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TUZLA, March 1 (FENA) - Director General of the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) Carin Jämtin, Ambassador of Sweden to Bosnia and Herzegovina Johanna Stromquist, Head of SIDA's Europe and Latin America Department Lisa Fredriksson and Head of the Embassy's Development Cooperation Department Sweden in BiH Eva Smedberg visited the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) and witnessed the arduous process of identifying victims of conflicts in the territory of the former Yugoslavia.
During the visit to Tuzla, the delegation, which was accompanied by the deputy head of the Program for the Western Balkans, Samira Krehić, learned how ICMP collects genetic reference samples from the families of the missing and how important it is for a scientifically reliable anonymous process based on DNA comparison used in the identification of missing persons.
To date, ICMP has collected data from 100,000 families of the missing and more than 50,000 postmortem samples from state authorities in the region. This enabled countries in the region to find more than 70 percent of the 40,000 missing persons of all national, ethnic and religious groups.
- The Swedish government and SIDA are one of the most important factors in providing financial support to ICMP's work in the Western Balkans and in the world. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and other places, we work together to help the countries that are searching for the missing and to protect the rights of the families of the missing - said Krehić.
The Director General of SIDA, Carin Jämtin, said that she was impressed by the dedicated work of the ICMP in the difficult task of identifying missing persons in BiH, which contributes to realizing the right to truth and justice for the families of the missing. She also stated that it was encouraging to learn about the ICMP's work on the transfer of ownership of the process of identifying missing persons to domestic authorities in BiH.
In the facility of the Identification Project "Podrinje", which was established to help in the identification of the victims of the genocide in Srebrenica, they observed the procedure of the anthropological examination of the victims.
With the help of identification methods based on DNA analysis, ICMP helped Bosnia and Herzegovina identify 7,000 of the more than 8,000 persons who disappeared after the genocide in Srebrenica. Work on finding new mass and hidden graves and identifying the remaining missing persons is still ongoing.
ICMP's scientific data, including DNA analysis records, have been included in 30 criminal court proceedings as evidence in trials before the ICTY and courts in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The evidence has been thoroughly cross-examined numerous times and has been consistently corroborated, highlighting the importance of conducting missing persons investigations in accordance with judicial standards, thereby enabling the perpetrators of horrific crimes to be held accountable.
With financial help from donors, ICMP's Program for the Western Balkans continues to provide support to BiH in terms of forensic archeology and anthropology during the exhumation of remains and through access to ICMP's DNA analysis and verification of the existence of DNA matches for the purpose of identifying missing persons.
It also continues to support the work of the Missing Persons Group (MGN), which is a multilateral post-conflict cooperation mechanism made up of domestic institutions responsible for missing persons issues from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Montenegro and Serbia.
The GNO was established by the Declaration on Missing Persons, which was signed in London in 2018 by the heads of government of 16 countries participating in the Berlin Process for the Western Balkans, including the heads of government of the Western Balkans.
The GNO operates in accordance with the jointly agreed Framework Plan of Activities, focusing on issues of importance to all members in order to resolve the issue of missing persons in the Western Balkans, the ICMP announced.
(FENA) L. N.
