CHIEF PROSECUTOR MET WITH REPRESENTATIVES OF THE ASSOCIATION OF WAR CRIMES VICTIMS FROM THE RS

Chief Prosecutor of the Prosecutor’s Office of BiH - Goran Salihović and Prosecutors of the Special Department for War Crimes met with representatives of associations of war crimes victims from Republika Srpska: Mrs. Smilja Mitrović and Mr. Zoran Šebez from the Association of the families of missing soldiers and civilians of Semberija and Majevica.

The process of searching for the ethnic Serbs who have disappeared during the last war, and the activities that should be undertaken in the process of searching for missing persons in the future were discussed at the meeting.

Chief Prosecutor pointed out that the search for missing persons and the process of exhumation and identification of missing persons are among the priorities of the Prosecutor’s Office of BiH because it is very important for the families of victims who have been searching for their loved ones for 20 years, but it is also important for prosecution of war crimes as the documentation concerning the victims of war crimes is important evidence in such cases.

The need for an expedited identification, using DNA methods, of victims whose remains can be found in ossuaries in BiH was also discussed at the meeting

During the meeting Mrs. Mitrović provided the Chief Prosecutor with a certain video material relating to the imprisonment of her son who has been missing since 1995, and Mr. Šebez handed the documents concerning the disappearance of his father in the Bugojno area in 1992.

The Chief Prosecutor has called for support of victims’ associations in terms of submitting information on missing persons to the Prosecutor’s Office and emphasized that the Prosecutor’s Office of BiH shall initiate cooperation between all institutions involved in this process in order to identify as many already exhumed remains as possible, as well as to locate as many of the remaining 7.000 persons, whose remains are still missing.

During the war in BIH about 30.000 persons went missing. The remains of about 23.000 missing persons have been recovered to date and some 17.000 were identified.