Thomas Hannis, prosecutor in the Tribunal

‘Economic reasons are always the most important motive for a population to decide to migrate; people do not migrate solely because they have been forced to leave’, the demography expert called by the defense of first Bosnian Serb police minister Mico Stanisic said today. The prosecution cross-examined Pasalic today about the reasons for the migrations during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The prosecutor contested the witness’s expertise, focusing on some inconsistencies in the report. Thus, for example, when the witness analyzed the movements of population in two municipalities from 1991 to 2009, he compared two different areas at the beginning and end of the analyzed period. This happened with the migrations in Kljuc and Sanski Most, where the analysis covered areas that were no longer parts of those municipalities after 1995. According to the prosecutor, such discrepancies rendered the witness’s findings ‘statistically useless’. The witness agreed with the prosecutor’s suggestion that he could have added explanations about the territorial changes. He believed that a person well versed in the way data are used by experts would be aware of the territorial division of BH and that the clarification wasn’t necessary.

In his report, Pasalic covered the period from 1991 to 2009, since only an overview of a substantial period of time can result in proper conclusions about the factors that affected the migrations during and after the war, Pasalic noted.

Although the indictment charges Mico Stanisic and Stojan Zupljanin with crimes against non-Serbs in 1992, the witness explained he didn’t include the war period as a separate whole, because ‘after the war, there were only estimates, rather than relevant data’. Nothing really important happens in demography over a short period of time, Pasalic said. At the end, the witness agreed with the prosecutor that he could have drafted an overview covering the war years, but the findings ‘would not have reflected the rules of migrations’.

The prosecutor described the fact that the witness in his expert report investigated mostly the migrations of Serb population as the ‘crucial failure’ in comparison with the demographic reports made by Ewa Tabeau, the prosecution expert, and the Research and Documentation Center from Sarajevo. Tabeau and the Center surveyed the situation in all three ethnic groups. ‘It would have been better if I had been able to include all of them’, Pasalic conceded, arguing nevertheless that his report could be a good ‘supplement’ to the analyses made by the prosecution experts.

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