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The year 1991 was a turning point.
While things in Slovenia were going back to normal
a war broke out in the Balkans,
specifically in two former republics, Croatia and Bosnia.
In Ljubljana I was contacted by a person, who asked me
if I wanted to join him on a trip to Austria.
He was half-American and half-Croatian.
That was my first contact with a representative
of an important American agency.
This agency had access to all information,
as everybody knew, and he saw me as a person
that he could usefully...
He must have known I was somewhat out of favour
and that I wasn't working.
He took me to Austria
where I was introduced and the first thing they said was
they're not interested in Slovenia but in Bosnia.
It seems they had major interests in Bosnia and
they were interested in the atmosphere over there.
He had information that I was fluent in Serbo-Croatian
and Slovenians were generally well liked
in the former Yugoslav republics.
It is tricky to hire a Croat or a Serb,
they will never get anywhere. Neither will a Macedonian.
From 1992 till the end of 1994 or thereabouts I was
in the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina about 35 times.
Typically, I stayed there for 10 to 14 days,
perhaps a day more or less, it depends.
I was known for being able to get to Sarajevo by plane,
that is, on a United Nations plane.
I would sleep in Sarajevo
and make trips to Pale or Ilidža for a day or two.
I was monitoring developments. The US agency wanted to know
how the people were doing, what they were doing
how they were earning a living,
what their views are on world politics,
on American politics.
Mostly such developments among the population.
Come on, take... -Hold this.
Fucking hell!
Come here! Get over here, man!
Fuck you all!
Here we go.
Come on. -Lift her up.
Lift her up, for fuck's sake! -Up, up.
Fuck this country!
Fuck this world!
Sweet mother of God! -Let's get him in! Faster!
Shit. -Get here, now!
Stop acting so crazy. -Hurry up. We can talk later.
Come on. -Hurry up. -Ok, let's do it.
Come here and help! Hey, come here!
Give us a hand. -Help us!
How do we...? -Who is it?
Hold him.
Slowly. -Now push.
Let's go! Go, go!
In Sarajevo everyone knew you had to run
through certain streets which had barricades.
When I walked around Sarajevo I was always told 'run, run'.
CAUTION SNIPER*
You had to pause and change pace when running to confuse
the sniper across the street so he couldn't hit you.
I always travelled around with a basic kit
for stitching wounds, morphine
and supplies for burns.
It's what I always carried, my own basic surgical supplies.
This way, if I had to get my wound dressed in a clinic,
I had everything I needed.
Americans had a huge interest in the Bosnian territory
so they paid well.
At the time, I used to relax by gambling.
In particular, I loved the roulette.
If I lost in one night - the local currency was the mark -
so if I lost 4 or 5 thousand marks
it didn't cost me anything.
I was tremendously well paid, but it's also true that
I was tremendously exposed.
Hold that. -Almost ready.
Next one!
Let's do this.
My late Mum would always tell me
that I was switched at birth by Martians.
That I came from somewhere up above,
to have a look around here, to observe.
My grandmother at first wanted me to become a priest
so I entered the School of Theology
but when my Dad found out, he said,
you must be insane, they'll send us all to prison.
Forget about theology school and being a priest.
You're going to Belgrade. So that's where I studied.
I was special. There was a small group of us, about 35,
who received special training
and two of them, a colleague and I, stood out.
They said that, for several generations,
they hadn't had such cadets as the two of us,
who were able to do quite some things.
When I finished school, I returned home
and I worked in various fields.
In various firms.
I had a code name, so...
Basically, I was infiltrated in certain institutions
so that I... they could be kept under surveillance.
After that, my career was sort of...
rather clandestine.
You could call me a sort of traveller
but the travel was mostly
for the security of Yugoslavia, in that context.
You could say I gathered information
and protected both internal and external borders.
When I wanted to travel to the US in 1987
the US Consulate General was in Zagreb
so I went there and talked to the Consul.
I could see they were aware I worked for the government.
They knew everything.
