Regional Cooperation is the Key to Finding the Wartime Missing

In the last 20 years, governments in the Western Balkans have been able to account for more than 70 per cent of the 40,000 people who were missing at the end of the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. Almost 28,000 have been accounted for, which is an unprecedented achievement following a large-scale conflict anywhere in the world.

The high proportion of people who have been accounted for shows clearly that the missing persons process adopted in the Western Balkans - and spearheaded by the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) - works.

It has succeeded by using a three-pronged approach - creating legislation and institutions to sustain the process over the long term, developing a network of effective family associations that can advocate for their rights, and deploying state-of-the-art DNA technology, supported by advanced data systems capacities.

Forensic science capability has expanded continuously since ICMP first pioneered the process of mass DNA matching in 2001.

Just last week, the Missing Persons Institute in Bosnia and Herzegovina was able to inform a family member that three relatives had been identified, in this case using a revolutionary new technique known as Massively Parallel Sequencing (MPS).

This was the first time that MPS, which is being developed at ICMP's laboratory system in The Hague, had been applied successfully to identify human remains from the Western Balkans.

The technique makes it possible to achieve results in highly challenging cases, where current technologies have failed and it also enables identifications to be made between more distant relatives. This offers new hope for families who are still waiting to learn the fate of their loved ones.

As we acknowledge what has been...

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