Deception or, as Mr. Tokača would call it, the “Bosnian Atlas”

(original text: http://www.srebrenica-project.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=80:deception-or-as-mr-tokaa-would-call-it-the-bosnian-atlas&catid=12:2009-01-25-02-01-02)

Given modern technology most things today are practically impossible to hide. There are still those with such vested interests that they are scarcely in a position to discuss wartime suffering in a frank and open manner, and even if they were so inclined their mentors would never allow them to do so in a professional and honest way. As a result, we still cannot take assertions made by Mr. Mirsad Tokača of the Sarajevo-based Research and Documentation Center at face value. We must always keep checking and rechecking whether Mr. Tokača is really prepared to apply the same standards to all victims of the recent war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

If you start with a critical review of his treatment of religious facilities, you will notice on their site, http://www.idc.org.ba/, a significant discrepancy between his treatment of Orthodox churches and mosques. Almost as a rule, churches are hidden, masked, scarcely noticeable. That might be the fault of Mr. Tokača’s technical assistants, for all we know. But what definitely discredits him and seriously calls into question his moral values is the number of destroyed Serbian temples that he is prepared to list. For the author of this widely touted reference work on wartime crimes, no more than 26 Orthodox churches were razed in all of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Just based on the data available in Prof. Slobodan Mileusnić’s documented study “Spiritual genocide,” it is clear that over 150 Serbian churches were destroyed and several hundred were damaged. That suggests that in Mr. Tokača’s Atlas something is seriously awry.

This approach is particularly patent in the politically crucial Drina River valley where the region of Srebrenica happens to be located. In order to preserve the last propaganda bastion of the Sarajevo political “elite”, Mr.  Tokača is compelled to take his falsehoods and disinformation to the highest practicable level. Not only does he disingenuously report damage to just one Orthodox church and one Roman Catholic chapel in  Srebrenica, but he goes a step further in skillfully and perfidiously manipulating his presentation of data about victims. Today, given the omnipresence of technology, the number of those who would be reckless enough to do that would be very small indeed. 

Where the Atlas refers to incidents involving the murder of innocents, or the devastation of their villages, if the victims were Serbs they are largely ignored. However, if they happen to be Moslem, Mr. Tokača is very meticulous in identifying each victim and describing each incident, even if it involves no more than one person. From our standpoint, there is nothing whatsoever wrong with that. But a cursory review of Mr. Tokača’s Atlas will reveal that he has left out dozens of devastated Serbian villages and that he nonchalantly ignores hundreds of Serbian victims. For him, the murder of old people and children, ranging in age from 15 to 90, and the total destruction of Serbian villages such as Ratkovići, Podravanje, Krnjići, Andrići, Zalazje, Brana Bačići, Obadi, Bukova Glava, Gaj, Karno, Medje, Brežani, Špat, Božići, etc. does not constitute an incident, in spite of the fact that in those villages some of the victims, who were approaching the ninth decade of their lives, were murdered, or burned to death, in their own homes. 

To make matters worse, there are some who are prepared to do anything in order to realize their goal, which is to maintain the Srebrenica myth at any price.

Yet, side by side with the invisible Serbian victims, in the category of incidents and crimes which are recognized as such by Mr. Tokača and his associates there are some victims who appear to have been killed twice in different locations and who therefore have earned the right to be inscribed in the Atlas twice as victims of the war. They are Moslem, of course. One of them, Omerović Selmo, born in Bratunac, according to Mr. Tokača was killed three times at three different locations.

To avoid any possibility of misunderstanding, we are referring to the locality of Glogova where, in his incidents category, Mr. Tokača presents data about Moslem victims who lost their lives in and around that village.

Before going further, we should remind Mr. Tokača and his staff that the victims of Glogova did not all belong to just one ethnic group. On November 6, 1992, Bosnian Moslem forces under the command of Naser Orić staged an attack on Serbian positions in the area of Glodjansko brdo. In that attack, they took 52 Bosnian Serb soldiers prisoner. From that point on,  pursuant to the relevant provisions of the Geneva convention those soldiers acquired the status of protected persons, exactly the same as captured Bosniam Moslem soldiers in July of 1995. These Bosnian Serb prisoners of war were liquidated on the spot: they were shackled and tortured and then they were killed in the most brutal fashion, using dull objects and knives, with body part amputations. In February of 1993 the remains of 42 massacred Bosnian Serb soldiers were found in 7 mass graves. Post mortem examinations were condcuted by Dr. Zoran Stanković of the Military Medical Academy in Belgrade. The bodies of ten of the prisoners taken by Naser Orić’s forces have not been found to this day.

In the section of the Atlas which refers to Glogova there is no mention of these war crimes victims, whose status as such is unchallangeable even by Mr. Tokača’s standards. Why?