In that regard, the Yugoslav intelligence service
collaborated very well with services on both sides
of the so-called blocks.
In January 93, I was invited to Belgrade.
There, certain colleagues I had known from students' time
asked if I was interested in any other affairs
and that is when I first learned about the dark side
of the civil war, or whatever you may call it, in Bosnia.
A helicopter took me to Pale
where the seat of the Republika Srpska was.
I was told there, that they would show me something.
That was the first time I got to know Sarajevo Safari
from up-close, so by being right there.
I was at Grbavica where I saw how,
for certain sums of money, strangers would come in
to shoot at the surrounded citizens of Sarajevo.
I spent a couple of days in Pale
because they were waiting for the team to arrive
and they could... well, go on safari.
I recall that a representative of the Serbian Army,
of the Republika Srpska, told me he would show me
the nearby positions of their soldiers vis-a-vis
the Army of the Federation.
I also saw that two other jeeps were ready,
military jeeps, and that one of them also had
people inside, but they were...
We were all mostly wearing green so that
we couldn't be identified as civilians.
I had a bullet-proof vest on
and a bullet-proof helmet for safety.
So he told me he would show me
the nearby positions of their soldiers.
Then we stopped at a building.
That's where I saw three men
and I could immediately tell from their faces
that they weren't
from Bosnia, they weren't Serbs or Montenegrin
and that they had to be from the West.
One of them even seemed to be from the East, from Russia.
I can tell this from a face.
And they were all, how should I say, ready for...
You could see something was about to happen.
I thought these were foreign journalists.
You should know that I was accredited as a journalist.
Although, looking back at that moment,
reporters are frightened.
When you take a journalist to a location
he's not at ease, he's a bit scared.
Here, you could feel the adrenaline.
Later I connected the dots.
They couldn't wait to go and get some action.
We go inside and get to these two rooms which were set up,
with everything camouflaged.
There were several posts, so they could change them.
After shooting, the shooter moved to a different post
because after a shot is made from a certain post
it's likely they'll shoot back at you from the other side
because the sniper's location has been revealed.
Then I saw that he spoke in fluent English,
the army man,
telling two men that they would get things ready now,
but I still thought he would lie down at the side
and watch through the binoculars.
I couldn't believe that he lay down and was handed a rifle.
Everything was set up and he made the shot.
I will honestly admit that I...
I was in a bit of a shock, despite the fact that
From my previous assignments, I was used to
seeing outrageous things, but you're still shocked.
It happened, and a person was shot and fell down.
I used the binoculars and saw the person was shot down.
Then the people scattered, ran away.
The first time they took me to this event
I informed my employer and they said
hmm, that's interesting, and that's it.
What further passed between us
I'm not at liberty to say.
The next times I joined them at my own request because
I was intrigued what sort of people did this.
The people I saw certainly weren't just
average people. They held high positions.
They were protected accordingly.
A politician doesn't do this.
It's people in the background, the lobbies.
This is the next level for a person who has so much that
he is bored of everything, so he thinks, why don't I
go to Sarajevo and shoot a child or an adult
to get some satisfaction...
I won't kill only animals.
I never heard about the prices,
I just know it was terribly expensive. I do know...
it was said that you paid more for a child target.
In October 93
Irina turned one.
We even improvised a small celebration from nothing.
My mother, her grandmother, made a cake without eggs,
the frosting without butter.
But it was a lovely family gathering.
We marked Irina's first birthday.
Someone came up with a camera and some film
and these are the only photos I have.
That's when we took pictures of her
and four days later we went for a short walk.
It was a lovely, quiet day, with no shooting.
I took her out for some fresh air every day.
She just learned to walk. -And that's what I did that day.
We walked over to Samir in his unit, just passing by,
where he was posted in the Bosnian Army.
On the way back, we came to Ciglane, where we lived,
and something incredible...
I stopped to chat with a couple of friends.
A quiet day, there was no shooting.
Irina could already walk. I let go of her for a moment,
when out of nowhere came a sniper bullet.
