| Slobodan
was being a gracious host. Whenever we entered an exposed stretch
of territory, he would stop, listen like a terrier for signs of
trouble, and then sprint ahead, waving me on when he felt it was
safe.
It was the winter of 1993, the Bosnian War was in full throttle,
and Slobodan was taking me to his place of work, a ransacked apartment
in a bombed-out building on the front line around Sarajevo.
Slobodan was a Bosnian Serb sniper. Because he was off duty when
he showed me around, he was armed only with a pistol. Once we reached
his perch, though, he cheerfully pointed it at the Sarajevans running
across exposed ground a few hundred yards away. “I can shoot!”
he said in excited English. “Look, look, people, pistol, pop-pop!”
Then he calmed down and smiled. “No problem, no problem. No
shoot people. No, no shoot.”
What he actually was saying was that he didn’t shoot civilians,
only soldiers. This was improbable. I had been in Sarajevo long
enough to know that civilians were pretty much the only targets
of snipers like Slobodan. I had talked to people who were shot by
snipers, I saw a youth get shot near the Holiday Inn near the front
line, and I knew, as everyone did, that the cold weather and lack
of food in Bosnia’s besieged capital were not the worst killers.
It was the snipers you worried about the most, because they were
the ones firing all those bullets that found their way into so many
arms and legs and heads and hearts.
There is no prohibition on sniping at combatants during wartime,
but the intentional killing of civilians is a war crime. And it
was likely that Slobodan and his sniping pals were guilty of willful
killing—the legal term for that crime—many, many times
over.
It is well established in international humanitarian law that civilian
deaths that are incidentally, even if foreseeably, caused by justifiable
military operations are legal, subject to the principle of proportionality.
But if the killing of a civilian, a noncombatant, is intentional
or is not justified by military necessity, a war crime has been
committed. For example, the execution of hostages or prisoners would
be such a crime. In an international conflict, the violation could
be prosecuted as willful killing under the grave breaches provisions
of the four Geneva Conventions of 1949; in an internal conflict,
the crime could be prosecuted as murder under domestic law or under
Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.
The sorts of people covered under the willful killing and murder
rubrics include not just civilians in the ordinary sense of the
word, but prisoners of war, sick or wounded or surrendering soldiers,
and medical and religious personnel.
The crime of willful killing is an active component of international
law. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
has convicted defendants both of willful killing, where the crime
was committed in connection with the international part of the Balkan
wars, and of murder, when the crime took place during a non-international
phase of the fighting. Whatever the charge, a sniper like Slobodan
would likely be subject to multiple counts.
On the day he served so politely as my tour guide, I asked whether
he had shot anyone. “Today, no,” he replied. “Yesterday,
yes. Pop, pop!”
(See civilians, illegal targeting
of.)
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