An analysis of the very revealing findings of the Sarajevo-based Research and Documentation Centre concerning the death toll of the Bosnian war, republished from the Greater Surbiton weblog.

Earlier this year, the Research and Documentation Centre (RDC) headed by Mirsad Tokaca in Sarajevo released the semi-final results of its extensive investigation into the death-toll of the Bosnian war. The investigation, the most well documented to date, gives a body count of 97,207 war-dead in Bosnia-Hercegovina in the period 1991-95. This number is then broken down into different categories and combinations thereof: year, month, region, municipality, nationality, gender, age and status (i.e. civilian or military), with a more detailed treatment of the Srebrenica municipality. The figures tell us much about the character of the Bosnian war.

1. Do the RDC’s figures vindicate the genocide deniers ? Since the figure of 97,207 is about half of the figure of 200,000 Bosnian war-deaths that has been commonly accepted since the Bosnian war, and since it has been clear for a couple of years that the RDC’s research would produce roughly such a figure, its work has for some time now been eagerly seized upon by Bosnia genocide deniers and apologists such as Ed Herman, David Peterson and Nebojsa Malic as supposed ‘vindication’ for their position. This being the case, and since the RDC’s findings are broadly supported by those of a second scientific investigation, carried out by Ewa Tabeau and Jakub Bijak of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, we hope that they can now be taken by all sides in the debate as an essentially reliable basis from which to draw conclusions about the Bosnian war.

For reasons that should not require too much explanation, a body count will almost always give a lower death-toll than a scholarly estimate of total deaths. This is because a body count only takes into account documented deaths, rather than all the deaths that are likely to have occurred but for which documentary proof is lacking. In the words of Philip Verwimp, an expert who has evaluated the RDC’s figures: ‘Many consider the number of 97,207 as the overall total of victims of the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia, which is not correct. For several reasons, this number should be seen as an approximation of a minimum and not as a complete total.’ In the case of the RDC’s study, the discrepancy is not likely to be so great, because years of research have eliminated most of the ‘unknowns’. Tokaca has stated that the final figure for the Bosnian death-toll may rise by up to 10,000 as research continues. Still, for purposes of comparison, the figure of 97,207 falls into the same category as the figure for Iraqi dead provided by the Iraq Body Count website (approximately 80-87,000 civilian dead at the time of writing) rather than the figure of over 600,000 Iraqi dead in the study appearing in the Lancet last year (NB my purpose here is not to compare death tolls, but to compare methods of their evaluation).

The RDC’s figure of 97,207 includes only those definitely documented victims defined as direct casualties of war in the strictest sense. It does not include indirect victims of war: e.g. those who died of hunger, exposure or lack of medicine as a result of war conditions; those killed by incompetent use of weapons; military suicides; civilian and military accidental deaths; victims of armed quarrels; etc. The total number of Bosnians who died as a result of the war is therefore substantially higher than the RDC’s figure, and the proportion of civilian fatalities greater.

This should be borne in mind when considering the arguments of deniers from the Chomsky-Pilger school, who will happily treat the figure of 97,207 as though it were equivalent to their own favourite estimates for the victims of ‘Western imperialist’ crimes, e.g. 200,000 East Timorese victims of Indonesia, two million or more Indochinese victims of the US, one million Iraqi dead in the current war, etc. For example, Noam Chomsky’s oft-cited figure of 200,000 East Timorese deaths resulting from the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, a figure broadly supported by John Pilger, apparently includes deaths from famine and disease or ‘enforced starvation’ (to use Pilger’s words) - such deaths were not included in the RDC’s study of the Bosnian war-dead.

Any evaluation of the death-toll of a genocide should, indeed, take into account those killed by disease, hunger and exposure as a result of conditions deliberately imposed by the perpetrators for that purpose. Thus, for example, the figure of six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust includes those, such as Anne Frank, who died from disease, hunger or exposure as the result of Nazi-imposed conditions in the camps and ghettos. The figure of 97,207 Bosnian war-dead does not therefore include all the civilian victims of the genocide.

I make these observations by way of a preliminary, in response to those who enjoy playing the numbers game with regard to the Bosnian genocide. Whether 100,000 or 200,000 died in the Bosnian war should have no bearing on our recognition that this was a terrible crime, or on whether we consider what happened to have been genocide. But if numbers cannot be used to confirm or deny a genocide, they can tell us a lot about when, where and how most of the killing occurred, who were the principal perpetrators and who were the principal victims.

2. What was the national composition of the victims ? The most striking fact to emerge from the study is that 83.33% of civilian deaths in the Bosnian war were Muslims (Bosniaks). In total, 33,070 Muslim civilians were killed, as against 4,075 Serb civilians, 2,163 Croat civilians and 376 civilians of other nationalities. Muslims were the only one of the three principal Bosnian nationalities who suffered higher civilian than military casualties. Thus, 51.64% of the Muslim dead were civilians, as against 27.77% of the Croat dead and 16.36% of the Serb dead.

The RDC has not compiled data on who carried out the killing. Nevertheless, it is indicative that in both absolute and proportional terms, more Serb civilians were killed in the Sarajevo region than in any of the other six regions of Bosnia-Hercegovina that the study considered. Thus, in the Sarajevo region, 1,091 Serb civilians and 2,927 Serb soldiers were killed. We can compare this to the region of Podrinje, in one part of which Naser Oric, a Bosnian commander frequently singled out as particularly guilty of war-crimes against Serb civilians, was active. In Podrinje, a total of 849 Serb civilians and 4,711 Serb soldiers were killed. Muslim, Serb and Croat civilian casualties in Sarajevo all peaked in the same year - 1992 - and fell in subsequent years. Civilian casualties were highest in Sarajevo in the early stages of the war, the spring and summer of 1992. Due allowance must be taken for the Serb civilians killed by Bosnian Army or Croat soldiers, in particular by rogue commanders such as Musan Topalovic-Caco, but the conclusion is inescapable: the single largest killer of Serb civilians during the war was the Serb siege of Sarajevo.

Taking into account all those Serb civilians killed by Serb forces in Sarajevo and elsewhere (such as in the Tuzla massacre of 25 May 1995), as well as those killed by Croat forces, then the number of Serb civilians killed by Bosnian Muslims during the whole of the Bosnian war across the whole of Bosnia cannot have been very different from the number of American civilians killed by fundamentalist Muslims on the single day of 11 September 2001. Which should serve as a salutary lesson for those who like to equate the moderate Muslims of Bosnia with the fundamentalists of al-Qa’ida. The relatively low Serb civilian death-toll in the Bosnian war is testimony to the fact that, while the Bosnian Army was sometimes guilty of war crimes, it did not pursue a policy of deliberately targeting Serb or

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