Nineteen ninety-two outside besieged Sarajevo: a quiet moment on the heights from which Serbian artillery has been bombarding the city. Troopers play with dogs or clean their guns. In their midst, Radovan Karadžić — president of the breakaway Republika Srpska, psychoanalyst, poet, and commander responsible for actions that an international tribunal would later term genocide. He is in conversation with a lean, semi-bohemian type dressed rather inappropriately in a tight ’70s leather jacket and narrow blue jeans.

Aside from being well into his forties, the dandy resembles Andreas Baader at the Palestine Liberation Organization military training camp in Jordan, foppishly prancing about a martial scenery in which he clearly doesn’t belong. A soldier shows him the workings of the Browning machine gun he had been greasing. He offers his guest a try. Once instructed on the correct position, the excited visitor fires in the direction of the besieged city.

This footage appeared in the documentary Serbian Epics (1992) by Pawel Pawlikowski and Lazar Stojanovic, which formed part of the evidence exhibit at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Irrespective of the rights and wrongs of the war that destroyed the multiethnic socialist country, what these images appeared to show was despicable: a pathetic war tourist firing at civilians under siege to impress the big boys; an edgy artist exploiting misery to feed his narcissism and carefully constructed public image.