Probes of Atrocities Divide Bosnians

By R. Jeffrey Smith

Washington Post Foreign Service

December 28, 2000

SARAJEVO, Bosnia -- Mirsad Tokaca passes each morning through a shrapnel-damaged doorway in the heart of Sarajevo, gripped by an obsession that has lasted for eight years. His grim quest is to catalogue a seemingly endless stream of mass killings and other nightmares during Bosnia's 31/2-year ethnic war. Sixty miles northwest of this capital, Pejo Djurasinovic performs virtually the same tasks in Banja Luka. An employee of the Documentation Center set up by the Bosnian Serb Republic, one of Bosnia's three ethnic regions, Djurasinovic has compiled a list of thousands of people alleged to have committed war crimes, fixed the location of hundreds of camps where prisoners were abused and identified dozens of major slaying sites. But in an important sign of the Bosnian war's enduring ethnic divisions, he and Tokaca have never spoken with each other. Djurasinovic is an ethnic Serb; he documents only atrocities against Serbs. Tokaca is a Muslim; he records only atrocities again!

st Muslims. And they have a counterpart in the Bosnian Croat city of Mostar, a lawyer who researches only atrocities against ethnic Croats. Instead of trying to reconcile these experiences -- a goal of the U.S.-drafted Bosnian constitution -- each of these men is writing a separate account of the war's savagery: the rapes, beheadings, torture, mutilations and machine-gunnings carried out in the chaotic conflict here from 1992 to 1995. They describe their efforts as a quest for justice. But some local officials say the independent efforts are yet another sign of an inability to heal the war's wounds and cultivate a collective public awareness of what one side did to another. The result, they say, is an enduring bitterness that is laying the ground for further conflict. "Instead of one democratic country, we have three ghettoes," said Jacob Finci, who heads Sarajevo's tiny Jewish community and has tried to serve as a postwar mediator among the former combatants. With littl!

e understanding of the links between the abuses perpetrated by all three groups on one another, he said, "you might think someone arrived from the moon and created all these crimes." Boys who were 10 at the time of the war, for example, have heard only one-sided accounts of what happened to their relatives and neighbors, Finci said. Now, they are at the age of military service and may be thinking of revenge. This helps explain why "it is a common belief that if NATO peacekeeping troops withdrew tomorrow, Bosnia . . . would likely descend anew into bloodshed and further division," Finci said recently in a report on Bosnian reconciliation efforts co-written by a scholar at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, Neil J. Kritz. The clash of histories is exemplified by efforts to summarize the bloodletting in the city of Visegrad, 90 miles east of Sarajevo on Bosnia's border with Serbia. The official Bosnian Serb history begins in 1991 and describes harassment and scatter!

ed killing of ethnic Serbs by Muslims before mid-1992. It does not mention the subsequent slayings or disappearance of more than 3,000 Muslims at the hands of local militia groups and police officers. Even the cumulative toll of Bosnia's war remains submerged five years after the Dayton peace accords ended the fighting. There is no agreed estimate of how many civilians in each of the warring ethnic groups were killed or who killed them. Many scholars cite only rough estimates that the war killed 140,000 Muslims, 90,000 ethnic Serbs and 20,000 ethnic Croats. No agreed estimate exists, moreover, of how many individuals took part in war crimes or stood by while atrocities were committed. A top U.N. official here put the number at 20,000, while Tokaca and his counterparts said they have the names of roughly 10,000 who participated in or witnessed such crimes. After five years, the pace of work by the body charged with affixing responsibility for Bosnian war crimes, the Inter!

national Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, makes clear it will fall far short of fulfilling the task. It will take 16 more years to conduct, at most, 140 trials. "They have indicted only 94 people, and there are far more than 94 war criminals in this country," said the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Richard C. Holbrooke, in a recent speech. Holbrooke served as a U.S. envoy to the region and helped draft the Dayton accords. Only two-thirds of those charged with crimes have been arrested. Many of the most prominent indicted figures remain at large -- including Ratko Mladic, who commanded Bosnian Serb forces during the conflict, and Radovan Karadzic, the wartime Bosnian Serb president. According to Finci, many scholars, particularly those in the West, have asserted that Muslims were the war's principal victims. But they were not the only ones, he added, an idea that has yet to percolate far into the consciousness of the country's Muslim citizens. Simila!

rly, in Bosnia's Serb Republic, where the nationalist party candidate was recently elected president, there "is no readiness to start discussing this issue," said Branko Todorovic, an ethnic Serb who heads the Helsinki Committee human rights group's chapter in the northern Bosnian city of Bijeljina. Todorovic said that most wartime Bosnian Serb leaders still insist that the "Serbs have won the war and few of them were killed. . . . The most difficult task is to accept that Serbs were killed and to face the crimes that Serbs did. If we do not discuss this subject, there is no chance of stopping this from happening again." But he faces opposition from Djurasinovic, the Bosnian Serb historian who says it is premature to hold such a discussion with Muslims and Croats and that, "to our knowledge, there was no killing or harming of civilians. All actions were of a military nature." Mindful of the continuing struggles of Austria, Germany and Switzerland to come to grips with so!

me of their actions in World War II, Finci and Kritz have been trying to persuade Bosnian officials to act quickly to establish a single truth commission to reconcile the competing views of wartime experiences. Its aim would be to provide a public account of what happened, help delineate who was responsible and spread information about those "who helped someone and are still afraid to say so," said Finci. It would be modeled partly on the truth commission established to look at the apartheid era in South Africa, but, unlike that body, would not have the power to grant immunity. Finci said such a commission has been blocked not only by resistance by local nationalists, but also by officials at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague. The tribunal has complained that the commission's work could be manipulated, that it would obstruct criminal trials and that it would absorb scarce Western financial aid. The truth commission idea has so far attracted only lukewarm support from !

top Western officials in Bosnia. As a result, Tokaca, the Muslim looking into war crimes, remains pessimistic. "I see, all around me, walls," he said, saying he has become more nervous, frustrated and angrier every year. "I fear that I won't be able to realize what I want." He has stocked a closet in his office with shoe boxes full of identity cards and driver's licenses of the deceased, retrieved by Bosnian villagers from forests near atrocity sites. He also has recorded and stored the statements of 700 victims of rights abuses and 6,000 witnesses to serious war crimes in loose-leaf notebooks and on six computer hard drives. Volunteers show up almost daily to record new statements, a task that Tokaca says absorbs him because the clarity and justice he has been searching for in Bosnia still cannot be found today. His obsession stems, he said, from hearing tales from his mother about the slaying in the 1940s of her father, Selim, and 20 other relatives in front of a mosqu!

e near the city of Gorazde by ethnic Serbs. "When my mother told me about these events, I couldn't believe it. I always said, 'That's impossible, it can't happen again,' " Tokaca said. "After this war, I will never say, 'It won't happen again.' "