Afrasianet - Jamal Wakim - The "Sarajevo Safari" case reflects the extent of the West's decadence, as evidenced by the Epstein scandal, which expresses the extent to which the moral decay of the influential has reached. 

The case of what became known in the media as the "Sarajevo Safari" hunting came as a shock to European and international public opinion, not only because it related to war crimes committed against civilians during the siege of Sarajevo between 1992 and 1996, but also because it  was committed by "wealthy European and Western people" who paid tens of thousands of dollars for "human hunting" by sniping and shooting Bosnian civilians from Serbian sniper positions.

Although investigations are still ongoing, the mere revelation of this horrific crime linked to the fulfillment of hidden instinctive desires exposes the deep and structural flaw in the Western value system when individuals belonging to the wealthy, political, and even intellectual classes of Europe murder innocent people simply for the sake of entertaining themselves, amounting to crimes against humanity. 

The danger lies in the fact that the case was not individual, but was committed by a large segment of Western elites, reflecting the extent of the distortion of the value system of these elites. 

It is worth mentioning that this scandal, which is linked to European elites, is in addition to another scandal whose threads are still unfolding, but this time in the United States, known as the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, in which the spectrum of presidents, senators, politicians and artists from Britain and Europe have been implicated, where they have participated in parties and networks in which minors were sexually exploited through a cross-border network set up by Epstein.

It is worth mentioning that this scandal is not related to short-term practices, but has been going on for decades, which means that it was legally and media-protected from the globalized American system. 

The danger of these two issues lies in the fact that they reflect the extent of the moral decay that the elites in the West have reached, which is an indication of the imminent collapse of this West, led by the United States, especially if one believes what Edward Gibbon said two and a half centuries ago when he talked about the factors that led to the collapse of the Roman Empire, including what he called the corruption of morality related to the immersion in the indulgence of pleasures and pleasures, which is an echo of what Ibn Khaldun talked about four years before Edward Gibbon Centuries when the decay and collapse of states were attributed to the corruption of the last generation ruling in these countries. 

"Safari Sarajevo"

A few years ago, a documentary entitled "Sarajevo Safari" was screened, which included testimonies from former Yugoslav civil war officers and participants who admitted that wealthy Europeans had paid £70,000 to be allowed to shoot and kill Bosnian Muslim civilians of all ages, including the elderly, women and children, in order to gain the pleasure of hunting.

As a result of these testimonies, the Bosnian, Italian and French judiciary opened an investigation into this protracted crime, shocking the public opinion with the identity of some of those who participated in these crimes, who are European businessmen, according to preliminary investigations, with estimates that the investigations may reach prominent Western European political elites. 

This pattern of deviant behavior exposes the fact that some European and Western elites have practiced murder as a sport for elites for entertainment, which raises another dimension of the issue related to the racist values of the West.

The victims in this case were Bosnian Muslims, which raises the question of whether European elites would have carried out these killings if the victims were not Bosnians (i.e., non-Western Europeans) or if they were not Balkan Muslims.! 

This crime itself proves that the West still clings to its racist colonial traditions against non-Western peoples, which led to the extermination of hundreds of millions of Africans, Indians and indigenous peoples in the Americas and Australia.

The "Sarajevo Safari" is a contemporary version of the safari of British and French political and military leaders, who ended up taking pictures over the bodies of their dead and then hanging them in their homes and offices to boast about their "achievements."

Museums have been set up in former colonial countries to display these images, and even a museum of the skulls of tens of thousands of people killed in different eras while resisting French colonialism is currently in Paris. 

The case of the "Sarajevo Safari" reflects the system of values that Western elites believe in, which does not value the lives of non-Westerners, which makes us understand the massacres committed by Western governments during the colonial period, and also committed during the past three decades, whether in Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan or other Arab and African countries. 

The Epstein Files

If the "Sarajevo Safari" case reflects the search of Western elites for satisfying their killing instinct, another case is the Jeffrey Epstein case, which reflects the structural relationship between the ruling political elites in the United States and the West in general and moral and human decay.

The question that must be asked in this context is: what drives elites who have all kinds of natural sexual pleasures to rush to engage in homosexuality with underage girls and even underage boys, when these elites condemn this type of practice that takes place in non-European and non-Western countries? 

As for the Jeffrey Epstein files, the case was exposed nearly two decades ago and its tails and secrets are still unfolding to this day, making it a crime as protracted as the case of the "Sarajevo Safari".

This proves that the judiciary and the media were complicit in providing an environment that protects the perpetrators of these acts from accountability, whether in the case of human hunting or the sexual exploitation of minors, and this confirms that the two crimes do not represent an exception but rather reflect a pattern of behavior and values that are an integral part of the Western ruling system. 

Both cases are the tip of the iceberg of an entrenched and cohesive corrupt system ruled by Western elites, whose ranks are rife with economic corruption, tax evasion, bribery among politicians, and the creation of wealth through shady deals, some of which have come to light through the Swiss-Leaks and Panama Leaks scandals, sexual corruption, one of which is the Epstein scandal, and violent criminality, which manifests itself not only in the Sarajevo Safari scandal, but also in private mercenary companies and assassinations of leaders in the Global South opponents of the West, sponsoring terrorist groups and supporting military coups in the countries of the Global South. 

Reasons for the dissolution of the West

We conclude that the "Sarajevo Safari" and "The Epstein Files" scandals do not constitute isolated scandals, but rather reflect behavior linked to the integrated moral, value, and behavioral structure of Western elites, in which wealth and power accumulate in the hands of a few that become out of the question, to the extent that they can turn the poor and vulnerable into material for experimentation for the purpose of obtaining entertainment linked to the satisfaction of distorted instinctive desires. 

If Ibn Khaldun in the 14th century and Edward Gibbon in the 18th century spoke of this phenomenon among elites, the American historian Charles Wright Mills was a pioneer in warning against elite corruption, especially in the United States in the 1950s.

Mills spoke about American elites and how they came to share power and money through closed networks, placing them above legal accountability. But what Mills spoke about would only have been revealed over the past two decades as a result of technological advances that have given the "poor and vulnerable" the opportunity to exercise control over elites and expose their perpetrations. 

The reasons why the West is morally collapsing are due to the abandonment of the religious and moral values that controlled the behavior of elites in previous eras, the transformation of capitalist liberalism into a commodity, in addition to the dominance of big corporations over the media and the creation of public opinion, which makes the elites immune from accountability. 

The Sarajevo Safari case is not only a major moral crime, but it also reflects the extent of the West's depravity, which is also reflected in the Epstein scandal, which expresses the extent to which the moral decay of the powerful has reached.

This proves that Europe, the United States, and the West in general, after centuries of claiming civilizational and moral leadership, have been exposed for their truth in that they are based on racist values based on hate speech against the other, which has been practiced for centuries and manifested in wars of extermination in North America, Africa, Asia, and Australia, and is still practiced today in the Arab and Muslim world.

But this reflects a moral decadence that is itself an indication of the imminent collapse of the West, just as the Roman Empire had fallen.

Professor of the History of International Relations at the Lebanese University