Bosnian Serbs’ War Commissions: Fact-Seeking or Truth-Distorting?

Two controversial new commissions set up by the Republika Srpska government to examine wartime crimes in Srebrenica and Sarajevo are to hold their first meetings in late March despite widespread concerns raised by international experts, diplomats and Bosniak war victims' organisations that their aim is to rewrite history.

The two commissions have suitably weighty names - the Independent international Commission for Investigating the Sufferings of all Peoples in the Srebrenica Region in the Period from 1992 to 1995 and the Independent International Commission for Investigating the Sufferings of Serbs in Sarajevo in the Period from 1991 to 1995 - and are made up of a variety of academics from all over the world. How they will actually work, and what methodology they will use, is not yet known.

Milorad Kojic, the director of the government-funded Republika Srpska Centre for the Research of War, War Crimes and the Search for the Missing, insisted that the commissions' only goal was "to determine the truth".

"There can be only one truth. These are international commissions which will work without pressures. We expect them to determine the truth," Kojic told BIRN.

But last week, 31 international experts on the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia published an open letter saying that the commissions appear to be an attempt to revise established truths and "represent the culmination of more than a decade of genocide denial and historical revisionism by the [Party of Independent Social Democrats-led] government".

The director of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights of Republika Srpska, Branko Todorovic, also argued that the commissions' goal was to exonerate Serbs accused of responsibility for wartime crimes.

"Their goal is to enable...