the only Slovenian documentary filmed on the soil of BiH during the war. Then they were in Sarajevo at the end of ’93 and the beginning of ’94 and recorded even more material.
Except for the wounding of Faruk Sabanovic, all archival footage in the film “Sarajevo Safari” was recorded by our crew. In fact, Franci is most responsible for that film, because he searched for years and then found people who were ready to talk about the safari in front of the camera. Unfortunately, there were also those who first agreed to the recording, but then changed their minds. The fear is still present after almost 30 years,” concludes Zupanic and adds that, according to testimonies, some members of the Army of the RS and the Army of Yugoslavia participated in organizing the “safari”, N1 reports.
