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rfmcdonaldReuters Alertnet carries the story.
It's worth noting that "[a]ccording to the 1991 census, Bosnia and Herzegovina had a population of 4,354,911. Ethnically, 43.7% were Muslims (now almost all them declare as Bosniaks), 31.3% Serbs, and 17.3% Croats, with 5.5% declaring themselves Yugoslavs." Military campaigns targeted against ethnic groups tend to do this.
The death toll from the Bosnian war, which ended 10 years ago this week, was half of the widely used figure of about 200,000, a leading Bosnian war crimes researcher said in an interview on Wednesday.
"Let me be clear, this is still an extremely high figure but there is a big difference now that people cannot irresponsibly use inflated numbers for their political goals," said Mirsad Tokaca, who heads the Sarajevo-based Investigation and Documentation Centre (IDC).
He said work to establish the exact number of Muslims, Serbs and Croats killed in the 1992-95 war should be completed in early 2006.
[. . .]
The ethnic breakdown of the victims of the war, for which the term "ethnic cleansing" was coined to describe large-scale killings and expulsions of members of other ethnic groups, remained unchanged from Tokaca's estimate a year ago.
"It is about 70 percent Bosniaks, slightly under 25 percent Serbs, slightly under five percent Croats and about one percent of the others," he said.
He said the multi-ethnic team of 12 professionals and several volunteers combed military, civilian, non-governmental and a number of other records and sources throughout Bosnia.
The initial, computerised, database included about 300,000 names as many people appeared on several different records listed either as soldiers, police officers or civilians that were killed or missing.
It's worth noting that "[a]ccording to the 1991 census, Bosnia and Herzegovina had a population of 4,354,911. Ethnically, 43.7% were Muslims (now almost all them declare as Bosniaks), 31.3% Serbs, and 17.3% Croats, with 5.5% declaring themselves Yugoslavs." Military campaigns targeted against ethnic groups tend to do this.
