In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the search is still on for 7,540 people who went missing during the war in the 1990s. There are around 1,300 unidentified remains (NN) in morgues, both complete and incomplete.
On International Human Rights Day, a central meeting of all associations of families of missing persons operating in Bosnia and Herzegovina was organized in Sarajevo today. At the meeting, the families were presented with the work of the Advisory Board in the past four years as well as the Institute for Missing Persons of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the next steps and challenges in the process of searching for missing persons, and information on available support for families.
The media campaign “Right to Truth” was also presented, which the Institute for Missing Persons of Bosnia and Herzegovina, i.e. the Advisory Board, is implementing on International Human Rights Day with the support of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
The aim of the campaign is to raise public awareness of the problem of missing persons and to remind people that more than 7,000 people are still being searched for in Bosnia and Herzegovina and that the families of missing persons have the right to know what happened to their loved ones.
The Chairwoman of the Advisory Board, Aljonka Dželetović, said that she has been searching for her brother, who died as a soldier in Mostar, for more than 32 years.
As she said, they organized today’s event to raise their voices and remind people that more than 7,000 people are still missing in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
“This is unacceptable and violates all human and humanitarian rights. For families to have peace and to know where their missing people are. Today we want to wake up all good people in Bosnia and Herzegovina to speak up and tell the truth they are hiding, to contribute to this process,” said Dželetović.
She appealed once again to everyone who knows something that could contribute to the process of finding missing persons, to share it, whether anonymously or in some other way.
The Chairwoman of the Board of Directors of the Institute for Missing Persons of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Salih Đuderija, said that the goal is to find a larger number, or almost all, of missing persons from the past war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
“In this way, we can talk about reconciliation and overcoming the consequences of our past. A society that does not respect its dead will not respect the living either,” explained Đuderija.
According to her, the Institute’s investigators are on the ground and are searching locations in the hope of finding the remaining part of the missing persons.
She reminded that more than 35,000 people disappeared in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the past war.
“We found and identified about 80 percent. This number of about 7,500 is especially difficult at this time. However, 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’s break the silence and say what we know. Help a child, a person, a woman get her name. In this number of 7,500 missing, there are many women and children,” she pointed out.
She recalled that in recent years they have begun the process of obtaining satellite images from the period 1991-1995, which show changes in the terrain during the war.
“We have a large number of these images and it is very difficult to technically and professionally read these images, bearing in mind that more than 30 years have passed and that the configuration of the terrain has changed. We are using these images as much as we can. We will probably also request professional assistance from fellow engineers and geologists to facilitate our searches. The goal is to connect investigators in the field with the technical and professional part. We have also gained access to the residual mechanism, the objects that are in the Hague Tribunal. There is a lot of data, eyewitnesses and witnesses who testified about the events,” said Đuderija.
She stated that a Norwegian program with sniffer dogs also started last year. However, she added that there are currently no trainers, so they will try to solve this problem and see its effectiveness in the field, writes AA.
