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.