Dispatches: A Sniper’s Tale

From his perch overlooking Sarajevo’s downtown, a Bosnian Serb sniper named Pipo watches people strolling the streets he thinks of as his. He likes to picture the streets the way they were before the cease-fire two weeks ago: fearful, deserted. “Everyone likes peace except me,” he says. “I like the war.”

Pipo claims his bullets have felled 325 people. He has become comfortable in war, and knows that peace will bring him uncertainty — or worse. “I don’t think we snipers will survive the peace,” he says. “We have killed too many, and it is a small country. Not only will there be the revenge of the families, but our own army will not want us around. We know too much. We did too much.” He claims that other snipers have gone to South Africa, where “they are hiring men like us.”

At 25, the former javelin thrower, a hulking 6 ft. 3 in., fears that his life is already lost. Late one night in his two-bedroom apartment — strewn with war booty, weapons and the ransacked belongings of the previous tenants, a displaced Muslim family — he wrestles with the idea of peace. “All I know how to do is kill,” he says. “I am not sure I am normal anymore. I can talk to people, but if someone pushes me, I will kill them … In the beginning I was able to put my fear aside, and it was good. Then with the killings I was able to put my emotions aside, and it was good. But now they are gone.”

Before the war, Pipo and a Muslim were partners in a restaurant. He joined the Bosnian Serb army but did not begin to hate until, he says, his mother was jailed and beaten by Muslims. “When she got out she wouldn’t talk about it. That’s when I picked up a gun and began shooting Muslims. I hate them all.” His anger and keen marksmanship drew him to a sniper unit. An officer taught Pipo a useful mental trick for his new line of work: “Don’t let the faces follow you.”

No, he says, not one of the faces he held in his sights was a civilian. But he makes the denial with a flat voice, eyes downcast. Any admission of firing at civilians could get him arrested and charged with a war crime. “I have no feelings for what I do,” he says. “I went to see my mother in Belgrade, and she hugged me and I felt nothing.” Catching the irony — that all the killing has been done to avenge a mother he can no longer feel for — he struggles to explain: “It is our choice to go to hell … I have no life anymore. I go from day to day, but nothing means anything. I don’t want a wife and children. I don’t want to think. I don’t want …” His hand sweeps the room; the chaotic debris indicates that he connects to very little. A wall calendar is still open to October 1992 — the month the apartment’s original inhabitants fled. Their delicate demitasse cups lie shattered under a carelessly tossed antitank missile.

Pipo asks a visitor if a note and some cigarettes could be taken to someone still in Sarajevo. He confides that his friend is a Muslim and a sniper on the other side. “Would you kill him if you got him in your sights?” he is asked. “Why not?” he replies.