The bullet didn't hit me,
it didn't hit any of us adults who were there.
It hit Irina who was one year and four days old.
With incredible speed we reached the hospital
at Koševo where a team of doctors was on duty.
Their response was very, very fast.
But the baby had gone blue... -We are grateful to them.
The baby had already gone blue, blue lips...
The doctor found the entry wound from the sniper bullet
which was lodged in her body and was removed surgically.
Not just the bullet but most of her internal organs
had to be removed because they were torn.
After the operation all they could do was sew her up
and the doctor told me
that her chances of surviving were very small.
Five, six hours after the operation she succumbed.
Samir knows best how. He managed to sneak
inside the hospital, get into her room.
We were not allowed to see her. It was night,
around one o'clock at night. Samir sneaked into her room
and he was with her when she passed away.
Difficult moments...
I had to go home and explain this,
that she stopped breathing. I remember a black doctor.
You may not remember, but before the war there were
many Arabs who finished their medical studies here
in ex-Yugoslavia. He held me and led me out of the hospital
and asked me to behave as befits a...
As a real man, which was very hard for me,
to manage to control my
rage and..., I don't know how to say it.
And he walked me home, we lived close by.
I found myself at home and as soon as she saw me
she started crying. -I knew at once.
That we lost the battle.
Today, Irina would be 27 years old
and it has been 26 years since she passed away.
It still hurts regardless of the time.
I can say that a consequence of that was
in 94, when we were happy
to find out I was pregnant again.
We though it might be best to bring into the world
new life, a new baby. This time it was a boy.
But fate played with us again and
and when I entered my ninth month
the baby's heart just stopped beating.
So the foetus died inside her.
The doctors established death and for ten days
they couldn't even deliver me because we had no conditions
we had no drugs, no medication or any way to deliver me.
For ten days, I lay
with the dead baby in my belly... -And next to her,
there were women having healthy babies.
Yes, who kept their babies.
After the delivery of the dead baby, the boy,
all the doctor could say was that the baby was healthy,
that my pregnancy was normal, by the book,
but that my mental state...
that I had transferred my mental state
to my baby, and the baby couldn't take it.
That his heart couldn't take it. -That's right.
Every time I dream about her, she is
as old as when she was killed.
So, one year old.
Only once did I dream about her as a girl
that I found.
I walked up to her in my dream and said
I'm glad I found you, because you were stolen from me
when you were one year old.
She was a lovely, beautiful girl and I knew it was her.
And she was happy because her mom had found her.
I only had that dream once
but mostly these dreams
are around the time when she was killed.
It's the time we spent together,
our shared moments, that's all I dream about.
Nothing new.
The safari operated since
the beginning of the war, when someone started organising it
and this is where it was very easy to do.
So you came to Belgrade by plane,
from Belgrade you took a helicopter to Pale,
you went and shot your trophy and
went home. After they were done they left,
they were transported. There was a rotation.
I don't know how I was presented to them.
I was like an observer
and there was no conversation, ever.
As for the men I later travelled with on the plane,
and assumed were coming, because I could just tell,
I never approached them because I felt...
Why was I under cover? Here's the answer.
Because I was told by the Serbs to
never go public with this story I saw.
I saw about
seven shots, and...
If someone shoots down a
a young person, it's terrible. It's horrifying.
And furthermore...
I will tell you because I've already said so much.
For example the mother holds the child's hand and
the child gets shot and falls, with the mother standing right there.
It was just...
It was horror, really horrendous.
When we reached the sniper's post,
the sniper who was there prepared the rifle.
The person who was going to shoot then lay next to him.
Lying close was another man with stationary binoculars.
I wasn't lying but squatting and watching with binoculars.
I had my own binoculars so I could see.
When the shooter fired the person fell down.
And most of the shots were made at
the chest, because the head...
was difficult to hit.
I also saw someone shot in the head.
So I could tell they were very good hunters.
I knew before that walking in Sarajevo was
very dangerous because snipers were always killing people.
