The database of judicially established facts about the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a project of the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network BiH (BIRN BiH), which was implemented from April 2021 to March 2023 with the support of the United Nations Democracy Fund (UNDEF ), was presented in Sarajevo.
As it was pointed out on that occasion, the goal of this project is to offer sources of information, based on facts that can be used for educational and informative purposes, thereby raising the level of public understanding and ensuring support for dealing with the past and opposing revisionist narratives, misinformation and denial of crimes.
Executive Director of BIRN BiH Denis Džidić said that this is a starting point, followed by an ‘update’ of the database that refers to the judgments of the Court of BiH, local and regional courts, which will serve as a platform for communication of a new approach to judicially established facts.
“This was a rather unusual project for us, with which we wanted to to do something different from media reporting, reporting on trials and make a step forward within the segment that concerns education,” said Džidić before a roundtable on the topic “How to teach judicially established facts about the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina – challenges and perspectives” in which the aforementioned base of judicially established facts is presented.
He expressed the expectation that it will be possible to make the presented base even more useful for teachers, competent ministries, and institutes, stating that he believes that this concept will be accepted on a partnership basis so that in the future they can work more comprehensively on educating young people about what happened in the war during the 90s in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Džidić announced that the complete database will be delivered to the competent ministries in Bosnia and Herzegovina and that on this occasion working meetings will be organized to determine the next steps.
As part of the project, BIRN BiH also published ten short documentaries for each region, which, in addition to the conclusions of the judgments, also contain personal testimonies of surviving victims and witnesses, which, together with the facts established by the courts, form a multimedia base for creating a methodology for lectures and learning about the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Fena writes.
