Challenges of Estimating Srebrenica Victims in the ICTY Approach Helge Brunborg Research Department Statistics Norway Workshop on Estimating War Victims in the Former Yugoslavia, : Challenges and Achievements Sarajevo, 17 October 2009

Background ICTY established in May 1993, began operating in 1994 A need for expertise on statistics and demography soon emerged ICTY requested the Government of Norway to provide a demographer Started working in June 1997 Returned to Oslo in December 1998 but continued as a part-time consultant A permanent position as demographer was created and Ewa Tabeau began working in the fall of 2000

The population project at ICTY Objective: Estimate the population changes in Bosnia and Herzegovina due to armed conflicts Common estimates of the changes Dead or missing persons: 25, ,000 Displaced persons: 1 mill. Refugees: 1.2 mill. Population size Pre-war population (1991): 4.4 mill. Post-war population (1996): 3.4 mill.? Approach: Collect and analyse data on individuals

Victims: Dead, missing, buried, exhumed, displaced, refugees Pre-war population: Population Census 1991 Post-war population (survivors): People who registered to vote, displaced, refugees Major data sources: lists of

with information on Full name Father’s name Date and place of birth Personal Identification Number (maticni broj) Place of residence Ethnicity Type of status or event Date of event … Preferably in electronic format Lists of individuals Who collected the primary data? How were the data collected? Quality of the data? Duplicates?

Srebrenica Project Objective Determine the minimum number of dead and missing persons related to the fall of the enclave on 11 July 1995

Srebrenica-related missing men as per February men (and 48 women) Based on lists of missing persons

Age distribution of missing persons and exhumed bodies As of Feb Only 70 of the exhumed had been identified

Probability of being missing for Muslim men from Srebrenica As of Feb. 2000

Srebrenica-related dead and missing Minimum numbers Feb. 2000: 7, = 7, of these identified as dead (0.9%) Nov. 2005: 7,661 2,054 of these identified as dead (26.8%) Nov. 2007: 7, = 8,087 3,837 of these identified as dead (52.7%) Oct. 2009: Data not yet avaiIable but we expect that at least 60-70% have been identified as dead

Expert testimonies First presentation in court of demographic evidence: Number of Srebrenica-related dead and missing, against Radislav Krstić in June 2000

Expert testimonies on Srebrenica Krstić (2000) 35years Blagojević (2004) 15 years Milosević (2004) died in 2006 Popović et al. (2007, 2008) ongoing Perisic (2008) ongoing

Expert testimonies at ICTY by demographers Until now 25 times Ewa Tabeau: 15 trials – Sarajevo, Srebrenica, Herzeg-Bosna, etc … Helge Brunborg: 7 trials – Srebrenica, Kosovo Patrick Ball: 3 trials – Kosovo

Conclusions Demographers and statisticians can make an important contribution to a war crimes court Who did it and why? Statistics cannot tell. Need additional evidence. Researchers are trained to be objective, critical and concerned about quality of data and analysis The demographic research at ICTY has contributed to the growth of scientific work in this field –The book The Demography of armed conflict (Springer 2006) –Many scientific seminars and articles –At a large demography conference in Marrakech one week ago there were four sessions with more than 15 papers on this topic Interesting and challenging to work on this at ICTY A great satisfaction to have contributed to reliable figures on the number of victims. This is important for –History –Reconciliation –The families of the victims

Thank you for your attention