But of course I didn't know that this was done by
foreigners for money. Just like hunters going hunting
for deer, they were waiting in ambush for
a person in town to shoot at.
I was horrified to see this. Horrified.
Naturally, it made my heart sink to see a gentleman
who was 40 at the time, 35 to 45 years old,
how his rifle was prepared by the sniper who was there
and there was another man with binoculars watching
and when he told him the target was there,
he took aim and fired.
The first time I came along
I was asked, do you want to feel some adrenaline?
He must have had orders from the top to show me.
But to this day, I still don't know why they showed me.
They did know I was working for
a big agency.
They must have had a reason for allowing me
to see the whole thing.
I studied physics during the war.
When I turned 18 I was drafted into the army
but every morning after lining up in the barracks
of the 1st Motorized Brigade.
I would change into civilian clothes
and run to the school of sciences and mathematics
where I studied physics, and the first lessons were
about projectile motion.
Beneath all the grenades and
bullets and projectiles we were firing ping pong balls
from a cannon and working out ranges and trajectories.
We discussed physics, mathematics, gravitation.
One such day, in fact on my way back...
There were only three of us at the department of physics.
In fact I had three classmates and I was the fourth.
The lectures often took place at the professor's house,
because there were enough of us ...
not to go to the lecture hall,
which was on the front line at the time,
by the River Miljacka, which divided the world in two.
And...
I was drawn by this beautiful afternoon,
a sky that was clear for the first time after a long winter,
on 3 March 1995 - it may have been the first day of spring,
the day when spring came, maybe prematurely.
Anyway, I...
Walked out, drawn by the beauty of that...
that sky and ...
In front of the National Museum I was hit by a sniper.
The moment of my injury was recorded.
There was a camera at the crossroads.
Hey, come here.
What happened to me was something that
we all expected, that sooner or later each of us would be
...that this would happen to us.
I knew it would, but I didn't think it would be so
radical, so terrible and so painful as it was.
And... I lost my breath...
I couldn't really...
Speak, to react. I had to calm down.
I had to calm down and...
Find, to focus my energy to survive.
I knew I would stay alive.
But only for the reason...
That I had to witness...
something greater than what
I saw then.
It may sound strange but...
That beautiful sunset that drew me out from the
shelter and brought me to that spot...
The tragedy and drama that took place there...
And what I experienced in that moment may be the most
beautiful moment of my life.
Perhaps because I had
learned in the previous four years of war,
how to find, in the greatest tragedy,
beauty which can counteract it.
So if this was the greatest tragedy of my life,
there had to be great beauty to counteract it.
No matter how you rationalize it, dismiss it,
I then started...
my journey to...
something very meaningful.
I haven't found out yet what it is.
I could never explain, but it is what drives me.
After I survived that moment
and after intensive care at Koševo hospital, and after
going to New York to recover, and coming back to Bosnia
I have always been obsessed
with how to describe
the sunset on that day.
How to say something good about everything around us.
On the first day of truce and even a UN transporter
was on that corner, with soldiers in an armored vehicle
that was heavily armed
but it wasn't authorised to protect passers-by.
It was there just for show, as a reminder and...
An insubstantial, powerless reminder of a presence...
Without power.
And...
In the video, there is no trace of that sunset.
It is a 4:3 Beta recording which is...
Which only records the facts of that day.
But the truth is a much wider frame.
And...
To search for that truth,
to testify, to be...
To speak about the beauty of it all,
that may be the reason why I'm here,
which has never been clear to me since it happened.
We were all killed by war. We are all wounded,
deeply and incurably.
The period that unfolded before cameras and under
snipers' sights left a mark on us all, which can't be healed
by any court or...
any compensation. There is no reward...
No resolution which could take away
that act, that disappointment...
It remains...
as the trace of a painful hope,
of an impossible wish.
Of an eternal futility
of everything that we believed in.
We are all slowly dying from these wounds.
It's strange how violence
which is omnipresent
in the public, in ideologies,
in politics, in the world.
It seems so attractive, like something dynamic,
like a drama which is exciting.
