The conference, organised by the Croatian Society of Victimology, was attended by scientists and experts from the former Yugoslav republics who aimed to get closer to the truth about the war casualties and war crimes regardless of their perpetrators.
The President of the Croatian Society of Victimology, Zvonimir Separovic, said that according to data gathered by his organisation, 13,150 Serbs had been killed during the 1991-1995 war in Croatia.
Vesna Nikolic-Ristanovic of the Belgrade Faculty of Special Education and Rehabilitation said that many casualties remained unaccounted for because no official records were kept or were incomplete, and that such data were manipulated as well.
Citing data supplied by the Serbian documentation centre Veritas, which she said were supported by the UN, Nikolic-Ristanovic said that 6,799 Serbs had been killed or had gone missing during the war in Croatia.
The Director of the Research and Documentation Centre from Sarajevo, Safer Hukara, said that 97,207 soldiers and civilians from all ethnic groups had been killed during the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Citing data provided by international organisations, Azem Vllasi, a lawyer and former politician from Kosovo, said that 14,000 people, 99 per cent of whom were ethnic Albanians, had been killed in the breakaway Serbian province in the late 1990s.
About 900 Serbs were killed there in a wave of revenge attacks after June 1999 when ethnic Albanians began returning to their homes, Vllasi said.
Marjan Damaska of the University of Yale Law School said that possibilities of the international community caring about the victims were limited. He said that international justice had a lot of mutually conflicting objectives, such as bringing individuals to justice and establishing the historical truth.
Damaska concluded by saying that non-governmental organisations could be of greater help than international criminal justice in restoring trust.