Families of Bosnia’s Wartime Missing Persons Deprived of the Right to Truth
Thirty years after the end of the war, families in Bosnia and Herzegovina are still searching for more than 7,000 missing relatives. They want the younger generation to learn about what happened to their lost loved ones, based on judicially-established facts. But the authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina still haven’t been able to agree to set up a commission to establish a common truth about the war.
By: Lamija Grebo
It was August 2024, on the International Day of the Disappeared, when Aljonka Dzeletovic made a speech outside the state parliament building declaring that it is high time that all the missing persons from the 1990s war are found and buried with dignity.
Dzeletovic believes that prosecutors are not trying hard enough and are under too much political pressure, which is why the search process has never been completed.
“Our people did not disappear in a large territory; Bosnia and Herzegovina is a small area,” said Dzeletovic.
For years, she has been repeating her call for action, on behalf of herself and other families, driven by a desire to find the remains of her older brother, Milenko Milovic.
He disappeared in the Mostar area in June 1992 and has been missing ever since.
“What I do know is that, from an early age, he protected me and guarded me, we never fought, he always looked at me as his little sister who needed him to protect her, to watch her every step – that is how things worked constantly when we were growing up, until the war,” she tearfully told Detektor journalists who were for the filming for the campaign ‘I’m Still Searching for…’
The search for the missing has become her life’s mission. Dzeletovic’s story is just one of many told by families of more than 7,000 missing persons from Bosnia and Herzegovina who are still waiting to exercise the right to bury their loved ones.
But Bosnia and Herzegovina has never taken that right very seriously. The draft Transitional Justice Strategy guarantees the right of families to receive information about the fate of their missing relatives, but also for society as a whole to know the truth about what happened during the war in order to prevent historical revisionism and the denial of crimes, and to punish the perpetrators. But Bosnia and Herzegovina has never officially adopted the Transitional Justice Strategy.
As well as the search for the missing, the right to truth also entails truth and reconciliation commissions, as well as education about the war.
‘It’s as if the state has said goodbye’
The biggest problem in finding the disappeared now is the lack of interest from the state, from society, but also from prosecutors’ offices, Dzeletovic thinks. Families of the missing are on their own.
“They have simply accepted the number of the missing people who are being searched for … It’s as if the state has said goodbye to that many people, but they are actually in such a small territory,” she said.
She holds Republika Srpska most responsible for the disappearance of her brother, who was a Bosnian Serb Army soldier.
“All my family are dead. I’m the only one left and I’m a vociferous person, but I haven’t benefitted from that. My only benefit is that I feel like a human being,” she said.
Dzeletovic has been repeating for years that the number of people still missing – more than 7,000 – is a huge amount for those who have still not found the remains of their loved ones.
How many people are still missing?
According to the Missing Persons Institute, more than 30,000 people, including nearly 1,000 children, went missing in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war. Most of them had been found by 2017, when the process slowed down, so almost 30 years after the end of the war, the search for more than 7,000 people is still ongoing.
During the war, 102 children were killed in Prijedor. Data available to the Izvor Association shows that another 32 minors are still missing in the Prijedor area.
The Centre for Research of War, War Crimes and Search for Missing Persons of Republika Srpska has previously told Detektor that almost 30 years after the war, it is difficult to obtain information about the missing, especially from eyewitnesses. There were 31 children on Republika Srpska’s list of missing persons, of whom 22 have been identified, while the bodies of the remaining nine children are still being searched for.
According to the Centre’s data, Bravnice near Jajce, the Javorska Kosa area and the Medari village area in Croatia are the places where the most children were reported to have gone missing.
As many as 29 babies under one year old disappeared in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war, while the bodies of 373 more minors have yet to be found. This is why Detektor launched a database of wartime missing children, seeking to preserve the memory of their existence through the testimonials of their surviving family members, hoping that it will persuade those who know the locations of mass graves to disclose them.
The Hague Tribunal found in its verdicts that more than 7,000 men and boys were killed in the Srebrenica area in July 1995, and the bodies of many of them have been found in several mass graves. Among them, 445 children and minors have been exhumed so far.
About 150 children who were killed before the genocide have been exhumed from the Donje Podrinje area – in Vlasenica, Zvornik, Srebrenica, Bratunac and Sekovici.
About 1,000 people from that area, also including children, are still being sought.
