In January 2025, Italian writer Ezio Gavazzeni reopened a horrific cold case by filing a complaint with the Milan public prosecutor’s office. It concerned wealthy individuals who went to Bosnia during the siege of Sarajevo and paid large amounts of money to be allowed to shoot at innocent civilians. Just for ‘fun’.

This subject is not entirely novel. There were a few testimonies already in the 1990s, but they were never dug into seriously and were often considered unverified war rumours. But this ‘urban legend’ turned out to be true. Reckless, sadistic bourgeois – reminiscent of the masked oligarchs in the Korean TV series Squid Game – did indeed participate in this atrocious pastime.

Gavazzeni has based his investigation on the work of Slovenian director Miran Zupanič, who authored the 2022 documentary Sarajevo Safari produced by Al Jazeera Balkans. Al Jazeera subsequently shut down its Balkans division, but the purpose the Qatari media outlet had in screening this film was to denounce the plight of Muslim Bosniaks.

It is only due to this intervention from outside of Europe that this story has once again come under the spotlight. This horror, which speaks amply of the rotten heart of the European ruling elite from which these ‘tourists’ mostly came, could have easily passed quietly into obscurity, had it been left to that same elite.

The Bosnian War

Let’s give a bit of context first. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 led to a crisis of all so-called ‘socialist’ regimes in Eastern Europe, both aligned and non-aligned with the Soviet bloc. Yugoslavia was not aligned with the USSR, but it followed a similar Stalinist model: a planned economy where capitalism was abolished and yet workers’ democracy was not implemented, because the political power was held by a bureaucratic caste.

In a process encouraged by pressure from foreign imperialism, the national bureaucracies that had developed in the Yugoslav Federation under the rule of Tito each came to the fore, to pursue their own petty nationalist vision, ultimately leading to the splitting of the country into what are now seven distinct republics (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, North Macedonia), all dominated by foreign capital.

The Bosnian War erupted in 1992 as part of the larger Yugoslav civil war. Bosnia was simply defined in Tito’s times as the Muslim-majority area, but it is a mosaic of at least three ethno-religious groups: Muslim Bosniaks, Catholic Croatians, and Orthodox-Christian Serbs. Animosity between these three groups was consciously instigated, and the ethnic make-up of the area violently altered through ethnic cleansing.

The siege of Sarajevo (1992-1996) was probably the bloodiest episode of this war. Relentlessly shelled by Bosnian Serb forces supported by Belgrade, the city was cut off from food, water, and medical supplies. Thousands of Sarajevo’s Muslim civilians were killed, many by snipers positioned to aim at wells, bridges, and marketplaces: key spots that civilians needed to visit for their survival. This happened while the forces of the United Nations were on duty there, on a very ineffective peace mission.

The ‘hunters’

Edin Subašić is a former agent of the military intelligence of Bosnia-Herzegovina. He is one of the original sources of the whole story. The whole dirty secret was first revealed to the Bosnian intelligence by a young Serbian prisoner of war who told his interrogators that he had reached Bosnia as a volunteer/mercenary on a bus. This bus was also bringing five Italian ‘war tourists’ to the frontline. The Italians carried with them expensive hunting weapons and equipment. One of the ‘hunters’, a man from Milan, then explained to him that they had paid to slaughter the civilians of Sarajevo.

sarajevo Image public domainThe siege of Sarajevo (1992-1996) was probably the bloodiest episode of this war / Image: public domain

The enquiry proved the existence of an organised network that handled the transport of the wealthy snipers to the hills surrounding Sarajevo (and sometimes to Prodinje), where they were escorted by members of the military special forces and the nationalist Serb army.

According to Subašić, the groups were made of five to eight ‘safari goers’, and such groups carried out their homicidal routines every weekend, beginning in 1992. Apparently, these weekend killers were mostly men in their 30s or 40s, and included mostly Italians, Canadians, Americans, and Russians, but it is not ruled out that rich killers from other backgrounds were also involved.

