Three decades after the end of the war, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) marks the International Day of the Disappeared, August 30th, still searching for 7.594 missing persons.
The Institute for Missing Persons of BiH in Tuzla is organizing the commemoration of the International Day of the Disappeared. Families who are searching for the missing will send an appeal and seek support in their struggle for truth and justice.
In BiH, during the war of 1992-1995, more than 32.000 persons went missing. About 80 percent of that number have been found and identified, although verification of the missing is still ongoing.
In recent years, the process of searching for the missing has become increasingly difficult because of the lack of relevant information on potential individual or mass graves, of which there are dozens in the territory of BiH.
Most people are being searched for from the Podrinje area
The largest number of missing persons are being searched for in the area of the municipalities of Zvornik, Srebrenica, Prijedor, Foca, and Visegrad. In the area of these municipalities, about 2.733 persons are still being searched for, among them 173 children and 574 women.
In morgues, there are about 1.300 unidentified mortal remains (NN), both complete and incomplete.
“The largest number of missing persons are being searched for in Zvornik, Srebrenica, Prijedor, Foca, and Visegrad. In our country, the greatest number of victims are being searched for in the municipality of Zvornik, namely 635 persons, including 39 children and 65 women. Then, in Srebrenica, where we are searching for 565 persons, including 32 children, 83 women, and in Prijedor, where 552 persons are being searched for, among them 33 children, 93 women. Next comes Foca, where 494 missing persons are being searched for, among them 11 children and 161 women, and Visegrad, where 487 missing persons are still being searched for, including 58 children and 172 women,” said Emza Fazlic, spokesperson of the Institute for Missing Persons of BiH.
Investigators of the Institute for Missing Persons of BiH are still searching for locations where the mortal remains of victims who are still considered missing may potentially be found.
Let us break the silence.
The greatest problem in the process of searching certainly remains the lack of precise information on the locations of graves in which the mortal remains of victims are hidden. What remains is the search for extremely complex cases.
Chair of the Board of Directors of the Institute for Missing Persons of BiH, Saliha Djuderija, stated earlier that there are still people who do not want to break the silence.
“There are people who do not want to break the silence and help us open the archives and gain access to information that would help us locate the places where the remaining missing were buried. Let us break the silence and say what we know. Help so that some child, person, or woman may regain their name. In the number of 7.500 missing, there are many women and children,” Djuderija emphasized.
The International Day of the Disappeared is marked every August 30th, as a day of remembrance and honoring of tens of thousands of persons worldwide who have disappeared in armed conflicts, crimes against humanity, or as a result of violations of fundamental human rights.