As Detektor was previously told by Amor Masovic, a former member of the Board of Directors of the Missing Persons Institute of Bosnia and Herzegovina, during one exhumation they discovered that refuse had been thrown over the bodies of 77 war victims in the ‘Laniste 1’ pit, near Kljuc.
Masovic described how they dug out the garbage and descended to a depth of about 18 meters, where they found a new layer of victims – 111 additional bodies. They also found a pacifier belonging to a baby who they knew had been killed in Biljani on July 10, 1992 along four-year-old brother Almir, mother Besima and other members of the Dzaferagic family.
“We were afraid that, after we had found the mother, brother and other family members, the baby’s body was simply not in the pit. On the last day, when we had already started to fear that we might have thrown the tiny body out with the waste material, we discovered the remains of four-month-old Amila Dzaferagic,” Masovic said.
Families of the missing from Grabovica have never found the remains of three-and-a-half-year-old Mladenka Zadro and her mother Ljubica, who were killed by Bosnian Army members in September 1993.
The search by Mladenka’s brother Goran Zadro for his sister and mother Ljubica has been going on for 31 years. The remains of his father, grandfather and grandmother were found and buried.
“To be brutally honest, living in this country, the way we do, we have somehow learned to accept things that are not normal,” he said.
“I will die one day, we all will, and I will be sorry that this part will not have been brought to a proper conclusion, out of respect for the victims, for how their lives ended and ultimately for the truth itself for the generations coming after us,” he added.
In his opinion, there is no serious interest in finding the missing.
“That doesn’t suit someone and that’s our reality in almost all spheres. If someone doesn’t like it, they put an obstacle there, they put it away in a drawer, they don’t touch it, don’t interfere in it. That’s my personal opinion, because otherwise the outcome would have been different,” he said.
Over the years, there have been various problems in finding the missing, but the lack of information about individual and mass graves, inaccessible terrain, as well as the lack of resources, still remain the biggest problems.
The way the Missing Persons Institute obtains information is significantly different from how it was done when it first started operating, when information was provided by eyewitnesses or people who decided to break the silence, explains the Chair of the Institute’s Board of Directors, Saliha Djuderija. Some people found human remains in their yards, while post-war returnees came across traces of graves and ammunition.
“The reason for the lack of information also lies with certain cases that were tried in the courts, which criminalised certain groups of people who are still active in public and political life,” she said.
The budget that the state allocated to the Institute was bigger in the past, but has decreased over the years.
In 2023, the remains of 60 people were exhumed in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and besides having to deal with unreliable information about the locations of graves, the Institute also faces a lack of equipment, pathologists and other resources for its operations.
Over the years, the number of missing persons being exhumed or identified has gradually decreased year on year. The coronavirus pandemic further contributed to the slowing down of the process.
The political debate about the number of people who disappeared, and also about which areas the most missing people come from, provides a key insight into the complexity of the missing persons problem in the aftermath of the 1990s war, explained Mirza Buljubasic, a researcher at the Faculty of Criminalistics, Criminology and Security Studies of the University of Sarajevo and an associate of the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement, in a policy paper he prepared for Detektor.
“The problem of missing persons in Bosnia and Herzegovina is politicised, and is often focused on ethnic interests instead of being a humanitarian problem. Therefore, the need to depoliticise this issue and to show greater political will to address it must be emphasised,” Buljubasic said.
Who has been searching for the missing?
After the war, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) led a Working Group on Missing Persons until 1999. The group included representatives of former warring parties, the High Representative, local Red Cross organisations and associations of families of missing persons. They put in place a process for collecting requests to search for missing persons, which enabled the creation of credible lists of the missing.
After the Dayton Peace Agreement, the pre-war commissions for prisoners of war and missing persons were transformed into the State Commission for the Search for Missing Persons, tasked with locating, documenting and identifying the missing. The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) was established in 1996 at the initiative of US President Bill Clinton to resolve the humanitarian issue of the missing in the former Yugoslavia. The ICMP, with the support of the US, coordinated the exhumation processes and set standards for working on identification. These efforts laid the foundations for subsequent state mechanisms in Bosnia and Herzegovina, including the creation of the National Team for the Search for Missing Persons and the establishment of central registers.
Although significant efforts were invested in locating and identifying the missing, challenges such as political will and resources remained crucial for the full implementation of legislation and support for families of the missing.
