Ewa Tabeau, witness at the Radovan Karadzic trial

The number of persons whose disappearance is related to the fall of Srebrenica and Zepa in the summer of 1995 currently stands at 8,021, OTP demographic expert Dr Ewa Tabeau sates in her latest report, written for the trial of former Republika Srpska president Radovan Karadzic. Of that number, 116 persons are related to the fall of Zepa and the remaining 7,905 persons are linked with the fall of Srebrenica.

Dr Tabeau described in detail the demographic aspect of the Srebrenica genocide in the report she wrote in 2009 for the trial of General Zdravko Tolimir. In the updated version of the report for Karadzic’s trial, Dr Tabeau said that, according to the data of the International Commission on Missing Persons, 6,241 persons have so far been identified using DNA analysis. This is 81.1% of the total number of victims exhumed from the Srebrenica mass graves.

For Karadzic’s trial, Dr Tabeau wrote several reports: on the changes in ethnic composition of the 27 BH municipalities listed in the indictment, on the number of civilian and military victims of the siege of Sarajevo and on the victims linked to the fall of Srebrenica in July 1995.

In the first part of the cross-examination, Karadzic contested all of Dr Tabeau’s findings, including the statistical method she used to determine the intensity of the siege of Sarajevo. Karadzic put it to her that the method could be applied on animals but not on humans. In a bid to contest Dr Tabeau’s conclusion that citizens of Sarajevo were the victims of a deliberate terror campaign, the accused claimed that Sarajevo was not under siege because there was a tunnel which was ‘very busy’. Karadzic illustrated the claim by quoting from Robert Donia’s book Sarajevo: A Biography, where he says that according to BH Army estimate, more than a million people had passed through that tunnel.

Karadzic also put it to Dr Tabeau that she was ‘adding up apples and oranges’ because in her report on the demographic changes in the municipalities, Dr Tabeau compared sets of data of ‘a different order’: the 1991 census and the electoral rolls from 1997 and 1998. Dr Tabeau replied it would have been ideal if she had had the after-war census at her disposal, but as she hadn’t, the 1997 and 1998 electoral rolls proved to be ‘highly reliable’ sources.

Karadzic will continue cross-examining Dr Tabeau tomorrow morning..

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