prijava
SARAJEVO, June 12 (FENA) - The war in Ukraine is not calming down and elements of war crimes have already been registered, as well as footage of mass graves containing the bodies of killed civilians that need to be exhumed and identified. The Institute for Missing Persons of Bosnia and Herzegovina offered its help because its search model was recognized as the most successful in the whole world.
As the spokesperson of the Institute for Missing Persons of BiH, Emza Fazlić, told FENA, their search model is applied today in those societies that have gone through the same experiences of war and post-war period as Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The Institute for Missing Persons of Bosnia and Herzegovina a few years ago (at the time this issue was in focus in Crimea) had a visit from a delegation from Ukraine who wanted to know more about the process of searching for missing persons in BiH.
At that meeting the Institute shared all its experiences with the delegation from Ukraine when it comes to searching for missing persons.
The delegation was then presented with the most successful model for searching for missing persons in the world created and implemented in BiH, starting with key things necessary for this process such as compiling an accurate list of missing persons, then the relevant law modeled on the Missing Persons Act, the establishment of a professional institution that would deal with this issue, such as the Institute and the way of working in the field, procedures for exhumations and identifications.
"We recently received a request from Ukraine for technical assistance related to the DNA identification process that the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) is actually doing for the Institute. We gave them certain recommendations and sent them to ICMP and certainly offered them our expertise for everything they need to use all the experiences we had in BiH, thanks to which almost 80 percent of missing persons have been found so far, all to help in establishing a system that will be in charge of finding missing persons in Ukraine," says Fazlić.
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, more than 25,500 victims of the last war have been exhumed so far. Of that number, about 24,300 persons that went missing have been identified and handed over to their families while a number of victims are still being identified who have been exhumed but not officially identified.
Exhumations have been going on for 30 years since the start of the war and there are still remains of victims who disappeared at that time, and BiH is still searching for 7,628 missing persons, and resolving the problem of missing persons is very important for the reconciliation process.
"Families who have lost their loved ones have the right to know what happened to them, to receive their remains and bury them with dignity and have at least that satisfaction, to know where their loved ones are, to go to the grave and say a prayer, light a candle. Only after facing the past and accepting it, coexistence and reconciliation will be possible in this region," stressed Fazlić.
(FENA) S. R.