The process of establishing a state institution for missing persons in Bosnia and Herzegovina began in 1998 with an initiative to establish the Institute for Missing Persons, envisaged as a joint and multi-ethnic body. The registration of the Institute by the ICMP at the Sarajevo Cantonal Court in 2000 marked a key step in that process. Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Council of Ministers took on an important role in 2003, and in August 2005 the Missing Persons Institute of Bosnia and Herzegovina (INO Bosnia and Herzegovina) was formally established through the joint efforts of the Bosnia and Herzegovina Council of Ministers and the ICMP. By the end of 2007, the activities and staff of the entities’ Missing Persons Commissions were transferred to the Institute.
The state Law on Missing Persons, adopted in November 2004, set out the rights of families of missing persons, including the right to information about the fate of a missing person and their place of disappearance, which was based on the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols of 1977. In 2006, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) defined the “right to knowledge” as a human right, with its protection to be guaranteed by the state.
Meanwhile, in 2004, the Parliamentary Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina adopted the Law on Missing Persons, the only state-level legislation dealing with war victims, establishing the basis for the creation of a state institution in charge of searching for missing persons, a central registry and a special fund to support families.
The Law constitutes the result of interaction between international and domestic actors, which influenced the creation of new social policies in the post-war period. The Law focuses on the socio-economic empowerment of victims through financial benefits, social policies and free health insurance, providing a new framework for peacebuilding and transitional justice.
The legislation reflects the complexity of the compensation process. It was created through a combination of international pressure with the moral authority of war victims and their ability to mobilise for change.
These factors, when combined with the political calculations of the domestic authorities and influence from international partners, create opportunities for these compensation policies to succeed. The Law also illustrates how justice for victims and the right to truth are administered through legal mechanisms that acknowledge the suffering and the right of families to be informed about the fate of their loved ones.
Despite its adoption, the implementation of the Law encountered challenges, including financing of the fund and administrative barriers, demonstrating how political dynamics can have an impact on the effectiveness of legal protections. The Law on Missing Persons stands as an example of how legislative initiatives can facilitate transitional justice processes, providing a legal framework for addressing the issue of missing persons, but also as a reminder of the complexity of implementation of such laws in politically and ethnically divided societies.
The Law on Missing Persons laid the foundations for the creation of central registers of missing persons and defined the social and economic rights of the family members of the disappeared. A key part of the Law was the establishment of the Missing Persons Institute, in cooperation with the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) and the Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina – a crucial development to enable families to be granted their human rights.
The establishment of the Missing Persons Institute marked an important step forward in the process of identifying and documenting missing persons, regardless of their ethnicity, religion and nationality. The Central Register of Missing Persons (CEN) reconciled data from 12 databases, including the physical characteristics and circumstances of each person’s disappearance, which was crucial for locating and identifying them.
The Law also provided for a fund to support the families of missing persons to alleviate the economic hardships they faced, but the entity governments and the Brcko District Government encountered difficulties in agreeing on the establishment of the fund, which led to a deadlock in the process of establishing it.
The role of judicial authorities, including courts and prosecutors, has been crucial in dealing with the missing persons issue, particularly in war crimes trials. State institutions and judicial authorities together form the basis of the legal and institutional framework for addressing the missing persons issue, which is crucial for building peace and reconciliation in a post-conflict society.
Even though significant efforts have been made, challenges such as inter-entity cooperation, continued funding and respect for the rights of missing persons persist, indicating the need for further work on this sensitive issue.
Due to the passage of time and disappearance of witnesses, it is often people from the younger generation who take it upon themselves to search for family members who have not yet been found.
At the Dizdareva Njiva grave, near Rogatica, Emin Curevac found the remains of his grandfather and nephew among 29 bodies. Born after the war, Curevac learned about the past from his father and family. His father passed away two years ago and didn’t live to see the discovery of two more family members.
“Once when I and my father were at the Seljani shahid [martyrs’] cemetery, I asked him why there were two empty plots next to my grandfather and my nephew. He said those two plots were intended for Sejdalija and Uzeir Curevac once they were found. However, my father didn’t live to see that. My father passed away two years ago and I realised he left it in my trust, so I have now got involved in that struggle,” Curevac said.
Buljubasic explained that trauma and the psychological impact on families and resistance to excavations are key challenges in finding the missing, along with the instrumentalisation of the issue political and ethnic reasons, as well as limited access to information and lack of resources.
