On April 13, 2021, a report titled: FINAL REPORT OF THE INDEPENDENT INTERNATIONAL COMMISSION INVESTIGATING THE SUFFERING OF THE SERBS IN SARAJEVO FROM 1991 TO 1995 was published. On the initiative of the National Assembly of the Republic of Srpska and the then President of the RS Milorad Dodik, the Government of the RS hired and financed a commission to prepare this report. The establishment of the commission for Sarajevo and Srebrenica was criticized by many experts even before, considering that the people who are in it are biased and that, in fact, they are working on disputing the facts about the events as well as the judged crimes before the courts. An open letter in which, among other things, they said that the formation of the commission to prepare this report "looks more like revisionism than a genuine effort to establish the truth" was signed by 31 international experts on conflicts in the former Yugoslavia.
According to the president of the commission, Rafael Izraeli, each of the six members of the commission wrote one part of the Report. The report consists of seven chapters, with the seventh chapter referring to general conclusions, and appendices. The report is mostly composed of chapters related to the historical context in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the role of "radical Islam", the role of the media, and the physical and psychological aspects of suffering. The fifth chapter refers to the suffering of Serbs in Sarajevo.
In the preparation of the report, the sources used for the most part were the statements received at the committee meetings, the statements of the Republican Center for Research on War, War Crimes and the Search for Missing Persons, based in Banja Luka, and other documentation of this center, part of media reports (selected journalists), interviews , certain literature. What is noticeable is that the verdicts of the International Tribunal in The Hague or of domestic and regional courts are almost never mentioned, as well as the tens of thousands of available relevant and credible documents that have passed all court evaluations and were used as evidence in trials, as well as many other sources and literature. Only in the cases before the ICTY against Stanislav Galić, Dragomir Milošević, Radovan Karadžić, Ratko Mladić, more than 40,000 pieces of evidence were used, on the basis of which verdicts were reached, while for Sarajevo, close to 10,000 pieces of evidence were used. On the other hand, slightly more than 200 sources were used in the report on the suffering of Serbs in Sarajevo. The report does not have a research methodology, with the exception of a short preamble and foreword in which, for the most part, there is a reference to the authors and consultants of the report.
We will refer to several segments from the Report that require additional clarification. During many years of my own research into the suffering of the Serbian population in Sarajevo at the Institute for Research of Crimes against Humanity and International Law of the University of Sarajevo, I thought that this Report would offer more detailed information as well as the identities of the killed, missing and murdered residents of Serbian nationality in Sarajevo. In the Report of 1250 pages, that segment is very narrowly treated. Data on the killed and wounded inhabitants of Sarajevo are listed in the 5th part of the Report on just a few pages where the death of 93 inhabitants of Serbian nationality in Sarajevo is described.
The members of the commission draw conclusions about the total number of those killed on the basis of earlier unreliable statements and lists, and conclude that 3,000 Serb civilians were killed in Sarajevo and 1,700 were wounded, explaining that most of them were not related to the war but to a criminal act, without explaining why the data on no court has confirmed so many killed. In presenting the final number, the authors of the Report rely on the statement of former policeman Sime Tuševljak, who said that more than 3,000 Serbian civilians were killed in Sarajevo during the war. According to Tuševljak's statement, around 700 Serbian civilians were killed by snipers in Grbavica alone during 1992 and 1993, while the total number of those killed in Grbavica, including VRS soldiers, is 1,600 (p. 720). The figure of the Institute for Research on the Suffering of Serbs in the 20th Century of 8,524 killed and missing Serbian civilians in Sarajevo is also given.
I must point out that earlier, such as in the period when the scheduled date of the oral hearing on the lawsuit of Bosnia and Herzegovina against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY), i.e. Serbia and Montenegro, was approaching, governmental and non-governmental organizations and individuals of the RS began to publish more frequently through public means of information and special publications lists of killed Serbs in Sarajevo. These lists were the subject of an analysis that I dealt with for several years, after which important results were reached. I believe that the authors of the Report knew what kind of lists they were dealing with and consciously avoided publishing the identities and circumstances of the suffering. Lists analyzed:
The list compiled by Marko Mikerević and published in the book "Sarajevo Deaths", Doboj, 2004, of a total of 894 victims;
List of non-governmental organization "ISTINA" - Association for Researching the Suffering of Serbian and Other Peoples in Sarajevo in the Period 1992-1995. under the name "Killed and missing Serbian civilians in the period from April 1992 to the end of 1995 in the area of Sarajevo" with 2452 victims;
The list of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the RS, published under the title "Preliminary list of Serbs killed in Sarajevo (1992-1995)" with 2,435 victims;
List of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the RS, published under the title "Preliminary list of Serbs missing in Sarajevo (1992-1995)" with 575 victims;
List of the Institute for Research on the Suffering of Serbs in the 20th Century with 8,524 victims.
The listed lists were compared, name by name, with a dozen different sources using the method of comparative analysis and content analysis.
