New Approach Urged in Hunt for the World’s Missing

The chairman of the International Commission on Missing Persons, Thomas Miller, told the conference in The Hague that a new global approach was needed to the search for missing persons experiences have shown that the problem was similar after the Bosnian war in the early 1990s, the Asian Tsunami in 2004 or the September 11 attacks in the US.

“Wherever we have had missing persons, we have seen that families are demanding information about their loved ones. They are asking for the truth. This is why we need a new agenda for the future,” said ICMP chairman Miller.

The ICMP’s director-general, Kathryne Bomberger, said that it was discouraging that in the 21st century, the international community does not have an organised method for looking for missing persons.

“There are no guidelines regarding responsibilities of states following conflict, no standards that families of victims can refer to, no sustainable international response mechanisms that adress this problem,” Bomberger said.

The conference – entitled ‘Missing Persons: An Agenda for the Future’ – heard that the ICMP, which was created in 1996 to help search for people missing after the wars in the former Yugoslavia, has grown into a renowned worldwide organisation.

Amor Masovic of the Bosnian Institute for Missing Persons said that without the help of the ICMP, he did not believe the local authorities would have found and identified thousands of missing persons after the war.

“What Bosnia and Herzegovina is lacking, and I presume this is the situation in many countries around the world, is that there is no significant political will to search for missing persons. This is why we need a worldwide, professional international organisation to deal with this issue,” said Masovic.

The conference heard that as a result of the work of ICMP, of the 40,000 people declared missing after the conflicts in the western Balkans in the 1990s, more than 70 per cent have been accounted for.

David Tolbert, a former prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and currently the president of the International Centre for Transitional Justice, said that the ICMP had helped to develop the rule of law in the former Yugoslavia.

“ICMP data, professional databases of identified victims, have been crucial for the Hague Tribunal prosecutions, expecially regarding the Srebrenica genocide. But the value is not just in criminal prosecutions, forensic evidence is crucial for truth commissions, memorials and vetting out abusers,” said Tolbert.

The participants of the conference highlighted the assistance given by ICMP to the Thai government after the 2004 Tsunami, which killed thousands, and their help in looking for the missing persons in Libya and Iraq after the recent conflicts.

Iraq’s human rights minister Mohammed Shyaa Al Sudani said that his country still has more than 50,000 missing persons, but the identification process was improved after training by the ICMP on the excavation of mass gravesand the establishment of databases of blood samples.

“I hope that this conference is just the first begining that shall be followed by other steps in a bid to prevent the problem of missing persons,” said Al Sudani.

The scientific director of the German forensic institute, Ingo Bastisch, said that developed states are also ill-equipped to handle large crises, which demand mass DNA matching protocols.

“In Germany, we have limited resources. In a hypothetical case of a terrorist attack, we would certainly need additional capacities to handle the crisis,” said Bastisch.