“In some areas of Bosnia and Herzegovina, there is local resistance to excavations and investigations. The families of missing persons, returnees, are often stigmatised in their communities, which may further complicate their fight for justice and truth,” he said.
His recommendations include the strengthening of institutional frameworks, educational initiatives on missing persons and support for victims and their families.
Society only has a certain level of empathy for families searching for their members, Dzeletovic believes.
“If someone said: ‘Let’s finally solve these problems, let’s all help these people’… But no such thing has happened… The issue of the missing is very important for justice, truth and reconciliation, but it is not being addressed. It is not actually being addressed,” she said.
Commissions for truth and reconciliation: verdicts are the foundation
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the transitional justice process has been further slowed down by the lack of credible truth and reconciliation commissions. Since the beginning of the war, there have been no state-level commissions to determine an exact list of victims – name by name – and the facts about various incidents.
Such commissions are supposed to identify and document cases of human rights violations and crimes committed during conflicts.
But attempts to establish a state-level truth and reconciliation commission have never had government support, as Branko Todorovic, president of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights of Republika Srpska, explained.
“Every attempt so far, be it by domestic actors or international organisations and institutions, has actually been doomed to failure, because it is simply obvious that truth and reconciliation doesn’t suit those who have been in power in Bosnia and Herzegovina during these 27 years,” Todorovic said.
He added that this is one of the main weapons in the hands of the authorities – control over the truth, inter-ethnic and inter-faith mistrust, hatred and fear.
The Regional Commission for the Establishment of Facts about War Crimes Victims (RECOM) tried to become an established institution, but despite public support in Bosnia and Herzegovina, with 200,000 signatures on a petition, it also encountered political obstacles.
Domestic politicians in Bosnia and Herzegovina have generally showed no enthusiasm for initiatives to deal with the past, and any attempt to establish truth commissions was halted once it reached the political level, Buljubasic said.
“The commissions that were localised faced political manipulation and controversy, including a lack of clarity in their mandates, ultimately leading to the commissions failing to deliver a report or perform tasks in accordance with their objectives,” he wrote in his policy paper.
What kind of commissions have been formed in Bosnia and Herzegovina?
Under a decision made in 2006, the Council of Ministers established the State Commission for Investigating the Truth about the Suffering of Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, Jews and Others in Sarajevo in the period from 1992 to 1995. The Commission spent about 230,000 Bosnian marks (117,000 euros), but it has never delivered a report.
The commission’s task was to transparently determine the facts about mass and individual killings, the locations of the victims’ remains, mass and individual detentions, rapes and sexual abuses, as well as about cases of deportations, expulsions and disappearances.
As it is stated on the website of the Parliamentary Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Commission has never submitted a report to the Council of Ministers, nor has it fulfilled any of the obligations from its mandate.
A year later, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the Municipal Assembly of Bijeljina was established. The Commission claimed to have submitted a report to the Assembly, but it has never been put on the agenda.
Three commissions in Republika Srpska managed to produce reports, but they ultimately failed to meet the transitional justice goals for which they should have been established.
In 2019, the Republika Srpska Government established the Commission to Investigate the Suffering of Serbs in Sarajevo from 1991 to 1995 and the Independent International Commission to Investigate the Suffering of All Peoples in the Srebrenica Region from 1992 to 1995, which produced reports that contradicted judicially-established facts. War victims said the reports from these commissions were an insult and represented the denial of crimes. The death toll of those killed in the Srebrenica genocide didn’t match the judicially-established facts, which is why experts accused the international members of the Commission of relativising the genocide.
Apart from one chapter referring to murders of Serb citizens at Kazani, the Sarajevo report is mostly composed of chapters relating to the historical context in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the role of radical Islam, the role of the media, as well as the physical and psychological aspects of suffering.
An analysis by Detektor showed that the report denies that the massacres at Sarajevo’s Markale market took place in the manner established by several trial chambers of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Instead the report advances the view that one side has been pushing for decades – that an explosive device was planted there, that a shell could not have been fired from positions held by the Bosnian Serb Army, and that the number of victims was not correct, and that bodies were brought to the site after the attack.
In its report, the Srebrenica Commission concluded that no genocide was committed in July 1995 and that the actual number of its victims was half the number stated in Hague Tribunal’s verdicts, which are also views expressed by political and other actors from Republika Srpska and from Serbia, which are also often reported by Russian media.
