Research and Documentation Center in Sarajevo

The Research and Documentation Center in Sarajevo (RDC) is an institution based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, funded by the Norwegian government that 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.

The Bosnian Book of Dead

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:^[1]

• Civilian status: 60% were soldiers (40% civilians)
• Male: 90%
• Ethnicity: 65% Bosniaks, 25% Bosnian Serbs, and just over 8% Croats
  • Of civilian victims: 83% Bosniaks, 10% Bosnian Serbs, and more than 5% Bosnian Croats, followed by a small number of Jews or Roma

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.

References

External links

• Research and Documentation Center
• "JUSTICE REPORT: Bosnia's Book of the Dead". Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN). 2007-06-21. 
• "After years of toil, book names Bosnian war dead" Reuters
• Assessment of the Database by the Households in Conflict Network, University of Sussex (pdf)
• article on the presentation of The Bosnian Book of the Dead in Sarajevo in January 2013