War-Related Deaths in the 1992-1995 Armed Conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Tabeau and Bijak)

A peer reviewed demographic study by Ewa Tabeau and Jakub Bijak, published in the European Journal of Population in 2005, critiquing earlier Bosnian War casualty estimates and presenting a record-linkage methodology cross-checking individual death and disappearance records against the 1991 pre-war population census to verify identities, remove duplicates and exclude survivors. Tabeau served as the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia's own demographic expert witness, and this line of research underlies the Sarajevo-based Research and Documentation Center's "Bosnian Book of the Dead" database, led by Mirsad Tokaca, which documents 97,207 confirmed named war dead. Its strength is a reproducible, individually verified count rather than a synthesized estimate. Its limit is that record linkage of this kind can still miss victims whose deaths were never reported to any of the underlying sources, so the true total may sit somewhat above the confirmed count.