The regional database should help find out what happened to missing persons from the 1990s wars.
Croatia has joined a project to establish a database of persons which went missing during the wars in the former Yugoslavia. The project is headed by the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), reports Index.hr on February 1, 2017.
The agreement has been reached between the ICMP and Croatia’s Ministry of War Veterans, and was signed in Sarajevo in Bosnia and Herzegovina by Stjepan Sučić, Assistant Minister in charge of the Directorate for Detained and Missing Persons, and Matthew Holliday, head of the ICMP’s Programme for the Western Balkans.
“The decision of Croatia to participate in the project represents a huge step forward in terms of strengthening regional cooperation in the process of searching for some 12,000 persons which are still considered missing”, said Holliday. He explained that the agreement would enable for all relevant data to be stored at one location and to avoid duplicate records and unnecessary duplicate work on same cases.
“Directorate for Detained and Missing Persons has recognized this programme as a useful tool and a good solution for the information on missing persons to be available in real time to all interested parties”, said Sučić. He confirmed that the cooperation with the ICMP had a support of families of missing persons from Croatia. “Our common goal is for this database to facilitate the search for missing persons and the final resolution of this important issue for the society as a whole”, said Sučić.
The regional database will contain the name of the missing person, father’s name, last name, date of birth, place of birth, as well as date, place and municipality of disappearance, date of identification if it has been carried out, and the country in which the disappearance has been registered.
The ICMP has previously signed similar agreements with Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Kosovo, while Serbia should join the programme during the first half of 2017.
