A round table on the topic ‘Achievements and priorities in the process of searching for missing persons’ was held today in Vitez, organized by the Advisory Board of the Missing Persons Institute of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Representatives of the association of families of missing persons participated, as well as representatives of the Missing Persons Institute of BiH, the Prosecutor’s Office of BiH, the State Agency for Investigation and Protection, the Intelligence and Security Agency of BiH, the Prosecutor’s Office of the Central Bosnia Canton, the Municipality of Vitez, and the International Commission for Missing Persons and the International Committee of the Red Cross in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Missing Persons Institute of BiH, Mujo Hadžiomerović, assessed that the Institute had much more remarkable results this year compared to the previous year, despite the problems and difficulties encountered in this complex process.
“We made a significant step forward when it comes to the identification process, so this year 150 victims of the past war were identified, which is a hundred percent more than last year. This year, we worked intensively on the identification of victims who were exhumed in previous years, and the families were not ready to accept the remains since they were incomplete bodies of the victims. Aware of the passage of time and the complexity of this process, the families responded to our calls and accepted the final identifications, as evidenced by the above data,” said Hadžiomerović.
He noted that this year they performed 103 exhumations, adding that they also identified certain problems that significantly inhibit and slow down the process of exhumations.
He pointed out that the lack of accurate information about the locations of mass graves is still the biggest problem in this process, as well as the poor material and technical equipment of the Institute.
According to him, of this number of missing persons in the region, 70 percent of the cases refer to Bosnia and Herzegovina alone.
“We have a great deal of work ahead of us, the search for 7,593 missing persons,” concluded Hadžiomerović, Fena writes.