It has become a form of entertainment.
We are so used, as the human species,
to violence, that peace is boring to us.
We experience peace as dullness,
as an emptiness where nothing happens.
When in fact peace is life.
Peace is what brings punishment,
peace is what brings life,
peace is where everything is created.
We absolutely do not want it
in this world.
It's a hit.
To the left! To the left!
Don't be by his side!
Let's go!
That tree in there! Run!
Over there!
In early 93, I was summoned by
the head of military intelligence to transfer from
the press centre to the intelligence service.
So, since early 93,
I have been a member of the intelligence administration
of the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The service has many sectors,
and given my previous job, education and experience,
I was assigned a job in analytics
and all people who work with information,
who crave knowledge,
analytics is actually an information paradise,
which pools all the information
which was coming at the time from all the fronts of Bosnia.
The intelligence service provided all the units of the
BiH Army, not just in Sarajevo but behind all the fronts,
with information about enemy plans and intentions.
We made assessments and sent them as needed
to the corps of the BiH Army, which formed over time
to count a total of seven. So, I can say that
I knew the Sarajevo battlefield as the back of my hand,
as the phrase goes.
One day, in late 93, we received intelligence from
the military security service that the interrogation
of a captive yielded some information
about foreigners in the Sarajevo battlefield
which could be of interest to us
in analysing the enemy, and they delivered it to us.
I took the information under consideration.
But the captive, at least at first, seemed to me
to be fairly irrelevant.
He was about 20.
He was originally from Paraćin in Serbia
and he came to the Sarajevo battlefield
here above Grbavica, specifically to Hrasno brdo
and Trebević a few days before.
In his statement he described his journey.
The Serbian radical party had instructed him to come to
a barracks in Belgrade, where he enlisted to fight
on the Sarajevo battlefield.
And then he and a group of volunteers from Belgrade
were transported here.
This is where his statement becomes interesting
and reports an entirely new phenomenon
on the Sarajevo battleground.
He said that during the bus ride,
and the ride took all night from Belgrade to Pale,
he noticed that the bus was at some point boarded by
five foreigners who were accompanied by
military police officers or the special military police,
he wasn't sure,
who seemed to have a special status in the volunteer group.
In what way? They came to the barracks with
good civilian cars, jeeps or some sort of limousines,
and they carried a lot of gear
and their outfit was a combination of
civilian items of clothing
and some items which seemed like army clothes
but he wasn't exactly sure what it was.
He didn't realise until later that it was
actually high-quality, luxury hunting gear.
And they carried packed arms.
During the ride, mostly the volunteers
drank and partied.
Conversation was struck up with
three of the five strangers,
and in his statement he claims
that the three men who talked to them were Italians.
One of them said he was from Milano and the other two -
he didn't know where they came from.
The forth and fifth man didn't interact during the ride.
They were trying to get some sleep but did not talk.
So he started a conversation with these persons
insofar as they knew some Serbian words
or he knew some English.
He mostly wanted to know about their daily allowance,
how much they were paid to fight for the Serbs in Bosnia.
They replied that in fact they are not getting compensation
and that it's them who paid to fight in Bosnia.
Being a petty mercenary, or criminal, he thought it was
odd, because he was there to make money or plunder.
So why are they paying? They pay to go to Sarajevo
and to be enabled by the Serbian army to shoot from
buildings at human targets
in the free part of town. And they pay for it
with compensation, like a fee for hunting.
So he realised, and so did I from his statement,
that this was a safari for humans.
And that the people who come for this reason are...
A new, morbid type of snipers who pay to kill.
This force works throughout the universe.
Between the stars and the...
Excuse me, how did the gravitational force begin?
We asked for the captive to be interrogated again
to expand and confirm the information.
In this respect, he wasn't very useful.
The gist of his story was that they were taken to Pale,
Pale is where the five foreigners and their escort of
Serbian special forces got off the bus,
and they drove on to Sarajevo, Lukavica,
and from that point on he has no more information.
