Process of Search for Missing Persons Needs Acceleration
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Representatives of Regional Coordination of Associations of Missing Persons Families from ex-Yugoslavia urged the presidents of the countries in the region to sign the “Declaration on role of the states in solving the issue of missing persons as a consequence of armed conflict and the human right violations” on the international day of missing persons, August 30.
“Our main and common goal is the truth about the missing persons as the fundamental right of their families in order to establish peace and trust among the citizens and for better cooperation among the states,”
said Ljiljana Alvir, chief of the Regional Coordination.
She pointed out that missing persons’ families request the acceleration of the process of search for the missing, making the regional list of missing persons, review of the morgues, and that judicial institutions insist on disclosure of individual and mass graves.
“By the end of the conflict in the ex Yugoslavia around 40,000 missing persons were registered. And 32,000 relates to Bosnia. Two thirds of them were identified so far and that is considered as unprecedented success,” said Matthew Holliday from the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP).
Marko Jurisic, chair of the Bosnia’s Institute for Missing Persons, INO, said that those figures does not mean a lot to the families that still search for their loved ones.
“Regional cooperation in the process of missing persons is getting better every year, although our country does not have signed agreements.
INO handed over five bodies to Croatia and Bosnia took over ten bodies from Croatia. We took over two bodies from Serbia,” Jurisic said.
Jurisic seeks maximum involvement of society and authorities at all the levels in the process of search for missing persons, following the example of Croatia where the issue of missing persons is the priority in all the strategic documents.
Ivan Grujic, the president of the Croatian government commission on detained and missing persons, said that Croatia is doing its best in finding missing persons.
“We managed to identify more than 81 percent of the victims. (…) The problem for search for the missing persons is the flow of information from those who have information on mass and individual graves, and regarding that we made an open questions for Serbia,” Grujic said.
Ljiljana Alvir believes that the delays and obstacles in the search for missing persons are caused by the political shakes in the region. “There was a delay between Croatia and Serbia in the work of the bodies in charge for search for missing persons after the election in Serbia…,”
Grujic said.
Prenk Gjetaj, the head of the Kosovo government’s missing persons commission, thinks that the question of responsibility for the search for missing persons and events which caused the disappearances are at the zero level in Kosovo.
Two day conference, which gathered 17 missing person associations from the region, is held in Sarajevo and it was organized by the Regional Coordination with financial aid of ICMP and the Balkan Trust for Democracy.
