Controversial Report Highlights Serb Victims in Wartime Sarajevo

The report published on Tuesday by the controversial Commission for Investigating the Sufferings of Serbs in Sarajevo, which was set up by Bosnia's Serb-dominated Republika Srpska to highlight its perspective on wartime events, claimed that Serbs were forced out of the Bosnian capital by Bosniak forces during the 1992-95 war.

The report describes the three-and-a-half-year siege of the city by Bosnian Serb forces as "a strategy to blockade Sarajevo in order to force the government of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina to accept their terms of peace".

It alleges that the Bosniak-led Party of Democratic Action aided and supported crimes against the Serb population of Sarajevo "which were committed by numerous criminal gangs and regular units of the Bosnian Army at least until October 1993, and included arrests, detention in concentration camps, torture, rape and murders".

"Paired with a systematic anti-Serb propaganda and ethnic pressure, these crimes represented a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing, which culminated in exodus of Serbs from Sarajevo after the Dayton Peace Accord," the report says.

It claims that from January to March 1996, Serbs from the Grbavica, Ilijas, Vogosca, Ilidza, Hadzici and Rajlovac neighbourhoods decided to leave the city because of the "politics aimed at destroying the Serb community in the parts of Sarajevo controlled by Muslims".

It also says that around 800 Serbs were reported missing in Sarajevo during the war and 260 of them have not yet been found.

"The number of the missing Serbs is probably even higher, because entire families were killed so there were no survivors to report the disappearances," it adds.

The report alleges that nearly all the perpetrators of war crimes...