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Bosnia and Herzegovina’s success in locating and identifying 74 per cent of its estimated 30,000 wartime missing persons, through cooperation between the families of the missing and international and local institutions, was hailed at the conference on Thursday as a model to emulate internationally.
“The key lessons we learned are the role and necessary cooperation between international and local institutions as well as civil associations,” Matthew Holliday, coordinator of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), told the conference.
“It is important to create a database with DNA samples of the families, and build mechanisms for information-sharing. Finally, it is crucial to include prosecutors in the search and exhumation processes, in order to enable prosecution of those responsible for the disappearances,” said Holliday.
The conference was organised by the ICMP and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, whose office head in Bosnia, Sabina Wolkner, said that finding the missing was crucial not only for dealing with the past, but also for the future of the country.
“Exhumations in Tomasica and the large number of missing in the war in Syria tells us that this problem remains one of the crucial ones in the world today,” Wolkner said.
Amor Masovic from the Institute for Missing People of Bosnia and Herzegovina, said that one of the reasons why the country managed to find and identify such a large percentage of the missing is because it started dealing with the problem back in April 1992.
“It may be distasteful talking about success while thousands of families are still seeking their loved ones, but we did achieve unprecedented success in the search for the missing. That is why a crucial lesson is to list the missing as soon as possible,” explained Masovic.