The formation of the Commission was preceded by a decision by the National Assembly of Republika Srpska, rejecting the government’s report from 2004 on the events in Srebrenica, which “unequivocally shows that large-scale crimes were committed in the area of Srebrenica in July 1995 through gross violation of international humanitarian law”, and that “Republika Srpska expressed its determination to face the truth about the what happened during the tragic conflict”.
There have been several initiatives to launch reconciliation commissions, explained Djuderija, who previously participated in transitional justice processes within the state-level Ministry of Human Rights and Refugees.
“In my professional opinion, we started those processes at a good time, but it was premature insofar as no one from government institutions, including the institutions in which I am now, had significant, relevant data that would have served as a basis for carrying out those processes,” she said.
The problem is that criminal justice in the courts was somewhat delayed, she added.
“Only through those sources – the notating of witnesses’ statements and the establishment of indisputable facts – was it sort some things out,” she said.
She added that the processes involved in establishing a state commission were highly demanding because there were no compromises on ethnic, national and political issues, nor did those involved have the will to reach a consensus in order to establish a commission.
According to Buljubasic, resistance to the establishment of a commission also came from victims’ associations that were supposed to be the greatest beneficiaries and supporters of such a mechanism.
Victims’ associations and women’s organisations expressed concern about the potential stigmatisation and retraumatisation of victims of wartime sexual violence if they participated in hearings.
There were concerns among victims’ associations about inadequate involvement in the process and fear of a ‘compromise truth’ that would put their suffering on the same level as that of others. The associations were almost unanimous in rejecting the idea of a commission.
Murat Tahirovic, president of the Association of Victims and Witnesses of Genocide, recalls some associations giving declarative support at the time, but there was no concrete outcome.
“As associations, we were not quite ready at that moment to resolve something in such a way. All of us, and I can at least speak for myself – I first wanted to see the outcomes of court proceedings to see how and in what way it would end for the most part, and only then could we talk about a commission that could go further on the basis of that,” he said.
Truth commissions also faced resistance at the international level, Buljubasic said. The ICTY was one of the main opponents of the establishment of truth commissions, fearing that they might undermine the Tribunal’s work.
“Many viewed truth and reconciliation initiatives as a possible distraction from justice, and preferred judicial processes. There is generally low public trust in the efficiency and transparency of state and international judicial initiatives, including those related to transitional justice,” Buljubasic said.
He believes that truth commissions should not be localised or separate from other transitional justice processes, particularly reparations, and that experts in various fields – historians, psychologists, criminologists, sociologists – should be involved in truth commissions to ensure a comprehensive analysis and interpretation of past events.
The commissions’ work should be fully transparent and inclusive, ensuring that all ethnic and social groups have an equal role and representation in the process, which could help reduce resistance and increase public acceptance.
“It is necessary to ensure that victims are at the centre of the process, their needs and stories should be prioritised, and their voice should be heard and respected throughout all phases of the commission’s work,” Buljubasic stressed.
Education and information campaigns are needed to increase public awareness of the role and significance of truth commissions, as well as to educate the public about the opportunities that commissions provide for social reconciliation and justice.
Buljubasic said that these commissions should work in cooperation with educational institutions to integrate teaching about recent Bosnian history, human rights and the importance of transitional justice into school curricula.
“Commissions should also have an educational role, organising public discussions, workshops and exhibitions that promote understanding and the importance of the reconciliation process,” Buljubasic said.
Today, there is a basis for establishing such a commission at the state level, Tahirovic believes.
“I think it is the right time for such a commission as it would now have quite a few things to use … We need to create a common narrative that would be acceptable to everyone, but to start with what we have already,” he said.
He sees the verdicts handed down by the Hague Tribunal, the International Court of Justice, courts in the region and Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as numerous international resolutions, as integral parts of a process that has continued from the 1990s to the present day.
Public apologies that aren’t apologies
After the war, there have been few public apologies. In 2013, while he was president of Serbia, Tomislav Nikolic apologised in an interview for crimes committed in the name of the state and by any individual from his country.
“I am kneeling and asking for a pardon for Serbia for the crime that was committed in Srebrenica,” he said in an interview, although he did not call the killing of more than 7,000 men and boys genocide.
