A working group bringing together Bosnian, Kosovar, Croatian, Serbian and Montenegrin institutions launched this common database to centralize information on people who disappeared during the wars in the former Yugoslavia during a meeting in The Hague on Thursday 4 November, in partnership with the International Commission on Missing Persons.
With our correspondent in The Hague, Stephanie Maupas
The creation of this database also bears witness to unprecedented cooperation between the institutions of the former Yugoslav republics. For the International Commission on Missing Persons, this joint work will help to depoliticize the issue, which is still sensitive in the region.
Since the end of the war in the Balkans, some 30,000 people, initially missing, have been identified, particularly during the exhumations of mass graves. Today, more than 11,000 people are still missing.
An initiative that could serve as a model in Ukraine
The initiative could also serve as a model, as the intergovernmental organization must formalize an agreement with the Ukrainian authorities by the end of the year. For the director general of the Commission, Kathryne Bomberger, scientific evidence is essential.
” Providing irrefutable proof of identity is essential, not only for the families of the missing, but also to ensure that there is a truthful account of what is happening. Because again, as in the former Yugoslavia, misinformation has been spread by governments that seek to use the issue of missing persons, to incite hatred, to incite division, she explains. As you know, we want to help prevent this from happening by ensuring that DNA is used at the forefront of identification and that Ukraine itself engages in an honest, credible and truthfully to find missing persons and investigate their disappearances, so that everyone has confidence in Ukrainian institutions “.
According to the Ukrainian government, nearly 15,000 people have disappeared since the start of the conflict.