“GENOCIDE means any of the acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

        UN Genocide Convention

Cooperation

Cooperation between the Institute
and national, international institutions



As soon as it was established, the Institute for Research of Crimes Against Humanity and International Law of the Sarajevo University established the communication and cooperation with national and international researching institutions, using the scientific methodology, aiming to gather records on genocide and other forms of crimes against humanity and international law committed in the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the period 1991-1995. Along with it, the Institute worked hard on gathering and securing the original, genuine, relevant, reliable, and authentic documents (a fairly large number of documents kept in the Institute archive), which deal with the issue of cause, reason, planning, intention, preparation, organization and execution of crimes against humanity and international law, which were subject to a complete examination of documents on the basis of qualitative and quantitative analysis of the content.

To prepare this activity, the Institute needed to establish and maintain a good quality cooperation with all the state authorities, institutions, governmental organizations and NGO’s, associations of citizens, and even individuals – not only the scholars, but also simple citizens who were the victims of crimes or both victims and eyewitnesses to the crimes. Hence, the special attention was paid to the cooperation with the Ministry of the Interior, Ministry of Defense; Armed forces of the Republic of BiH and its Commands, units and establishments; Ministry of Traffic and Communications, and other ministries within the Government of the Republic of BiH; municipal War presidencies; State Commission for Gathering Facts on War Crimes in the Republic of BiH; the R BiH State Commission for the Exchange of POW’s; the Republic Crisis Staff for the Health Protection; International Center for Peace; religious communities; media and other. The cooperation was established with the renowned international institutions such as: Society for the Endangered Peoples - International, UN Commission for findings on the war crimes committed in the territory of former Yugoslavia, UN Commission for Human Rights, ICTY; Institute for the Study of Genocide, Document Center of the Jewish victims of Nazi Regime; Amnesty International, and other.

Collecting and data-analysis was carried out in accordance with plans for sorting and analyzing the records, as a tool for verifying the hypothesis and drawing conclusions relative to the subject of research. The results were presented in a form of scientific books and studies and they were offered to scientific and general, national and international, public.

During the execution of so many projects, the Institute relied on national and international, renowned, experts, who often even without any financial compensation worked unselfishly and gave their full contribution to the implementation of projects, which fall under the scope of the activities carried out by the Institute. Among the numerous names, we would like to point some fighters for human rights: Prof. Dr. Eric Markusen, Prof. Dr. Norman Cigar, Roy Gutman, Tilman Zülch, and others.

As for the institutions, we have to point out the special cooperation between the Institute and two famous Universities in the United States of America: North Carolina at Charlotte and Rutgers in New Jersey.

Conferences

As a relevant and worldwide-recognized institution, the Institute has organized and participated in a series of presentations of its own study results at various conferences. During those conferences, the Institute presented facts and empirical, qualitative, and quantitative records on the aggression and genocide in the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and in this way contributed to objective informing the world scientific and political public about the events in Bosnia and Herzegovina at the end of XX century. Out of many conferences organized by the Institute, we selected the following: