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.

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