It’s Not Too Late to Find Wartime Missing Persons
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On Tuesday, representatives of the domestic institutions that are responsible for accounting for missing persons in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro and Kosovo will meet at the headquarters of the International Commission on Missing Persons, ICMP in The Hague to sign a Framework Plan that lays out steps that these institutions will take in order to boost their cooperation and increase their effectiveness in accounting for missing persons throughout the region.
In the last two decades, the institutions have been able to account for more than 70 per cent of the 40,000 who were missing at the end of the conflict.
This is a remarkable achievement and the individuals and agencies that have delivered tens of thousands of identifications should be wholeheartedly commended for their work.
However, there are still 12,000 people who have not been accounted for, and this means that the work must continue.
Some may think that the prospects of finding and identifying missing persons after such a long time are small. In fact, the opposite is true, if there is political will and if countries cooperate with one another, more cases can be solved.
Across the Western Balkans, governments have established institutions, enacted laws, and developed technical capacities to account for the missing, and they have achieved a great deal – but they can achieve more.
It is not unusual, for example, to find that clandestine gravesites are located in one country, families of the missing are in another, and data pertinent to the search is in a third. By making records accessible on a regional basis it will be possible to utilise information from one country that can have a bearing on a case being investigated in another.
At the same time, new investigative and forensic techniques make it possible to locate clandestine graves and identify the people buried in them, even after the passage of so many years.
Real peace can only be built on a foundation of justice, and the passage of time does not diminish the fundamental need to put those who have committed heinous crimes on trial. Identifications carried out to the highest standard make it possible to prosecute those who were responsible for the disappearances.
Progress can only be made on the basis of truth. One of the greatest obstacles to securing truth, justice and reparation for families of the missing has been the misuse of the missing persons issue for political ends.
This has happened across the region and it has typically been accompanied by efforts to obscure the facts rather than to establish a transparent and incontrovertible record of what actually happened.
The Framework Plan is a blueprint for ensuring that the countries in the region of the Western Balkans make facts available and use these facts to solve cases.
States are obligated to secure the rights of families of the missing – the right to know the truth, the right to justice, and the right to reparations. Upholding their rights means upholding the rights of all citizens.
The ICMP has been working with the relevant institutions in the former Yugoslavia since 1996 and during that time it has developed an effective strategy that combines legislative and institutional initiatives designed to embed the missing persons process in the rule of law, with activities to support the capacity of families to access their rights, as well as the application of advanced forensic science capability.
The Framework Plan that will be signed on Tuesday in The Hague reflects this. It includes action to resolve the approximately 4,000 ‘NN”’ (no name, or unidentified) and misidentified cases in mortuaries across the region, procedures for sharing data among agencies and families, and joint participation at excavations of mutual interest, and it is premised on the efforts of the regional governments to work together to engage in a credible and transparent process of accounting for the missing based upon facts.
The ICMP will make its Site Locator software available to facilitate data exchange, and it will maintain the regional database of missing persons from the conflict.
It will also help to ensure access to DNA testing and matching of biological samples, provide technical assistance in resolving NN and misidentified cases, support excavations, facilitate regular multilateral meetings of the responsible institutions, and develop domestic capacities in terms of DNA testing of post-mortem biological samples.
And it will continue to support cooperative efforts by the relevant domestic agencies so that they help one another, and in this way help families all across the region.
The United Kingdom has pledged funds to the ICMP that will be used to support the work of the domestic institutions and to provide technical assistance in implementing the Framework Plan.
The Framework Plan is a realistic strategy that will promote justice and uphold the rights of citizens. In this respect, the domestic institutions that are represented at the signing ceremony in The Hague on Tuesday will be making an important contribution to consolidating peace in the Western Balkans.
Kathryne Bomberger is the Director-General of the International Commission on Missing Persons.
The opinions expressed in the Comment section are those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect the views of BIRN.
