BALKANS: Muslim Exaggerations Begin to Surface

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

SARAJEVO, Dec 6 2005 (IPS) - The death toll in the wars of the 1990s in Bosnia stands at about half the usually stated figure of 200,000, new research shows.

Head of the Sarajevo-based Investigation and Documentation Centre (IDC) Mirsad Tokaca told local media that his inquiries show that the number “stands at 93,000 dead now and that it should rise to 100,000 victims.”

Tokaca said this is “still an extremely high figure, but there’s a big difference; people cannot irresponsibly use inflated numbers for political purposes.”

IDC is a non-governmental organisation financed by the Norwegian government. It was founded in April 2004 to determine the exact number of victims of the 1992-95 war in Bosnia.

Tokaca expects his task to be finished by March 2006 when the exact number of Muslims, Serbs and Croats killed in the war will be published.

“Our research so far suggests that 70 percent of victims were Bosniaks (Muslims), some 25 percent Serbs, and five percent Croats,” Tokaca said. He plans to make the database available on the Internet, with an analysis of ethnic, regional, age, sex and time data.

IDC has engaged a multiethnic team of 12 experts to search the available military, civilian and other records and sources across Bosnia-Herzegovina.

“In societies still gravely burdened with ideology, where ratio and facts are often neglected, we have either the complete negation of war crimes, or inflated figures in order to show who suffered the most,” Tokaca said..

“The horrible and tragic character of war in Bosnia-Herzegovina does not change if we come up with the real number,” he said. “We do not need lies and myths about victims.”

One of the worst reported atrocities in the war was the execution of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serbs in July 1995, as their forces overran the United Nations protected enclave of Srebrenica.

Bosniaks call it the worst massacre in Europe after World War II. Serbs deny it happened, and say the story was an invention to paint a bad image of them.

The Memorial Centre at Potocari in Srebrenica contains thousands of graves said to be of the victims of the July 1995 massacre. But no Bosnia-Herzegovina official is willing to admit publicly that these are not just graves of victims.

Many of the graves are of Muslims killed in fighting around Srebrenica earlier in 1992. Their bodies were found in the post-war period, identified and buried together with the victims of the massacre, in order to make a more impressive number of those killed in the massacre.

The international community came down strongly on the Bosniak side through the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, when local Serbs backed by Belgrade and the regime of Slobodan Milosevic took to ethnic cleansing of non-Serbs. The Serbs held about 70 percent of what is now Bosnian territory at the time.

Atrocities against Bosniaks were widely presented in international media, and were also used for local propaganda purposes. As the more precise facts surface, no Bosnian official is willing to comment on the ICD findings.

“The use of exaggerated numbers was the habit on all sides involved in wars of disintegration of former Yugoslavia,” international law professor from Belgrade Vojin Dimitrijevic told IPS.

“It had the aim of proving who suffered the most and who should be punished for extreme crimes. The implication is also that one side has the right of revenge if it suffered more. What history needs are only the facts. The figures should not serve as basis for retribution, demand for damages or for pure propaganda purposes,” he added.

The claimed figure of 200,000 victims has become the basis for charges filed by the Bosnian government against Serbia before the International Court of Justice at The Hague in the Netherlands. The hearing is to start next February.

“The major problem with the abused numbers comes from the fact that no simultaneous census was held in all the nations – Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia and Kosovo – since the wars ended,” Srdjan Bogosavljevic, head of the leading research agency Strategic Marketing told IPS. “This leaves broad space for manipulation.”

The last census in former Yugoslavia was held in 1991, just before the outbreak of the wars. Bogosavljevic was head of the Federal Statistics Office at the time.

Croatia and Serbia held the first post-war censuses in 2002, though they were due in 2001. Bosnia and Kosovo, which is the southern province of Serbia dominated by Albanian Muslims, have not held any.

Natasa Kandic, head of the Humanitarian Law Centre in Belgrade, a prominent independent institution, believes the new research is of invaluable importance.

“There will be no chance for people in the region to live as merely good neighbours again if real figures are not established,” she told IPS. “Only then we’ll have the new bottomline to start all over again, because we do share the region, a common heritage and the future.”