Legion of Faceless Snipers Escape Their Crimes

“Why bother waste two bullets?” one former Bosnian Serb Sniper in the 1992-5 war in Bosnia boasted to the Sarajevo police in Novi Grad municipality in 1992.

“If I shoot the child, I kill the mother too because the murder of her child is her death as well,” he added.

Many others made similar chilling boasts, saying they killed mothers, children and elderly people during the siege of the Bosnian capital.

But now, 17 years after the war, such voices have gone silent and few want to talk about what they did in those years, though some talk discretely to doctors of their guilty consciences.

Others, however, psychologically speaking, remain completely untroubled by their deeds.
Not one former sniper has been convicted in a court for what they have done.

Experts say that one problem is that it is almost impossible to prove in court that a certain sniper shooter killed someone, even if they were arrested and gave statements about what they did.

“It was almost impossible to determine whether someone was killed by a bullet, or by a sniper,” recalled Dragan Miokovic, former leader of a team of investigators of the Security Services Centre, CSB, in Sarajevo.

“We always tried to determine the direction of arrival of a bullet but we could not determine the exact point from where it was fired because of the conditions in which we were working and the circumstances that then existed in Sarajevo,” he added.

According to the Institute for Research of Crimes against Humanity and International Law, 53 children in Sarajevo were killed by sniper fire during the siege.

The Institute says that most of the children were hit in the temporal bone, eye and heart, and the sniper’s goal clearly was to kill them or to leave them permanently disabled.

Miokovic says that in conditions of war, snipers are «the worst criminals of all», because they look at civilians through the ocular and shoot them cold-bloodedly in the head, while, for example, those who fire from a cannon cannot usually see their human targets.

Meanwhile, the exact number of Bosnian Serb snipers who killed civilians during the siege, as well as the number of snipers on the opposite side, is not known.

The siege of Sarajevo lasted 1,425 days. According to the CSB, more than 11,000 persons were killed of whom around 1,500 were children under 15.

But the death toll from sniping is just an estimate, because there were many cases in which a man or woman was wounded by a bullet, and of whom records then state that he or she later died later from the wounds.

Shoot anything that moves:

The Hague Tribunal sentenced in November 2006 Stanislav Galic to life imprisonment, and Dragomir Milosevic three years later to 29 years in prison for crimes committed in Sarajevo.

The verdicts confirmed that Galic and Milosevic waged a campaign of sniping at and shelling Sarajevo, conducted with the primary purpose of spreading terror among the civilian population.

Momcilo Perisic, the Yugoslav Army Chief of Staff was sentenced last year to 27 years by a first-instance verdict, among other things, for the execution of the campaign of artillery and mortar shelling and sniping in Sarajevo.

Radovan Karadzic, former President of Republika Srpska, and Ratko Mladic, former Chief of Staff of the Army of Republika Srpska, VRS, have been indicted for sniping at and spreading terror among the people of Sarajevo.

Karadzic and Mladic, who are indicted for genocide, crimes against humanity and violations of laws and customs of war, are currently on trial before the Hague Tribunal.

Presenting its introductory statement at the beginning of the Mladic’s trial, on May 16 the Hague Prosecution announced their intention to interrogate an ex-sniper who will describe how he received orders to shoot at anything that moves.

“Sniper shooters would target the weakest member of the family or, in a group of girls, they would shoot at the most beautiful one, like it was something personal in the attacks,” said Hague Prosecutor Dermont Groom, citing an American firefighter who came to Sarajevo to help his Bosniak colleagues.

“They would do whatever would cause most pain to the survivors,” he added.

In the same introductory statement, Groom described the death of seven-year-old Nermin Divovic, who was hit by sniper fire in the head while returning home with his mother and sister.

“A sniper shot and killed him. His mother did not know [at first] that her son had been killed, because she taught him to fall down when shooting started,” the prosecutor said.

The street stretching along the river Miljacka in central Sarajevo, called Zmaja od Bosne, where Nermin was killed, received the nickname of “Sniper Alley” on account of the number of shootings there.

Sniper fire was also returned from the area of Sarajevo under control of the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

One 19-year-old Bosniak boasted that he used to snipe from the building of the then Bosnian government towards the neighbourhood of Grbavica, which was under the control of the Bosnian Serbs.

“I would shoot at an old woman, so that [the Serbian] soldiers would approach to help her. While they were pulling out the old woman, I would liquidate those soldiers,” he said in a statement given midway through the war to the State Security Service, SDB.

On the other hand, a former sniper shooter of the Special Police of the Bosnian Interior Ministry, MUP BiH, said he had the opportunity to shoot at civilians on a daily basis but never did so.

“We did not shoot at civilians. Our snipers shot only for the purpose of defence,” he told BIRN.

We had orders to act as snipers only when we had to pull out our dead and wounded civilians and soldiers,» he explained.

“Then we had orders to open fire, not only from sniper rifles but with all available weapons,” the man said, not wishing to reveal his identity because of his current employment.

If any snipers shot «at will», this former sniper shooter said he would have had to write a report, explaining where and why he shot.

“When we were rescuing the wounded, in order to avoid them or those assisting them being killed, we would shoot… [but] we could not hit their [Serbian] sniper nests because they were protected, so we shot around in order to prevent them from shooting,” the former sniper added.

Haunted by victim’s ghost:

Predrag O., another former sniper, killed himself in Belgrade in 2000, after writing a farewell letter, which the media published, in which he admitted having killed a nine-year-old girl.

“I do not know what devil entered into me that day. I remember, it was a hot summer day, August 1992,” he wrote.

“I saw civilians. Mainly the elderly and women, who were peeping cautiously from their houses. It was calm and they went to the fountain on the bank of river Miljacka to fill their water supplies… I caught the face of the girl and realized that she was smiling, just as if no madness whatsoever was happening around her … And then, the madness suddenly caught me.

“You will not do this to me, a voice from the hell told me, and at that moment I realized that my finger, as if I couldn’t control it, had come to the trigger and begun to grip it,” Predrag wrote.

Psychiatrist Senadin Ljubovic says that he has come across serious psychological problems among some ex-snipers who have approached him as the result of what they did in the war.

“Over time, these pictures begin to haunt them and they experience… significant psychological disturbances. It is undisputed that they feel a certain guilt because of what they did,” Ljubovic said, adding that former snipers usually do not talk too much about themselves.

Predrag O. tried to return to normal life after the war, but, as he wrote in a letter, after the murder of nine-year-old girl, he never felt the same.

“One night, I saw the girl that I killed. She asked me: ‘Why you did it?’. Since that day, the ghost of innocent girl visited me everywhere and in every place,” he wrote, adding that he could not take it any longer.

Ljubovic highlights that some people with “horrible minds” remain completely free of trauma, however.

“The criminal mind is difficult to reach. Persons with such minds do not cooperate enough to be able to be understood,” Ljubovic said.

Miokovic believes that the intelligence agencies of the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Army of Republika Srpska knew who the respective snipers were.

“I dare to say that a year after the war people from this side knew who had been on the other side, at least by their nicknames,” Miokovic said.

He added that following the 1995 peace deal, after the re-integration of Grbavica, Ilidza, Ilijas and Vogosca into Sarajevo, many sniper nests were found, while on Spicasta stijena one was found dug into the ground.

Miokovic says that not a single site from the left side of the Miljacka river, from Vrbanja bridge to Pofalici, was without a minimum of five active sniper nests.