For each incident which, following the monoethnic principle, is listed in this section of the Atlas, Mr. Tokača lists the victims. According to these parameters, the total number of victims, with first and last names, for the locality of Glogova is 101 [see Annex 1 – 6] Of that number, the names of 35 persons are listed twice in relation to at least two locations [multiple entries are marked in yellow on the list], while one person [marked in red] is listed as having died in three different locations. That suggests that in Glogova there are persons who died two, or even three, times. Why is Mr. Tokača risking the discreditation of his work by such shabby practices? Who gains from such a distorted and onesided misrepresentation of the victims, and of the Bosnian conflict as a whole?

How to explain the Atlas’ silence about the Serbian soldiers killed at Glogova in 1992, whose status as victims is not disputed even by the Hague tribunal? For Mr. Tokača, that incident never occurred and in his Atlas Serbian victims are unwelcome, particularly if they happen to be from the general area of Srebrenica where the thesis which holds that Moslems were victims and Serbs perpetrators must be tenaciously upheld. Within the confines of that approach, it is natural that there is no room for Serbian victims. If their existence were to be admitted, responsibility for crimes would have to be shared by the Moslem side, an outcome that is certainly abhorrent to those who are committed to blaming only one side in the conflict, in this case the Serbs.

Figuring that nobody would take the trouble and spend the time to critically examine his material, Mr. Tokača has frivolously undermined his and his institution’s reputation. For those who are studying these issues, he is not such a great mystery, after all, for he is only the tip of the iceberg.  The real threat to the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina are those who are unseen by the public and who are, metaphorically, that part of the iceberg which is submerged under water. They are the ones who, from the safety of the murky waters which shelter them, decide what is true and what is false, who is right and who is wrong, who are the victims and who are the perpetrators, what is just and what is unjust. It is they who are pulling the strings in Bosnia and Herzegovina, while Mr. Tokača and others like him only have the menial task of carrying out decisions they made and formulated beforehand, in this case in the form of the Bosnian Crime Atlas.

Table of Muslim victims from "Bosnian Atlas", showing re-used names in multiple different incidents, for purpose of increasing number of Muslim victims & anti-Serb propaganda:

http://www.srebrenica-project.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=80:deception-or-as-mr-tokaa-would-call-it-the-bosnian-atlas&catid=12:2009-01-25-02-01-02

AND BY THE WAY, MR. TOKAČA, HAVE YOU HEARD OF KRAVICA?

Orthodox Christmas is a good time to keep refreshing Mr. Mirsad Tokača’s memory of war crimes.[1] On January 7, 1993, armed forces of Bosnia and Herzegovina from Srebrenica, under the command of brigadier Naser Orić, attacked and devastated the Serbian village of Kravica, about 10 km from Bratunac. The human cost of the attack (or shall we call it „incident“ in deferrence to the terminology preferred by Mr. Tokača in his Bosnian crime Atlas?) was at a minimum 34 persons, if we exclude rumors and confine ourselves just to the bodies which were subsequently located and on which a proper autopsy was conducted on March 18, 1993.

A careful perusal of Mr. Tokača’s Atlas does not disclose any reference to this particular crime which, later, became a point in controversy during the trial of Naser Orić before ICTY at the Hague. The attack on Kravica, however, with all its attendant mayhem and destruction, should have been hard to miss for a Defence ministry official like Mirsad Tokača who, only three months earlier, on September 4, 1992, was appointed by the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo to the post of secretary to the State commission for the collection of evidence of war crimes.  It is specified in par. 3 of the Minutes of the relevant Presidency meeting that the Institute under which Mr. Tokača’s Commission was to be operating would have no „political or propaganda“ goals and that the Commission would keep the Institute abreast of its findings by means of regular reports.

The natural reading of the Presidency’s instructions is that Mr Tokača’s wartime Commission, in much the same way as his present-day Research and Documentation Center, was given a mandate to deal neutrally with all war crimes, no matter by whom and against whom committed. Such an unbiased approach should have been only fitting for a government in good standing with the international community which, theoretically at least, the Sarajevo Presidency at that time was. It was the political thesis of that government, one of whose civil servants was Mr. Tokača [2], that it was the only legitimate authority in Bosnia and Herzegovina, that it was democratic and multicultural, and that it represented, on a basis of equality, the interests of all constituent groups in the country.

Did Mr. Tokača’s Commission for the collection of evidence of war crimes do any investigations following the attack that the Presidency’s army conducted on the village of Kravica on January 7, 1993? If not, why not?

But let bygones be bygones. We can move forward, and we do not have to talk about Mr. Tokača’s involvement with Kravica, or lack of it, then. We can talk about it now.

In his new incarnation, as director of the Research and Documentation Center in Sarajevo, an institution which has acquired a considerable reputation as an objective data collection center, Mr. Tokača has, we are afraid, much less room for creative maneouvering than he used to have during the war. He is no longer working for some “Presidency” with dubious credentials, he is now accountable to the general public and to the judicial institutions where he often gives evidence as an expert witness and which rely enormously on the accuracy of his data. His performance now does not affect only his own and his institution’s credibility. By failing to meet professional standards, he also risks severly disappointing his distinguished sponsors, the Foreign Ministry of the Kingdom of Norway and the Swedish International Development Agency, to mention just a few.