A price list was in force. Different figures are given by different sources, but they are in the $50,000-300,000 range. This is the price per kill. Prices differed depending on the category the designated victim belonged to. Soldiers and able-bodied men were cheaper to kill than children. Their military chaperones clearly weren’t setting prices based on any military value of the targets, but on the degree to which killing them satisfied the lust for atrocity of the rich foreign serial killers.

Money can buy suffering

The most expensive human targets were children. Reports differ about the relative prices of women and the elderly. Most people would not allow anyone to pay them to engage in an activity as morally repugnant as taking the life of children and innocent adults. A despicable minority might overcome their moral restraint in exchange for a large, and sometimes even rather small, paycheck. These affluent monsters, instead, wanted to pay large amounts of their own money to experience precisely this. It is an entirely new level of evil.

Gavazzeni said: “These people did not kill for hatred or ideology, but for a sense of omnipotence”. There is obviously something wrong in the brains of these men. But this does not really satisfy us as an explanation. According to all accounts, they were not dysfunctional individuals, outcasts or deranged criminals. This behaviour was not the result of war trauma or some deeply ingrained ethnic hatred.

They were probably killing Bosniaks just because they were the human prey available at the time. Racism and Islamophobia can surely play a role in this horror story, but we guess that they would have taken advantage of any other chance. Given how they dehumanised their victims, the specific details of those killed was clearly irrelevant.

We don’t know much about the identities of these killers, but we know something. The Italian judiciary is apparently trying to catch a few of them, and sparse details have reached the media. A man from Milan is being searched for, and he is said to be the rich owner of a cosmetic surgery clinic. Another is supposedly linked to the far right. Their familiarity with weapons is assumed to derive from luxury hunting more than previous military experience. Subašić commented:

“In any case they are all part of a milieu of wealthy and probably influential people in their communities. They have the legal resources to protect themselves in an investigation, as well as the political clout to hinder it.”

We advance the hypothesis that this was mainly a display of power. Under capitalism, money can freely become capital, the almighty force and driving motive of capitalist society. With money, one can buy anything, including other people: their toil, their time, their bodies – even their lives. One can also buy a free pass for any conceivable crime or sin.

The ruling class is rotten

For these rich and powerful bourgeois, paying to kill civilians in Bosnia is no different from spending on other ‘luxury’ items. It’s less cruel and sadistic, of course, it might be bloodless, but the underlying motivation is uncannily similar.

Why would Microsoft’s co-founder Paul Allen pay millions to buy a MiG-29 fighter jet? Just because he could. Why did some Young Conservative Club members in English colleges burn banknotes in the face of the homeless as a ritual of passage? The man who ended up as the prime minister of Britain allegedly engaged in the same pastime. Append a few extra zeros and the banknote to mock the homeless man becomes the price to kill a Sarajevo girl.

An abnormally high proportion of CEOs and other individuals in the capitalist echelons have psychopathic traits, according to some widely circulated studies (e.g. Babiak, Neuman, Hare, Corporate Psychopathy: Talking the Walk, 2010, but Fanon et al. give higher figures in their later papers). In the media, this is often summed up as ‘one in five CEOs is a psychopath’. From a Marxist point of view, this is due to the capitalist mode of production selecting who is best suited for the task of overseeing capital’s self-valorisation.

This task prescribes exploiting workers, deceiving purchasers, crushing weaker competitors, and aggressively lobbying in the political sphere. It takes a ruthless maniac to do this 24/7 in the most effective way, completely disregarding the societal harm caused. The reality of bourgeois life, in which everything has a price, and where success is achieved through trampling over others, naturally is inclined to produce such individuals.

This begins at a very young age, in the training fields of the ruling class: expensive schools and elite clubs, extravagant VIP events, ‘high society’ social bubbles where everything has a price.

Socialism is not only about destroying an inhumane social system, but also removing the social relations that produce inhumane humans in the first place.

Originally published on In Defence of Marxism.