I analysed the information to the extent possible
and wrote a summary, a conclusion that
this was a new phenomenon on the Sarajevo battlefield,
that this was about
a specific type of enemy,
about foreigners who are not the real enemy in the war,
the aggression against Bosnia, but they are a real danger
given that they are located on Serbian lines
and opening fire on civilians.
At any rate, we knew that this is a new danger
on the Sarajevo battlefield.
In terms of war, this was not very significant,
compared to the dozens of regular snipers
in the ranks of the Republika Srpska, and foreign mercenaries
and weekend mercenaries, they were just
a few more snipers firing at the town every day.
It wasn't a special force that would tip the power balance
or influence it, but it was worthy of attention
because it made the Sarajevo battlefield a place
for a specific hobby.
We tried to investigate further, asking our
people in the troops, whether the lines of defence,
which were not urban - not in Sarajevo or Grbavica -
but the defence lines on the outskirts of town,
namely in the woods, in the fields and other areas.
Whether those locations show any signs of multiple snipers.
These efforts didn't give any results to speak of.
We always received information about sniper activity
on a daily basis, which was more or less intense.
However, our scouts, our observers weren't particularly
able or willing to estimate who's on the other side,
who's holding the rifle. It was simply concluded
whether a certain area had dangerous snipers
and that was the end of story.
So, this wasn't the way way to learn more
about the hunter snipers.
So, the head of military intelligence service,
General Mustafa Hajrulahović, aka the Italian - a legend
of the defence of Sarajevo, who died after the war -
he then launched new efforts
to get further information about this phenomenon
by asking foreign intelligence services for collaboration.
At the time, UNPROFOR in Sarajevo included units
from various armies and they were accompanied by their own
intelligence services. We took advantage of
our good contacts with the Italian intelligence service,
SISMI, which was there to support their own forces
within UNPROFOR.
A meeting was arranged at the military intelligence HQ
in connection with these snipers.
And we presented them with our preliminary findings,
which came as a surprise to them
and I believe it was indeed a surprise,
by no means a feigned surprise
as in - we know nothing about it, but in fact
this is the state affair.
No, our impression was that this was a totally illegal...
someone's illegal operation, about which
the Italian state, army and police probably had no idea
that it was going on at all.
We gave them information and asked them to investigate
the entire case, since this chain of
providing the service and transport for people from Italy
whether they were Italian or not, had its source somewhere
in Italy. Milano was not the key.
It was simply a city one of them came from,
so we weren't really able to tell them a lot.
They had very little information to go on.
The meeting ended with the conclusion that this is now
their problem, and that it isn't a military problem here,
but a very delicate one
in the relations between Italy and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
We waited to hear back from SISMI
and the Italian domestic intelligence service, SISDE,
because our possibilities here were simply exhausted.
Three or four months later I checked with
General Hajrulahović, then Chief, to find out
what was the situation, did we get any feedback,
because I, waiting for news in analytics, didn't see
any information received from them about our inquiry.
He answered that he was verbally informed
by the SISMI office in Sarajevo
that the domestic security service of Italy, SISDE,
had investigated the case,
that they located the starting point of these activities,
that this location was neutralised,
and that this will not happen again.
I think the safari went on at least right up until the
end of 94, perhaps a little longer, because in the years
93 and 94 I spent long periods of time there.
Serbia's capital was connected to airline services
all around the world and the closest airport
to Slovenia or Croatia was Trieste
and Trieste had three flights a day to Belgrade.
On the plane, I noticed,
- flights from there were made by JAT
with ATR 42, their turboprop airplanes -
on that plane I noticed certain types of people
who I knew were going there to do some business.
And... I have two good colleagues
who worked these transports because they were employed in
the Army of Serbia, not the Republika Srpska.
They were helicopter pilots. It was done for the money.
It could be the weekend or during the week.
It worked like this: from Trieste to Belgrade,
next day Sarajevo... They didn't stay around.
It moved quickly, people returned quickly.
And I know,
also from the information I got later,
these were Americans, Canadians, Russians.
