prijava
SARAJEVO, May 25 (FENA) - The final event in the project of awarding small grants to associations of families of the missing was held in Sarajevo when families and non-governmental organizations emphasized the role of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) in the financial support of donors from the European Union, the Swedish organization SIDA and of other entities.
The representatives of the families appealed to the government institutions in BiH to include the issue of the search for the missing in the priorities of their actions.
Chairwoman of the Coordination of the Association of Families of the Missing, Semina Alekić, speaking about the implementation of the project "Resolving the issue of the missing as a policy priority in Bosnia and Herzegovina", states that the pain of the families who are still searching for their members is not abating and that the cause is the policies of the nineties of the last century.
Even today, the families are not convinced that this issue is one of the most important topics of the government institutions, Alekić points out and adds that with the mentioned project, meetings with the institutions were planned for 2020, but its realization coincided with the election campaign.
Josip Drežnjak from the Association of Croat Victims of "Grabovica 93" Mostar spoke about the implementation of the project marking the 29th anniversary of the suffering of civilians in Grabovica and appealed to the institutions to get involved as much as possible in the issue of finding the missing, regardless of the nationality of the victims.
In the opening remarks during today's meeting, Samira Krehić from the Program for the Western Balkans emphasized the continuous and stable cooperation between the families of the missing and the ICMP, stating that it resulted in the finding and identification of two-thirds of the persons who disappeared during the last war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and then the adoption of the corresponding law and the establishment of a central record of the missing, as well as a regional list.
ICMP will continue cooperation with the families, persistent in their fight for justice and establishing individual guilt for the suffering of their loved ones, which has resulted in the largest number of indictments since the Second World War, Krehić states.
The Embassy of Sweden in Bosnia and Herzegovina emphasized the cooperation of families with ICMP in the implementation of a large number of projects, as well as the key importance of the involvement of families in determining the guilt of criminals.
Elma Majstorović Ninković, senior officer for civil society initiatives in the Program for the Western Balkans, thanked the donors and the families of the missing who are uniquely fighting to find as many missing victims as possible and manage to keep the issue in the public's focus even years after the war. This is very important because the fate of about 7,000 missing people is not yet known, about 7,600, according to some data, and the dedication of family associations resulted in the identification of thousands of victims because relatives voluntarily donated a sample for DNA analysis.
(FENA) A. B.
