Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik was unpleasantly surprised by criticism from the Serbian Orthodox Church of his persistent claims that at least half a million Serbs were killed at the WWII Jasenovac concentration camp.

Dodik said that he was surprised and felt insulted after media outlets on Wednesday published footage showing Pakrac-Slavonia Serb Orthodox bishop Jovan Culibrk as warning at a panel discussion, organised by the Serb business association “Privrednik”, of dangerous historical revisionism in Serbia as well as the Bosnian Serb entity of Republika Srpska (RS) that inflates the number of Jasenovac victims in the way it had been done on the eve of the 1990s war in the former Yugoslavia.

“I resolutely dismiss any possibility that Serbia and Republika Srpska are involved in a state-sponsored project to inflate the number of the Jasenovac victims. Many academic and other debates were and are conducted about the atrocities at Jasenovac, there are various sources, facts and data,” Dodik said.

He claims that in the former Yugoslavia it was not allowed to talk about the exact number of the victims even though it was then that the figure of 700,000 victims became official.

It is a common claim in the Serbian historiography that Croatia's Nazi-allied Ustasha regime killed 700,000 people at Jasenovac, of whom at least 500,000 were Serbs, while the other victims were Jews, Roma and antifascists. The fact that Croats whom the Ustasha regime considered enemies were killed at Jasenovac as well is not mentioned.

The Jasenovac Memorial Site public institution in Croatia has collected the names and data of 83,145 persons killed, including 47,627 Serbs, 16,173 Roma and 13,116 Jews. Among those killed were 39,570 men, 23,474 women and 20,101 children under 14.

Historians like Ivo Goldstein estimate the total number of victims at between 90,000 and 100,000.

The figure of 700,000 victims is inscribed today on a plaque in Donja Gradina, a village on the Bosnia and Herzegovina bank of the River Sava across Jasenovac, Croatia, where RS and Serbia have commemorated the Jasenovac victims for years on their own.

The plaque reads that 500,000 of the victims were Serbs, 40,000 Roma, 33,000 Jews, and 127,000 antifascists.

Serbia and RS plan to establish at that location as well as in Belgrade memorial centres dedicated to Jasenovac.

The prime ministers of RS and Serbia, Radovan Viskovic and Ana Brnabic respectively, last week signed a memorandum on the implementation of that project.

Before the break-up of Yugoslavia, Donja Gradina was part of a single memorial site together with Jasenovac while today there is almost no cooperation between the two memorial institutions, divided by the Sava.

Warning about a state-sponsored project of historical revisionism, Bishop Jovan said that Serbian historians are failing to react, even when there are attempts to inflate the number of victims.

“… They also kept silent in the second half of the 1980s, when writers and journalists started speaking about the crucial aspects of the problem,” Culibrk said.

In a comment on his statement, Dodik said he was particularly saddened by Culibrk's challenging Serb sources’ data on the number of victims but not Croatian sources’ data, which, in his opinion, downplay the number of victims.

“Shameful data are coming from Croatia about only 35,000 to 80,000 Jasenovac victims,” he said, concluding that Jasenovac was in any case undeniably a site of mass-scale crimes.