Allegedly also Slovenians, I don't have reliable information.
But it was rumoured, which I can believe,
because we're a peculiar nation.
You could probably find some people here who would...
be capable of doing it.
I was definitely horrified by the safari.
It's the height of perversity.
Such violent, inhuman, inhumane killing
and extermination of people as in Bosnia
will not be seen again soon, anywhere in the world.
Despite the presence of peacekeeping forces in Bosnia
and the fact that the western allies knew this was going on.
The aspect of paying to shoot people is an extreme
form of eccentricity and mental pathology,
which could most accurately be described with
a medical diagnosis.
We experienced them as such, without giving much thought to
what their real motive was, what their
personal histories were.
We assumed these were people who
used the luxury in their lives to
to experience every imaginable adventure, pleasure,
challenge that their money could buy.
But they hadn't tried killing ordinary people
simply because it's punishable in any normal country,
subject to sanction.
So we can't say they're crazy,
mentally detached from this world.
They fully comprehend what are the limits of normality
and what are the limits of punishability.
Then, in an extreme situation such as war,
an opportunity comes, it is offered by someone,
or it's their own idea,
to complete their gallery of trophies with a trophy
such as the human head.
What is perhaps even more morbid than them
is the fact that there were people out there
who were willing to organise it for them.
Who were willing to pick them up, take them to the frontline
and show them a place with potential targets.
So, these hunters had an escort,
which guided them to an area that was
controlled by the BiH Army, the enemy of Republika Srpska,
and the only rule was to shoot in this territory at anybody.
A person who shoots another person must believe that
his actions don't have great consequences.
That the person he is shooting at is guilty
and deserves what is done to him,
unless he is in severe psychosis and
convinced that the human beings he is shooting
aren't people at all, that they don't deserve to live.
And he lacks the ability to feel compassion or empathy
for the people on the other side.
It's the face of a horribly deformed mystical beast
which possesses people.
Is this the demon that was described as a being of fire?
Is that fire actually
that force, that something?
How mystical it all is.
How else can you explain it than a terrible mystery?
I can't give it any other name than...
Some dreadful, terrible secret.
A concealed...
dangerous...
precise...
ferocious fire.
What kind of man is he?
That's the question
I have been wondering about,
all these 26 years that have passed since
my daughter - our daughter - Irina was killed.
I am certain that he is a sick man,
that he's not a normal person.
That question tormented me for a long time.
What tormented me most was why didn't he kill me?
Why did he kill Irina?
If anyone had wronged him, it could only have been me
and not that child, absolutely not.
I was given the chance to shoot, for free.
But I said I can't, I can't cross that line.
You must draw a line somewhere, I can't become
a criminal and cross the line.
Something makes him different from all the rest,
to be able to do this for fun,
from a need to abuse,
without any vengeance,
without any act that could be a cause or reason for rage,
only for the simple gratification
of killing a child, shattering a child's head
to demonstrate that power,
power over life.
In my imagination, I don't have an affinity for
the contemplation of that evil. I'm afraid to develop empathy
with a pathology that
allows such a thing.
And...
So...
Because I know we're all just human.
Looking at me and them, our cells, our structure...
Our lives are not that different.
But there is something...
That makes some of us,
without a cause, able to shoot at
a classroom full of children, in which
not one child out of four classes survives.
The existence of people who can
abuse someone for years, rape them,
torture, kill, and later systematically
cover up their crime,
move bodies from one grave to another.
And the existence of people who will
go to another country,
where the chaos is so great
that they can, with no consequences,
kill a human being.
God, if I could live for just another day
to see the sun over Bosnia for one more time.
Can the bird find its nest,
can the refugee find happiness?
God, can I live for just another day?
What can comfort me tonight?
Another dawn will break without her smile.
Can the bird find its nest,
can the refugee find happiness?
God, can I live for just another day?
I would come back home, walk up to her door.
She still waits for me,
she will wait forever.
I would go back home, walk up to her door.
She's still waiting for me,
she'll wait for all eternity.
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