RECOM Reconciliation Network Calls for Abandonment of Policies of Concealing Bodies

In connection with the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, the RECOM Reconciliation Network (RRN) warns that the issue of missing persons has become extremely politicised in the countries of the former Yugoslavia, creating a culture of public silence about the massacres and killings after which the bodies of the victims disappeared, leading to the disappearance of the crucial physical symbol in the remembrance of the victims. The RRN reminds that the mortal remains of 1,608 persons killed in the Srebrenica region in July 1995, 370 victims in Vukovar from November 1991, 50 victims in the village of Kraljane in Kosovo in April 1999, and 16 victims in the village of Dojnice, after international forces entered Kosovo, have still not been found. The missing persons (11,364) are predominantly males, between the ages od 30 and 50, and there are more than 1,000 women and children.

The RRN calls on the governments of the post-Yugoslav states, national institutions and commissions for missing persons to put an end to policies of concealing information and documents regarding mass and individual graves, the intentional stalling of the exhumations of known locations of mass graves, and to resolve the issue of identifying mortal remains that are being kept in morgues, in order to allow the families to undertake concrete remembrance acts and demand public remembrance of the victims.