Bosnian Serbs’ Sarajevo War Commission Holds First Meeting

The Commission for Investigating the Sufferings of Serbs in Sarajevo met in Republika Srpska’s main town Banja Luka on Monday, but did not make any details public after the session.

“During the session it was decided, among other things, that the Commission would not make any public announcements prior to the completion of its work. The Commission members consider that giving any public statements prior to reaching concrete conclusions on the basis of available documents and analyses needed for the work to be done objectively and impartially, would be premature and counter-productive,” the Commission said in a statement.

The Republika Srpska government’s decision to set up two commissions to probe wartime events in Sarajevo and Srebrenica has been widely criticised, with concerns raised that they could be used to falsify history and deny the findings of domestic and international courts.

Thirty-one international experts on the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia signed an open letter last month saying that the decision to set up the commissions “looked more like revisionism than a genuine effort to determine the truth”.

Meanwhile the chairman of Republika Srpska’s Commission for Investigation of Wartime Events in Srebrenica, Gideon Greif, a professor of Jewish and Israeli History at the University of Texas, announced in Bijeljina on Monday that the commission should hold its first meeting next week.

Greif said that the work of the Srebrenica Commission would be based exclusively on “the truth and facts which can be substantiated by data”.