Mostar Declaration to Speed Up Search for Missing Persons and Their Perpetrators

The Declaration on stronger cooperation between the countries of the region in the process of searching for missing persons, signed yesterday in Mostar between Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, and Montenegro, is not just new hope for families searching for their loved ones, writes the BiH news agency Patria (NAP). It is another important message to the perpetrators that the noose is tightening around them and that one day they will still be held accountable for their misdeeds.

According to data from the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), which initiated the meeting of representatives from the four countries, about 40,000 people went missing in the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, with the largest number, around 30,000, missing in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Currently, more than 8,000 people are being searched for in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and more than 22,000 people have been found since the end of the aggression to date, reports NAP.

Most of the total number of missing persons were killed in the most brutal way during the aggression against Bosnia and Herzegovina, and among them are a large number of women and children. Their bodies were often moved multiple times from mass graves; the perpetrators wanted to cover up the atrocities they committed in this way.

Most of the direct perpetrators of these crimes are currently moving freely through Bosnia and Herzegovina and the countries of the region, and a large number of them hold high state positions, as is the case with several municipalities in Republika Srpska.

At the beginning of July, the film "I Miss You" by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) was screened in Sarajevo, which brought the topic to the fore, speaking not only about the suffering that missing persons went through but also about the suffering that the families of the missing go through in the process of searching for them. And it is, as all the interviewees in this documentary agreed, indeed great.

Amor Mašović, a member of the Collegium of Directors of the Institute for Missing Persons of BiH, explained that the signing of the Declaration in Mostar is another step towards improving the search for missing persons, or a step closer to establishing an international organization that will be the first on the scene, at the execution site, or at the site of accidents, which would significantly speed up the process of finding missing persons.

He believes that if the ICMP had been formed earlier, before the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, the current process of searching for missing persons in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the former Yugoslavia would likely have proceeded faster than it is today, reports NAP.