The Research and Documentation Center (RDC) is an institution based in Sarajevo, which aims to gather facts, documents and data on genocide, war crimes and human rights violations, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It describes itself as an independent, non-governmental, non-profit, professional and nonpartisan institution. RDC investigates issues regardless of the ethnic, political, religious, social, or racial affiliation of the victims.
The Center is made up of independent members, intellectuals and professionals from different fields of interest. All of RDC's documents (witness statements, photo and video material, etc.) have been at the disposal of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, as well as to the Bosnian courts, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), scientific institutions and the media.
On June 21 2007, the RDC published its research on Bosnia-Herzegovina's war casualties, titled The Bosnian Book of the Dead. This database includes 97,207 names of Bosnia and Herzegovina's citizens, killed and missing during the 1992-1995 war. An international team of experts evaluated the findings before they were released. More than 240,000 pieces of data have been collected, processed, checked, compared and evaluated by international team of experts, in order to get the final number of victims, belonging to all nationalities. Of the 97,207 documented casualties, about 60 percent were soldiers and 40 percent civilians. 65 percent of all victims were Bosniaks, 25 percent were Bosnian Serbs, and just over 8 percent Croats. 83 percent of civilian victims were Bosniaks, 10 percent of civilian victims were Bosnian Serbs, and more than 5 percent of civilian victims were Bosnian Croats, followed by a small number of others such as Jews or Roma.[1] The percentage of Bosniak victims would be higher had survivors of Srebrenica not reported their loved-ones as "soldiers" to access social services and other government benefits. The figure could rise by a maximum of another 10,000 due to ongoing research.[1]