My comparative analysis was done for each individual listed in the lists. Therefore, the analysis contains extensive text. Here, we will refer to the first and current list of the independent researcher Marko Mikerević published in the book "Sarajevo's Counted Deaths", which contains a total of 894 persons recorded as killed, dead, and missing Serbs in Sarajevo, and we will very briefly point out the most important part of the results. It was established that 407 people died, were killed or disappeared in other places, not in Sarajevo, while the list of those people states that they were killed in Sarajevo by "Muslim formations", "Caca and Caca's criminals", "Green Berets" and Fig.
Nine people died, were killed or disappeared in the area that at the time of the crime was under the control of the VRS, and in Mikerević's list it is stated that they were also killed in the part held by the ARBiH by "Muslim formations"; Then, 21 people are listed as killed, and the analysis proved that they are living people for whom we have addresses and contact numbers; 83 persons in the list are repeated twice, 11 persons are repeated three times, one person is repeated four times; etc. It was established that 655 persons from the aforementioned list have errors in the data according to various characteristics (died outside Sarajevo, died of natural causes, living persons, repetition of the same persons several times, a certain number are Croats, and they were registered as Serb victims, incorrect identification data, killed on the battlefields with the HVO or by the HVO in other places, etc.) Then, the names are deliberately repeated two or more times in the list, in order to show a higher number of victims than there is. By the way, the author did not make his list in alphabetical or alphabetical order, so that the mentioned inaccuracies would be more difficult to spot.
Manipulation of the numbers of victims is also visible in the Report on the example of Dobrovoljačka Street, where 32 people were killed, although it is common knowledge that six people died in that event. This was confirmed by the commander of the 2nd VO Milutin Kukanjac. During the period of the war and the difficult wartime circumstances in which Sarajevo was under siege, the participants in the murders at Kazan were prosecuted before the High Court in Sarajevo and sentenced to several years in prison. The Report states that in the first exhumation, the remains of 29 people were discovered, with the tendency for this number to be much higher in further exhumations. There are reliable data on this, where it was established that after several exhumations, the number of 23 people was determined, among whom several nationalities have been identified to date, of which 14 were Serbian victims.
The Report states the number of 211 "prisons and prison camps of the ARBiH in Sarajevo" for Serbs who they say "sprouted like mushrooms", but again does not state the identity but the numbers (98 killed - Dobrinja prison, 64 missing Serb inmates from " Viktor Bubanj", etc.). The description of the camps also describes those outside Sarajevo, such as Čelebić in Konjic, etc. In one part of the report, the Manjača, Trnopolje and Omarska camps are described. For the photo in which the inmate Fikret Alić was, it was stated that it became "a representative case of media distortion of facts and misuse of photos". It is further stated that there was actually a sick man in the picture and that the barbed wire was artificially placed in the foreground to hide the completely innocent mesh fence from the sheep that was under it:" (p. 474) It was further stated that Trnopolje was only a collection center for refugees seeking refuge and from there they could go wherever they wanted, and the barbed wire was not placed around the Bosnian Muslims at all, but around the cameraman and reporter (page 475 of the Report). In the end, the conclusion was drawn that the death camps did not exist on Serbian territory. In the Report, the authors do not state the truth, and facts that are generally known but also established and proven by court rulings. And the truth is that Trnopolje is one of the death camps through which about 30,000 inmates passed, who were tortured, beaten, along with cases of rape, where close to 100 inmates were killed. Several Serbs were charged with this camp, and the crimes in Trnopolje were also mentioned in the indictment against Slobodan Milošević. Even more infamous death camps were Manjača and Omarska. Next to Manjaca, one of the mass graves containing 540 corpses was found. The authors of the Report should be aware of the well-known facts, such as the fact that multi-year prison terms were imposed for these camps, namely: Milomir Stakić (40 years), Radoslav Brđanin (32 years), Nikola Kovačević (12 years), Miroslav Kvočka and others (63 years in total ). Some court proceedings are still ongoing.
I believe that the authors of the Report knew many of these facts and for that reason did not engage in presenting specific facts, data, names and surnames of the victims as well as the manner of their suffering. Based on this, it can be concluded that numerous intentional errors, inaccuracies and manipulation of facts were committed in the production. It is likely that an effort was made to shift the attention of the public from the numerous crimes, including the crime against peace and the crime of genocide, committed by the forces of the VRS together with the forces from the FRY to the defense forces (ARBiH). The authors of the Report, as well as the authors who are the bearers of the aforementioned lists that we have mentioned here, as well as the wider Serbian public, strive, when it comes to crimes against the Serbian people, to present the area of Sarajevo as a paradigm for the crimes committed in Srebrenica in July 1995. This is supported by the manipulation of the figure of 8,524 killed. In the reports, there are no names or surnames of how many Serbs died as members of the ARBiH, and it is known that it is not a negligible number, nor of those who were killed by fire by the VRS, which kept the city under siege for more than three years and by shells of all calibers (tank, mortar, howitzer, cannon), sniper, chemical and other heavy and lighter tools and weapons with enormous firepower "radiated" death, which could not recognize the victim by belonging to the people.
Therefore, the Report does not support the elucidation of events and the fate of the Serbs in Sarajevo. The report supports the "Serbian truth" and the quasi-scientific truth while manipulating the facts, in which everything that did not support it was consciously ignored.