Bosnia

LAST December, the Libyan National Transitional Council decided it was about time to tackle the thorny problem of dealing with the thousands of persons who had gone missing in the country over the previous 35 years. The Council authorised the country’s new Ministry of Martyrs and Missing Persons, itself then merely a month old, to handle this issue. Their minister, Mr. Naser Djibril Hamed, then promptly approached for assistance the Sarajevo-based International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP).

The ICMP will now help Mr Djibril Hamed and his ministry, which he says is committed to searching for persons in a non-discriminatory fashion, regardless of whether  the person missing is a “loyalist, rebel, or from another group.” He says there could be up to 10,000 people missing in Libya, both from the recent conflict, as well as those missing from the 1977 war with Egypt, the 1978 war with Uganda, the 1980-1987 wars with Chad and the 1996 Abu Salim Prison massacre in Tripoli. The bodies of missing people are scattered in mass graves across the country.

Founded at the behest of Bill Clinton at the G-7 summit in 1996 to deal with the problem of the thousands of people missing from the Balkans conflicts, the ICMP set out to identify, using DNA technology, the mangled human remains of the estimated 8,100 Bosnian Muslim victims of the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica scattered in mass graves around Bosnia (pictured above). Seventeen years on ICMP has identified over 85% of these, returning the bodies to grieving relatives for proper burial. By matching blood-samples taken from living relatives with DNA extracted from bone samples taken from exhumed human remains as well as using traditional means, some 70% of the estimated 40,000 persons missing from the 1990s Balkans wars have been identified. 

The organisation’s director-general, a tenacious American called Kathryne Bomberger, says that ICMP, through its efforts in the western Balkans, Southeast Asia and elsewhere, has demonstrated that the missing can be found, whether they are missing as a consequence of wars and atrocities, disasters, or other causes.  The ICMP, she says, “has modernised and transformed the international community response to the issue.” On a recent visit to Sarajevo, William Hague, the British foreign secretary, said that by supporting the ICMP, the international community has shown that missing persons can be found.

Governments worldwide trying to cope with missing persons, from Iraq to Colombia, and from South Africa to Norway, now come to ask for the ICMP’s assistance. The organisation has identified in its Sarajevo laboratory Chilean victims of General Pinochet killed in the 1970s.  The ICMP assisted in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and after the Asian tsunami. INTERPOL has ICMP on-call for help with the grisly task of DVI, or Disaster Victim Identification.

The organisation will assist the Libyans by deploying the same operationally-trifurcated approach that reaped success in the Balkans. This involves the establishment of forensic scientific expertise, a human rights-based approach to helping victims’ living relatives, and the creation of legislation that will help the fledgling Libyan authorities deal with missing persons. In time, Libyans will aim towards the establishment of the Libya Identification Centre, handling the locating, recovery and identification of the missing. Two NGOs, the Libyan Society for Missing Persons and The Free Generation Movement, working on the ‘Mafqood’, or ‘Missing’ project, have been recording information on mass graves.

The American government are providing 65% of the initial $1m costs of the preliminary Libya project. Denmark is providing the remainder. America has given some $45m to the ICMP since 1996, making it the largest of the 22 governmental donors that fund it along with the EU, UN and Interpol.

Nearly 85% of the organisation’s staff are Bosnian, says Adam Boys, a Scot who is the ICMP’s Chief Operating Officer, and who has worked in the country since the days of the war in 1993. ICMP is one of the few Bosnian exports that are in demand. “The ICMP’s success could be said to be one of the most successful international interventions in post-conflict former Yugoslavia.”