Death In The Eye

The citizens of Sarajevo, who at any moment could have been hit by a bullet fired by an unseen killer, in a situation which had become a way of life, are skeptical over the agreement. Necessary or not, they still zigzag across the dangerous spots. When asked about the latest developments by journalists, they just shrug and go on. ``I don't believe them. They'll shoot when they feel like it, and they'll stop when they want to,'' said an elderly citizen on TV, expressing the typical view of the citizens of Sarajevo.

But judging by UNPROFOR reports, the warring sides have, for some reason, decided to stick to the agreement. They have even agreed to set up mixed patrols which will help UNPROFOR in cleaning up the city of the rare rogue or uninformed snipers. No one can explain why the Serb and Muslim snipers have suddenly become so cooperative, why it means so much to them to abandon this form of terrorism and why they didn't do so earlier, since they obviously could have. Some say that this means that both sides are now satisfied, in principle, with the division of the city into a ``Serb'' and ``Muslim'' Sarajevo; others claim that the main reason lies in the diplomatic skills of UNPROFOR Commander General Michael Rose, which were helped along with the recently introduced practice of returning fire fiercely and precisely.

The war in Sarajevo started on April 5, 1992 with sniper hits at the people who had gathered in front of the Holiday Inn Hotel and demanded peace. The city was first shelled from the surrounding hills after a top Bosnian Serb official's bodyguard was arrested. He had been discovered in the hotel cellar with a rifle and a sniperscope. From then and to the present day, snipers have played an important role in the horror which followed, but their role was more political than military.

The goal was a dual one: on the one hand it was necessary to instill panic in the hearts of people who until then had been determined to live together, to create bitterness and suspicion of one's neighbors; while on the other hand, the alleged or real existence of enemy snipers was an inexhaustible source of excuses for all sorts of shady actionsfrom looting to the demolition of sacral buildings. When Zeljko Raznatovic Arkan's men ``liberated'' Bijeljina and were filmed executing people with a bullet in the head, the official explanation was that they were sniper victims. In Sarajevo criminals like Cela, Juka, and Cace broke into houses, looted, arrested and killed, and if the neighbors dared protest, they were told that a sniper had been discovered in the flat. Radovan Karadzic said on several occasions that there wasn't a single sniper in the Serbian army, and at the same time, used snipers as an excuse for destroying whole blocks of Sarajevoallegedly there was no other way of eliminating enemy snipers.

Official spokesmen of the Bosnian Army were equally insincere on this issue. According to them, there had never been any snipers in the BH Army, only antisniper units. Both sides admitted to the possibility that a maniac or renegade had crawled into a loft and was shooting at everything that movedchildren, women, the elderly and sometimes pigeons, in order to show that ``even a bird couldn't get past him.'' All denied vehemently any links with such maniacs. The efficiency with which the agreement has been carried throughthe number of sniper ``incidents'' was halved after just 24 hours, and then continued to drop, points to the fact that the ``maniacs'' were very much a part of the system.

What makes a man wound a tenyearold girl on purpose, and then cold bloodedly shoot for hours at all who try to help her? The author of this text talked, on various occasions with several men who were snipers at the front. None of them admitted to having shot at civilians but they all said that ``others'' (not ``our side'' but ``their side'') had done so often. ``When you look through the sniperscope, it's like looking through a camera, and somehow you're apart from the situation, even though you can see everything clearly,'' said one of them, a thirtyyearold called Goran, who didn't want his surname published. Like the others, Goran complains that it's dangerous and unpopular to be a snipereven among war comrades. ``The fighters from the trenches look down on you, like you're less brave than they are. And it's not like that,'' he said. ``It's more difficult and dangerous to be a sniper than it is to be in a trench. If you're discovered you're finished. And I'd rather not tell you what happens to snipers who get caught. It's not true that we received bounty `per head', as people say. We had the same salary as the ordinary soldiers.''

Before the war Goran lived in Zadar, and owned a boutique. At the start of the summer in 1991, during the disturbances in which most of the Serbowned shops were destroyed, his boutique was burned down. ``I barely managed to get away alive. And of all that I had, this is all I saved,'' he said, showing us an expensive leather jacket from which he never parts. ``Until then I'd lived nicely and associated normally with the Croats, but then I realized that they were fascists and that one must fight them with a gun in hand.''

When he joined a volunteer unit he was given a sniper, and to his surprise he realized that he was good at it. ``I was in Borovo Selo and in Kordun, later in Foca and Grbavica. I was never a coward, like some who spent their time sitting on hilltops and later boasted that they were heros. I always went into the city, into the fire.'' Goran said that he's had enough of everything and has sort of come to terms with himself (he works as a waiter in a Belgrade cafe) and that it's the turn of others to fight. He sleeps peacefully and has no problems with his conscience, because, as he claims, he hasn't done anything he should be ashamed of.

However, a trigger isn't a camera button. One of Goran's colleagues from Grbavica, a Belgrader, can't sleep nights unless he turns the radio or tv on ``full blast''the silence makes him nervous. Journalist Zeljko Vukovic described a similar case of ``flashback'' memories in his book ``The Killing of Sarajevo'': ``I don't remember when I started to wake up. One night I just saw all those unfortunate people I had shot at, wounded, killed. I woke up drenched. I'm afraid to sleep. As soon as I close my eyes, the pictures come. I feel as if those unfortunate people are acquaintances. I know their every detail. There are many of them, too many...'', said Vukovic's collocutor, a 23yearold youth who nearly went out of his mind after two and a half months' duty as a sniper. ``If peace came tomorrow, d'you know what I'd do? I would go and find the people I had shot at. I'd recognize them easily. I'd introduce myself. Seriously. I'd say: I shot at you, here, punish me. That would save me, even if they killed me. Do you understand... I'm not normal anymore. I'm a guest in my own life.''

Those whose bodies crossed a sniperscope's field of fire, won't find any comfort in an apology, at least not in this world. The agreement signed at Sarajevo airport has enabled people to breathe a little more easily, at least for the moment, but it has also given the anonymous killers time to merge into the crowd. Of all the war criminals in the former Yugoslavia, they have the greatest chance of getting away without being punished.

Zastava

``Zastava'' of Kragujevac products are used mostly in the former Yugoslaviasemiautomatic rifles M76 caliber 7.9mm and the newer M91 caliber 7.6mm are special sniper models, even though a large number of imported snipers are to be found on the battlefields. Recently ``Zastava'' announced proudly that it had a new product in this field: a sniper rifle with a longrange caliber 12.7mm, which was efficient with targets size 2 x 2 meters even from a distance of 1,800 meters.