14 000 Bosnians still missing
2005-11-23 12:35
Sarajevo - Ten years after the end of the Bosnian war, 14 000 people are still listed as missing, the commission searching for them said on Wednesday.
United Nations and local forensic experts so far have exhumed 16 500 bodies from about 580 grave sites, Marko Jurisic, a member of the International Red Cross working group on missing persons said.
He said that at least 8 000 of those listed as missing are probably in dozens of mass graves throughout the country that have not yet been excavated. Six thousand others cannot be accounted for, Jurisic said.
About 260 000 people were killed and 1.8 million driven from their homes during the 1992-95 conflict, which pitted Bosnia's Muslims, Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs against each other.
Jurisic said that Bosnia still does not have a unified state list of those who are missing as well as those who have been found and identified. "We need more information on mass graves as well as single graves. We still just do not have relevant information about that."
The peace agreement that ended the war divided the country into a Bosnian Serb mini-state and a Muslim-Croat federation, and each entity had its own missing persons commission.
A newly founded, central Missing Persons Institute is soon expected to take over the work of both commissions and search for the missing regardless of their ethnicity.
- AP