The then prime minister and current President of Serbia Aleksandar Vucic attended the commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide, after which there was an incident when stones were thrown at him, causing him to leave the memorial centre in Potocari. Since then, he has never acknowledged the genocide and has explicitly opposed the adoption of a genocide resolution by the United Nations General Assembly.
Milorad Dodik, the president of Republika Srpska, was also in Srebrenica in 2015, when he laid a wreath and paid respect to Bosniak victims at the memorial centre.
“It is true that a crime happened here and I feel sorry for all the victims, but the fact is that there’s been a lot of politicisation around these events,” Dodik said in Potocari, and in the years that followed, he has become one of the biggest genocide deniers.
In June 2016, Bakir Izetbegovic, the then chairman of the Bosnian Presidency, visited Kazani near Sarajevo and paid respect to the Serbs who were killed there. He said at the time that he hoped his move would inspire other Bosnian officials to make similar moves.
“However, that is not the main goal why I am here. I simply had a feeling and an obligation,” Izetbegovic said.
Helez told Detektor that he believed there was no justification for such a crime.
“In this case, among other people, a four-year-old child and 17 women were killed, and that could not possibly have been a legitimate military target. There’s no excuse for something like this. All the mothers of murdered children throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina mourn in the same way – there is no difference. This crime was committed by irresponsible individuals from the Bosnian Army,” said Helez.
He called on other officials to pay tribute to all victims in Bosnia and Herzegovina, regardless of ethnicity.
“We need to apologise and distance ourselves from those who killed women and children. Let this be a message that there will never again be war and victims in our region,” said Helez.
But as well as genuine apologies, victims’ families and survivors are also waiting for other forms of compensation for non-material damage. A 2019 decision by the UN Committee Against Torture called on Bosnia and Herzegovina to publicly apologise to a sexual violence victim, as well as to pay damages as soon as possible and systematically address the issue of reparation to victims at the state level.
It took the Ministry of Human Rights and Refugees of Bosnia and Herzegovina two years to form a working group to design a plan for the implementation of that decision, and the process has not yet been completed.
Education serving divisions
For Almasa Salihovic of the Srebrenica Memorial Centre, school students in Republika Srpska being taught that war criminals are heroes represents a new, very dangerous way to deny the genocide, relativise crimes and distort facts.
“There will be descendants of Srebrenica genocide victims or survivors of the Srebrenica genocide who will read something in history textbooks that’s so false and actually painful for their parents, and definitely for them too,” she said.
“There’s a great danger in that, because when you document something at the institutional level, when it makes its way into textbooks and books, it’s already at a new level and, in my opinion, perhaps the most dangerous thing so far,” Salihovic added.
According to the new curriculum in Republika Srpska, elementary school children will learn about the role of Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic in the “defensive-liberation war” in ten classes as of this year, but in none of those classes are teachers obliged to say that the two were sentenced to life imprisonment for genocide and other war crimes committed in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The entity Education Ministry announced that the goal of the new curriculum is to present events, individuals, as well as processes from the immediate past to students in an objective and impartial way, as well as to develop their critical thinking about wartime events. The ministry explained that most of the material had already been included in the curriculum and textbook.
Experts interviewed by Detektor believe that, in this way, the truth is being falsified, a parallel world created and convicted war criminals glorified.
Goran Simic, an expert in the field of criminal law and transitional justice, has told Detektor that such teaching represents a violation of the criminal code of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
“The criminal code of Bosnia and Herzegovina clearly defines that the verdicts of domestic and international courts cannot be contested; people have been convicted of war crimes under those verdicts and their actions cannot be treated in any other way than as war crimes,” Simic explained.
He said the actions taken by Republika Srpska’s Ministry of Education and Pedagogical Institute have elements of a criminal offence, but there are still no verdicts or domestic case law for violations of the criminal code related to the prohibition of the denial of genocide and other war crimes that was imposed by then High Representative Valentin Inzko.
“For now, this is just another political activity that takes from verdicts only those parts that suit a certain political narrative,” Simic said.
There are no uniform textbooks in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where children learn according to three curricula and three wartime histories. Experts and historians say that textbooks are deliberately discriminatory and serve the purpose of stereotyping other ethnic groups in order to maintain divisions.
Despite judgments by the Constitutional Court of the Federation entity asserting that the “two schools under one roof” system violates the human rights of children in several municipalities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, they still exist.
