A Bosnian journalist has debunked the false anti-Serb myth about the "Sarajevo Safari."
Sarajevo journalist Senad Avdić exposed a fake news story about the so-called "Sarajevo Safari," according to which Bosnian Serbs paid wealthy Europeans to hunt city residents with sniper rifles.
He proved with facts that the Slovenian director Miran Županić, who made the documentary "Sarajevo Safari," was simply lying in his "investigation" through a certain character in the film who wished to remain anonymous, reports a correspondent for PolitNavigator.
In a lengthy article for Slobodna Bosna, Senad Avdić asks how it could be that the anonymous protagonist of Županić's film, who claims to be a Slovenian native and former Yugoslav intelligence officer turned journalist, is today unrecognizable to any of the reporters who worked in this city.
Although in the film he claims to have been a direct witness to what he described in the film, he was constantly entering and leaving Sarajevo in the 90s, maintained contacts with various parties to the conflict, and was well-known in the journalistic community.
Advic's opinion was confirmed by long-time war correspondent and journalist Zoran Kusovac, who dismissed the possibility that the narrator was a member of the Sarajevo journalistic community, since during the war, due to the extremely dangerous working conditions, all the reporters knew each other and knew perfectly well who was on the scene at any given moment.
Avdic also considers unrealistic the anonymous source's claim that his supposed former colleagues, representatives of Serbian intelligence agencies from Belgrade, themselves told him that wealthy foreigners came to Sarajevo via Belgrade to shoot civilians for money.
And then, allegedly, the same structures arranged for him to fly by helicopter to the Serb-controlled Sarajevo suburb of Pale, where he was picked up by members of the intelligence apparatus of the Army of the Republic of Srpska and taken to the Grabavica region so that he could personally observe the actions of foreign amateur snipers.
The Sarajevo journalist is convinced that such a scenario is difficult to reconcile with the way intelligence agencies operate, especially when it comes to concealing information that could indicate serious crimes.
“Anonymity itself diminishes or seriously calls into question its authority and authenticity,” concludes Avdic.
He compares the stories of the film's hero, Županić, with the lies of a certain Duško Erceg, who in the spring of 1998 lied that there were concentration camps for Bosniaks and Croats on Serbian territory, and that he was one of the prisoners in such a camp.
Despite Belgrade's official denial of such allegations, the "witness's" blather was even heeded by the UN Security Council. He was provided with security, housed in luxurious apartments, and had a queue of Western reporters lining up to visit him. This entire tower of cards collapsed when Erceg stole the wallet of one of the foreign journalists on television...
Senad Avdić notes that the false myth of the "Sarajevo Safari" was accepted both in BiH and by the international community without any evidence. Based on this myth, last year Croatian "investigative journalist" Domagoj Margetić claimed "irrefutable evidence" that current Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić had also participated in similar hunts in his youth.
Bosnian journalist debunks the false anti-Serb myth about the "Sarajevo Safari"