Western mediators endorsed nationalist land claims contradicted by pre-war land registers

Evidence

In 1993, David Owen stated that Serbs had controlled 6o percent of pre-war Bosnia, a claim used by Serb militants to justify their claim that most of Bosnia should be given to the 31 percent of the country that was Serb. The last land registers before the war, however, showed 50 percent of Bosnia was public land and that Serb landowners controlled 23 percent. In April 1995, Thorwald Stoltenberg made the astonishing announcement that Bosnian Muslims were actually Serbs; it was a Serb extremist dream-come-true. — Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, 349

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: whether the 60-percent figure traces to a specific Serb nationalist source Owen adopted, and how the land-register data were gathered.