So it is a very important issue how in his Bosnian war crimes atlas [3] Mr. Tokača treats the attack on Kravica by Bosnian Moslem forces which occurred on January 7, 1993, and the subsequent massacre of its inhabitants who did not manage to flee. That is a litmus test of his objectivity and neutrality in relation to the victims of the recent war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, regardless of  their ethnicity. The display of such virtues may have been just too much to expect from a Defence ministry official turned war crimes investigator in the midst of a bitter ethnic conflict, but it is properly to be expected of him now. If that expectation exceeds his capacities, he should tender his resignation and let a better man take over.

A careful review of the relevant portion of the Bosnian war crimes atlas leads one to the disappointing conclusion that, as far as Mr. Tokača is concerned – or is willing to admit – nothing unusual whatsoever happened in Kravica on January 7, 1993. Strangely, Mr. Tokača is not similarly uninformed about events in the neighbouring village of Glogova, which occurred in roughly the same time period, [4]  when a number of Moslem inhabitants were massacred in the course of a Serbian attack. And as  surprisingly, he seems to be very well briefed on events in the neighbourhood which occurred in July of 1995. Two examples should suffice.

An icon on his Google map leads us to the village of Sandići, which is walking distance from Kravica on the Bratunac – Konjević Polje road. The entry is dated July 16, 1995, and it contains the following information: “Village of Sandići. Description: According to the allegations of a witness, ‘when the convoy with refugees from Srebrenica reached the village of Sandići, I saw on a pile the bodies of executed Moslem civilians. There were about 200 of them. Later, I heard that the corpses were incinerated.’”

The alleged incident may or may not have happened, but by all accounts the supporting evidence for it is flimsy indeed. How did the witness, who presumably was riding on a bus which drove by, know that the victims were civilians? What opportunity did she have to ascertain their number? What is the practical purpose of the hearsay report that the bodies were later burned, [5] except for its emotional shock value? [6]

The second item has to do with the Kravica Agricultural Cooperative, where on July 13, 1995, several hundred Moslem prisoners were killed by Serb guards. What Mr. Tokača offers in terms of back up evidence for this allegation are three indictments, two current ones against defendants facing trial before the Bosnia and Herzegovina War Crimes Tribunal in Sarajevo, and one against General Krstic a decade ago. An indictment is not the same as a judgment, which usually is announced after a trial and after a review of the evidence. We do not dispute that this terrible crime happened and we agree that those who were involved in its commission must be punished. But basic honesty and respect for users of the Atlas require that it be duly noted that this is not yet a judicially settled fact. The crime may be undisputed, but its dimensions, the culpability of the individual accused,  and its place within the context of the Srebrenica massacre are all very much open and controversial issues.

Mr. Tokača’s portrayal of wartime events in and around Kravica, sloppy and essentially unprofessional as it is, at least demonstrates that when he was creating his Atlas, victims from this village and its environs were very much on his mind. That makes his omissions with regard to Serbian victims of the war in exactly the same area, specifically in Kravica and its surrounding hamlets, doubly scandalous.

Mr. Tokača may, of course, offer the justification that in the few cases which dealt with Kravica – one, to be exact, in the prosecution of Naser Oric – the court did not draw any legal conclusions about the number and identity of the victims. That is true, but the prosecution did not allege any so the chamber had nothing in this domain to rule on. [7]  While that may have been a handicap for the chamber, it should not have been for Mr. Tokača, as evidenced by the rather liberal standards for the admission of evidence that he practices in cases involving Moslem victims, of which the two from Sandici should serve as sufficient examples. The appended dossier of the Ministry of the Interior of the Republic of Srpska, containing the findings of the post-attack investigation that they conducted in Kravica, including detailed forensic reports for 34 individuals, should constitutes evidence that would be admissible according to a much higher standard.

Unlike ICTY prosecution spokesperson, Florence Hartmann, who  drew a sophistical distinction between military personnel and civilian victims in Kravica in order to downgrade the number of innocent victims resulting from the attack, [8] Mr. Tokača is not bound by that distinction because he puts it as his mission to record both categories of war related losses. But even if he were to choose Ms. Hartmann’s lower figure of 13 “innocent civilians” for the Christmas massacre in the village of Kravice that the ICTY Office of the Prosecutor accepts as such, why aren’t those 13 Serbian victims listed in his Atlas? [9]

It is sad that what once appeared to be a promising project, with great potential to shed an objective new light on wartime events in Bosnia and Herzegovina, now seems to have degenerated into a typical Balkan hatchet job.

(Scanned forensic reports of Serb victims in village Kravica, in Serbian language, PDF):

Interior ministry dossier on the attack on the village of Kravica [PDF - 16.0 MB]