Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia to Work on Wartime 'Disappeared'

Representatives of the International Commission on Missing Persons, ICMP, Bosnia's Institute for Missing Persons, INO, the Commission for Detained and Missing Persons of the Croatia and the Commission for Missing Persons of the Serbia noted that almost 70 per cent out of an estimated 40,000 persons registered as "disappeared" during the wars of the 1990s have now been found. 

At the meeting on December 8 and 9 on Mt Vlasic, the participants agreed that the remaining missing persons will be harder to find as “the amount of additional information about the locations is decreasing”. 

Participants discussed the need for a regional list of missing persons and bilateral agreements for dealing with cases of missing persons.

“We talked about ways of improving the search. Specifically, we made an agreement regarding joint reconnaissance, exchange of information about the locations, monitoring exhumations and identifications and other issues related to missing persons in all three countries,” Marko Jurisic, chair of the INO, said. 

Participants supported the ICMP’s initiative to host a regional meeting in spring 2012, where measures to accelerate the search for missing persons and their implementation would be discussed.

Ivan Grujic, head of Croatia's Commission for Detained and Missing Persons, said the meeting had been important for all families of missing persons from Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia . 

From November 2001, the ICMP has collected information from 89,401 family members of 29,131 missing persons and analyzed 36,364 bone samples. By comparing the DNA from blood and bone samples, the ICMP has assisted in the identification of 16,475 missing people during the conflict.