On the occasion of the International Day of the Disappeared, the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) publishes the campaign “I’m still searchingfor…” in order to help raise awareness of the pain and hope of family members of persons whose every trace is lost after the war, but also to appeal to those who know the locations of possible graves to share information.
From Monday (August 28th), ten videos will be published on BIRN BiH’s social networks with family members of missing people from all over BiH talking about who they are searchingfor, sharing their memories of that person, and asking for help to find them. They all have a common pain and hope that they will find the remains of their loved ones before the end of their lives.
“Since we have been reporting on war crimes and missing persons in BiH for almost two decades, we are very familiar with what families are going through. Unfortunately, there are fewer of our interlocutors, because naturally, families are disappearing. This campaign is our way of being their voice, with the hope that someone who watches these videos will help them, that someone will have a conscience and will find out where the bodies are buried,” stressed Denis Dzidic, executive director of BIRN BiH, explaining that at the end of each video,there is information on how to anonymously report the location of an individual or mass grave to the Institute for Missing Persons of BiH.
Family members of the missing spoke in the BIRN BiH campaign about the information about their fate. Some disappeared in the area of Sarajevo and its surroundings, some in Mostar, Bugojno, Zvornik, and other places in BiH. BIRN BiH interlocutors are fathers, mothers, sisters, and children of missing persons, and many of them described their love and memories of their loved ones. Some interlocutors did not have the strength to speak, but they all begged for help, pointing out that a large number of their family members did not get to see how their loved ones are buried. Many of them would give anything and pay for information, as they said during the recording of videos.
About 30,000 people disappeared in BiH during the war, while more than 7,000 of them are still being searched for.
The International Day of the Disappeared is marked on August 30th, as a day to remember and pay tribute to tens of thousands of people around the world who have disappeared in armed conflicts, crimes committed against humanity, or as a result of violations of basic human rights.
The campaign is implemented with the support of the Global Initiative for Justice, Truth and Reconciliation consortium, Detektor reports.
E.Dz
