In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the search is still on for more than 7,500 persons who disappeared during the war in the 1990s. There are about 1,300 unidentified remains (NN), which are complete and incomplete, in the morgues.
The process of searching for the missing is becoming increasingly difficult because there is a lack of relevant information about potential individual or mass graves, of which there are certainly dozens in the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Saliha Đuderija, a member of the board of directors of the Institute for Missing Persons in Bosnia and Herzegovina (INO), pointed out in an interview for Anadolu.
New missing persons reports
“Unfortunately, 7,617 people are still wanted in Bosnia and Herzegovina, including 7,500 who are wanted in the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina and regionally, which includes missing citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the territory of Serbia, Croatia, and Montenegro. The number of missing persons in all these years is The reason for this is that, although there were identifications, there were also verifications of new disappearances, the opening of new files. After 20 years or more, there were new reports of disappearances because they had no information about their relatives or had moved away. so they didn’t show interest. At the level of last year and this year, there were about 20, 25 such applications,” said Đuderija.
In the first half of this year, they have 12 applications.
“Families who returned from abroad decided to take this step. Previously, there was no one to report their disappearance. People should see enforced disappearances as a process that implies that the institute had to review more than 170,000 files, reduce them to verified cases in the sense of checking whether it is an enforced disappearance, checking the identity, the place of death or disappearance,” said Đuderija.
The most difficult thing in this process is to get official data, there are also military formations that participated in those processes, headquarters, civil protection where data could be found on possible places where the remains are found.
“Unfortunately, the silence has not been broken in many segments. This is probably also due to the perpetrators’ criminal responsibility, connection or involvement,” Đuderija pointed out.
More than 1,000 unidentified persons are in the morgues
According to her, more than 7,500 people are wanted in Bosnia and Herzegovina, however, there are some unidentified remains in the morgues.
“In the morgues we have about 1,300 unidentified remains, which are complete and incomplete. We have a problem because of the lack of blood of family members. The other problem is that we have about 6,700 or 6,800 classical identifications. It is certain that there are still some mass graves in hidden places, and where are a number of people whose bodies have not been discovered. When we talk about disappearances, we are talking about verified names,” Ðuderija emphasized.
As she said, there are many factors that are a challenge and slow down the process of finding missing persons.
“Now we have two challenges. One is that, among these more than 1,000 complete and incomplete bodies, we are trying to indicate, due to DNA mismatches, how much these remains are related to which case and how much you can connect them by classic identifications. It may happen that the body from classic identification, it is actually found in the country, and since it was not a DNA method, it may belong to another person, and that this unknown person is actually there,” explained Đuderija.
She stated that they will try to solve these situations with another analysis, namely, to do it through relatives even though they are dead. It’s the bone-on-bone method.
Speaking about NN cases, Đuderija said that they started burying these remains in court plots, which are protected and marked, according to the locations closest to the place where they were exhumed.
“Since it is a large database, at any time, if it is identified or discovered, the DNA profile matches, the remains can be exhumed again. Previously, there were more than 3,000 unidentified persons in morgues, and now we have reduced that number to about 1,050 unidentified people are being buried in Visoko, Tuzla, Zvornik, Bratunac, Sarajevo… As for the victims of the genocide in Srebrenica, in Tuzla we have almost 90 people who were found in graves in the area of Snagovi, Crni vrh… So far we did not bury those remains. We will probably find a way to bury them in the Memorial Center because they are related to the collective suffering in Srebrenica. These are all the graves where the victims of the Srebrenica genocide were found,” said Đuderija.
