Release of database listing 35,000 people missing from 1992-95 war hailed as major step towards determining the fate of those left unaccounted for, 15 years after the conflict ended.
The International Commission on Missing Persons, ICMP, the Red Cross and some other agencies have unveiled a complete list of missing persons from Bosnia's 1992-war.
The records, according to officials of the Missing Persons Institute of Bosnia-Herzegovina, comprise data compiled from 13 different sources, including agencies on missing persons in two Bosnia's entities, the mainly Croat and Bosniak [Muslim] Federation of BiH and the mainly Serbian Republika Srpska.
Different figures from different institutions, the head of the Institute's steering board, Zoran Perkovic, said, had "resulted in different version of the truth" about what happened in the war being abused for the purposes of political manipulation.
The chair of directors of the Institute, Amor Masovic, said the new database would be a valuable source of information and would also facilitate the search for those still missing.
Masovic said some 23,000 people, or nearly two-thirds of the missing people, had been found since the end of the 1992-95 war, mostly in numerous mass graves across the country.
Speaking of the ethnic structure of the people listed in the records, Masovic said it was hard to determine all the victims' ethnic identities.
Many people from different ethnic groups had similar names, which sometimes made it difficult to guess which ethnicity they belonged to. Many victims also came from mixed ethnic backgrounds.
"I don't know if it [their ethnic background] is that important," he said. "For sure it is not important to the families of the missing persons because their only wish is to find and bury them properly," Masovic said.
The International Commission on Missing Persons, ICMP, which assisted in creation of the records, said it was now "for the first time in a position to provide accurate and reliable information" on missing persons.
"We hope that the verified records will contribute to ending political manipulation of the numbers of missing persons," ICMP's chief operating officer, Adam Boys, said.
He added that the records would also help families of the missing persons to access welfare benefits, which has been a problem for many of them.