Various plans and programmes for history classes, particularly those about the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, force elementary and high school students to learn from material that is not based on the judgments of international and domestic courts, which further enables the spread of disinformation and arbitrary presentations of the war.
History professor Melisa Foric Plasto explains that curricula in the country have contained material about the war ever since it was taking place, with a break when a Council of Europe recommendation not to study the recent past was implemented.
Since 2018, the war period has been reintroduced in all history curricula, and textbooks and additional teaching materials have been developed.
“The approach that applies to all three systems in the textbooks in Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian languages is to deal with the war from the ethnic perspective of each of the three peoples, with an emphasis on presenting events that only highlights victims among their own people,” she says.
She added that there were differences in the way the war is described – as aggression or civil war, and about the causes of the war. Emphasis is placed only on events that will highlight the positive role or victim status of one ethnic group, while facts about guilt on all three sides are mostly omitted.
Detektor’s analysis of history textbooks in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia showed a different approach or even the overlooking of certain topics, events and people, as well as textbooks focusing on one’s own victims and minimising or neglecting other peoples’ victims. The siege of Sarajevo, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, genocide in Srebrenica, and the roles of Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, the wartime political and military leaders of Republika Srpska who were sentenced to life imprisonment in The Hague, are also portrayed differently.
In Tuzla Canton, in an appendix to a history textbook for the ninth grade of elementary school, domestic and international verdicts were avoided as sources, but the author cited a book entitled ‘The Army, The Key to Peace’ by Rasim Delic, who the Hague Tribunal sentenced under a final verdict to three years in prison for failing to take measures to prevent or punish crimes committed by Mujahideen fighters against Serb prisoners near Zavidovici.
While filming ‘TV Justice’ in a Sarajevo high school, Detektor’s journalists were told by final grade students that their knowledge of the war came from their parents and other family members, and also from social media, while they thought information in textbooks was limited.
In Sarajevo, children have begun to learn about the siege of the city and Srebrenica genocide in recent years from material referencing verdicts, but teachers in the capital and elsewhere still don’t have enough material from reliable sources to use.
There is still no readiness to revise history textbooks, said Foric Plasto.
“Historical narratives in textbooks still serve the purpose of shaping national identity and, as such, do not leave enough space for introducing an approach where events are looked at from several different perspectives, and especially for introducing different interpretations of events that can counteract any idealised image that’s being created,” she explained.
Detektor’s database of judicially-established facts about the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina is intended not only for teachers and researchers, but also for ministries of education, so children can learn in schools about facts that have been judicially established, and not how different parties in or after the war interpret things, taking from verdicts what suits them and denying the relevant judicial facts.
Teachers can use the educational tools offered to create materials for educational curricula, as well as methodologies for how to teach pupils about the war.
Professor Foric Plasto has designed a manual for history teachers and professors for the database, so they can prepare their lessons and work with students more easily. Two cantons in the Federation signed a memorandum on the use of the database content, and workshops for teachers were held in Sarajevo.
Journalists from Detektor participated in the Summer School of Oral History in Srebrenica, where the methodology was presented as a document that would protect the culture, tradition, history and past of all people and combat harmful ideas.
The education system in Bosnia and Herzegovina is still under the influence of the Dayton Peace Agreement, , which ended the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1995, and many believe that it contributes to segregation and discrimination. The country’s entities have different approaches to curricula, while in the Federation curricula differ even further due to the number of cantons. None of them promotes the values of peace, says Buljubasic.
Curricula are often biased or neglect certain aspects of the past, making it difficult to promote an objective and comprehensive understanding of history. There is resistance among certain groups towards a review of school textbooks that would enable a fairer and more objective depiction of history, thus promoting the right to truth.
The course of education reform
December 1997
The Peace Implementation Council declared the need for changes in education for the first time.
February 1998
The international community launched the Sarajevo Declaration, which opened up the way towards a curriculum and revision of textbooks.
March 1998
The Working Group for Education in Sarajevo was set up to develop projects that promote democracy and ethnic tolerance.
1999
International pressure was applied for the creation of a central, coordinating educational body, for higher education as well as for the school system, and the National Conference of Education Ministers was established.
July 1999
All ministries signed an Agreement on the Removal of Undesirable Material from Textbooks for Use in Bosnia and Herzegovina School Year 1999-2000.
