Hey, Russian Media, there is No "Number War" in Bosnia and Herzegovina

The producers of Russian state television's English language channel belong to that especially loathsome group of people who exploit inaccurate and exaggerated war dead numbers. Some backstory. I was in DC for a few days last week, and accompanied my war correspondent friend David, recently returned from Afghanistan, to an afternoon of interviews at the Russia Today (RT) Washington studio. While David prepared for his live interview, I sat in the waiting room, watching RT on a large plasma screen television. A talkshow host named Al Gurnov was gleefully grilling a Dutch diplomat for answers to ridiculous hypotheticals, like what effect a single European army would have on the transatlantic relationship. I chuckled, but lost interest after a few minutes. Until I heard "Bosnia and Herzegovina." That caught my attention, as did the ominous headline: The Number War.

"It has been nearly fourteen years since the end of the Bosnian War," explained the somber voiceover. "However, both sides are still fighting, but this time over numbers – the numbers of those who died during the conflict." It got worse from there, as RT interviewed nationalist activists masquerading as legitimate researchers.

"Radovan Pejic and his team have put together 3299 files of Serbs who were killed in Sarajevo," RT continued. "He says there are still many mass graves with Serb victims inside that have not yet been found. Pejic is convinced the final count will show that more Serbs died in Sarajevo than Muslims in Srebrenica."

The story ended with, "Regardless, the battle for numbers, like the battle for truth, does little to bring peace to this part of the world, where the scars of war have not yet had time to heal."

Here's the problem: the numbers are not debatable. Bosnia, more so than any other contemporary postwar country, has been the subject of a huge, long-running forensic effort supported by the international community. We do know how many people died in the war, who they were, and even how most of them died.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the Sarajevo-based independent Research and Documentation Centre (RDC) have devoted more than a decade to putting together an accurate and detailed count of those killed, and have come up with almost identical numbers through two separate investigations, neither of which was mentioned in the RT story.

According to the ICTY and RDC investigations, about 100 thousand people were killed. Reflecting the common proportions of combatants and civilians killed in contemporary wars, approximately 60 percent of the those killed were soldiers, and 40 percent were civilians. Sixty-five per cent of all victims were Bosniaks, 25 percent Serbs, 8 percent Croats, and 2 percent others (with the last category comprising mostly Roma and people of mixed or unspecified backgrounds). Most victims were young people, between the ages 25 and 35, and more than three thousand children were killed during the war.

The war dead breakdown in Bosnia and Herzegovina isn't a matter of opinion, it's a matter of facts --facts that are now only disputed by the opportunist politicians who benefit from Bosnia's continuing political dysfunction, and their complicit media allies.

As David and I left the studio building, I mentioned my anger at the Bosnia story. David said something about RT being the English mouthpiece of Russian state media, and that I shouldn't be surprised.

I wasn't. My reaction was one of visceral revulsion. I doubt I'll ever stop being appalled by people who enjoy tearing the scabs off a fragile country's wounds. As I rested my head against the window of the Dulles Airport bus on my way home, I thought of the chirpy Russians and Americans I shook hands with back at the RT studio, and grimaced.