Bosnia formed a single organisation on Tuesday to search for thousands of people missing from its 1992-5 war after a decade of inter-ethnic bickering hampered the search for remains. The Missing Persons Institute (MPI) will unite separate Muslim-Croat and Serb organisations searching for those missing from the war that claimed up to 200,000 victims.
"The institute will search for persons regardless of their religious and ethnic background, excluding any kind of discrimination," Human Rights and Refugees Minister Mirsad Kebo said after a signing ceremony attended by the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), which will help the MPI.
There are no exact figures of the people missing from the war. They range from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) estimate of 21,000 to the ICMP's 30,000. Bosnian officials estimate 28,000. The discrepancy stems from varying methods used to collect data about the missing. The ICRC relies only on relatives and authorities' data but others use information from witnesses or neighbours, for example, which may multiply names.
ICMP Chief of Staff Kathryne Bomberger, who signed the agreement with Kebo on the International Day of Missing Persons, said the MPI will create a central database of the missing to help establish their exact number.
"It will help address the concerns of family members and their communities about the actual numbers of missing persons and where they went missing," said Bomberger.
ICMP is an inter-governmental agency formed in 1996 to address the issue of those missing from the 1990s wars in former Yugoslavia.
In recent years it has also assisted in the identification of victims of the 1998-99 Kosovo war and of the 2001 attacks on the United States, in Iraq as well as of those killed in late 2004 deadly tsunami in Asia.
Some 12,500 missing Bosnians have already been found and identified, including 6,000 remains identified through DNA analysis conducted in ICMP-run laboratories. A further 7,500 exhumed victims await identification.
Hatidza Mehmedovic, who is still searching for her husband and two sons who perished in the 1995 Serb massacre of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica, said she hoped MPI would finally give her and other families answers about their loved ones.