2000
Legislation prohibiting the import of textbooks from other countries to Bosnia and Herzegovina was adopted.
May 2000
A conference of education ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina was held.
2002
The OSCE was mandated to coordinate education in Bosnia and Herzegovina on behalf of the international community.
August 2003
A common core curriculum was adopted throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina.
2008.
An education strategy was adopted.
How do textbooks depict wartime events?
History textbooks for high school students in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s two ethnically-dominated entities depict different versions of events from the 1990s war, reinforcing ethnic divisions. For example, in textbooks in Republika Srpska, the genocide in Srebrenica in July 1995, one of the gravest crimes in recent European history, is hardly mentioned. In Republika Srpska, the textbook mentions the military takeover of Srebrenica without mentioning genocide, while in the Federation the textbook points out the responsibility of the Bosnian Serb Army for the subsequent massacres. Analyses show that textbooks from both Bosnia and Herzegovina’s entities take a biased approach, often downplaying or ignoring the suffering of other ethnic groups.
Higher education in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in the context of transitional justice and the right to truth, reflects deep ethnic divisions and political instrumentalisation that directly affect the ability to exercise the right to truth. The Dayton Peace Agreement did not specifically address education issues, leaving significant aspects of higher education in the hands of the entity authorities. This has resulted in a highly decentralised and inconsistent education system with different laws being applied in different parts of the country. Faculties are divided along ethnic lines, and students usually choose universities according to their ethnicity. This results in limited access to educational material that promotes objective understanding and critical questioning of the past.
Buljubasic believes that education in Bosnia and Herzegovina now stands at a crossroads between being part of the problem or part of the solution. Long-standing neglect of education reforms that would lead to the unification and harmonisation of curricula has led to deeper segregation in the education system, reflecting and exacerbating social divisions.
“This challenge becomes even more pronounced when one considers the strong political influence on education, which has often been an obstacle to the harmonisation of curricula and promotion of common values,” he said.
Developing and implementing curricula that include a comprehensive and objective study of the recent conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in order to promote truth and understanding among young people, is one of Buljubasic’s recommendations.
“Education reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina should do more in order to remove nationalist ideology and rhetoric from curricula and textbooks, and seek to include a multidimensional perspective on peace education at different levels of education in the country,” he said.
Buljubasic believes that it is necessary to revise school textbooks to ensure that they objectively portray events from recent history, avoiding one-sided views that may promote divisions or ethno-nationalist tendencies, as well as to develop educational programmes that promote inter-ethnic understanding, tolerance and dialogue, as part of a broader strategy for peace-building and reconciliation.
He also believes that training programmes should be organised for teachers, enabling them to adequately teach topics such as conflict and transitional justice in a way that is sensitive to cultural and ethnic differences between students. He highlights the importance of pedagogy and ‘upbringing’ in the development of an individual and society, as well as the need to focus on a holistic approach to education.
Given that teachers rarely receive adequate training to teach sensitive topics such as war crimes and human rights, which can lead to an inappropriate or insensitive approach to these topics in classes, they need additional training.
According to Foric Plasto, opening up space for the introduction of multi-perspectivity based on facts, in this case judicially established ones, is crucial for the future of the younger generation in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
“Dealing with one’s own past, naming the criminals responsible for the crimes that were committed and avoiding generalisations that are common in the approach to studying these topics are steps that are essential if we want to achieve any progress towards reconciliation and stability in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” she said.
Zadro said that it is best to talk about the truth.
“Only the truth in history can deliver some kind of message for the future. History should first be written correctly and children should be taught correctly. If that happens, we have some hope for tomorrow, and if not, we will only plant the seed of hatred for future generations to come,” he said.
Impressum
Journalists: Emina Dizdarević Tahmiščija and Lamija Grebo
Web development: Malik Hodžić and Lampa
Design: Olivia Solis
Cameraman: Mirza Mršo
Video edit: Elvedin Zorlak and Mirza Mokrović
Editors: Džana Brkanić, Semir Mujkić and Haris Rovčanin
Director: Denis Džidić
Proof reading: Nadira Korić and Amila Žunić
Copy edit: Matthew Collin, Monica Green, Denny Petrick, Haley Zehrung and Max Daly
English translation: Sunita J. Hasić and Selma Đonlagić
Project manager: Katarina Zrinjski
Project is supported by the Kingdom of Belgium